Mixing old and new perl versions

chriso has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Are older versions of perl compatable with perl 5? Here is the heading portion of a perl script I'm moving over to a server which is running perl 5:

require("cgi-lib.pl");
print &PrintHeader;
&ReadParse;
[download]

Will code written using this older version (I'm not sure what version it was run on) run on using a newer perl version? If not, what do I need to consider to upgrade the script (sort-of-speak)? Thanks. Chris

Comment on Mixing old and new perl versions Download Code

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Re: Mixing old and new perl versions by ysth (Canon) on Aug 25, 2005 at 02:09 UTC
Looks like perl4 to me. You should read through http://perldoc.perl.org/perltrap.html#Perl4-to-Perl5-Traps.	[reply]
Re: Mixing old and new perl versions by CountZero (Bishop) on Aug 25, 2005 at 11:51 UTC
A good book on transforming/updating/upgrading old code is Perl Medic. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re: Mixing old and new perl versions by ww (Archbishop) on Aug 25, 2005 at 13:08 UTC
cgi-lib.pl is deprecated by some; was standard, but (wisely and widely) supplanted by CGI.pm. Scripts using cgi-lib should be suspected of representing legacy (and potentially insecure) code. see perlman:lib:CGI	[reply]