Re^2: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl

this is an excellent point however:

What do you mean by needlessly?

You can write (almost) everything on Perl 5.000. Hey you could even do that in Perl 4 syntax using require... So why do we expect (and let our users expect) that modules will always work on old version of Perl? This creates needless (here it comes :-) extra work to the module developers.

Comment on Re^2: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl

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Re^3: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl by Corion (Patriarch) on Sep 18, 2007 at 13:00 UTC
I cannot speak for that hypothetical "we", but I as a module developer support my users because I want my code to be useful and used. This means that I don't want to place an undue version burden on my users, especially when I am one of my module users. I cannot easily upgrade the Perl versions I have available, and hence want my code to be both, conveniently maintainable on one side and conveniently working on the other side. For me, this means that I use whatever features I see fit - for example I often use the three-argument open, but I never use `our`, because the benefit of `our` is not existent. It's not "big extra work" for me because I mostly know what breaks between the major versions of Perl, and that "little extra work" usually pays off when I encounter a machine with only 5.005 on it.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^3: The need and the price of running on old versions of Perl
by Corion (Patriarch) on Sep 18, 2007 at 13:00 UTC

I cannot speak for that hypothetical "we", but I as a module developer support my users because I want my code to be useful and used. This means that I don't want to place an undue version burden on my users, especially when I am one of my module users. I cannot easily upgrade the Perl versions I have available, and hence want my code to be both, conveniently maintainable on one side and conveniently working on the other side.

For me, this means that I use whatever features I see fit - for example I often use the three-argument open, but I never use our, because the benefit of our is not existent. It's not "big extra work" for me because I mostly know what breaks between the major versions of Perl, and that "little extra work" usually pays off when I encounter a machine with only 5.005 on it.

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