Hi harangzsolt33,

The only reason I like to keep my scripts compatible with Perl 5.004 is because that way they work on the earliest Perl interpreter I have in my possession. ... And having a script that can run on anything is great. It's one less thing to worry about.

Okay, but that just begs the question: why do you want to support legacy versions of the perl interpreter? Upgrading to shiny new¹ versions gives you at least three benefits:

• Improved Perl syntax, as mentioned previously.
• Enhanced performance.
• Access to a much wider range of CPAN modules.

With a few minor exceptions,² your old scripts should still run fine on the more modern perl interpreters.

I have played around a lot with string variables and I noticed that if I have a very large string in a sub, exiting the sub will not destroy the big string in memory! ... and doing undef $VARIABLE causes Perl to free up that memory.

Are you sure you were using lexical variables when you observed this?

The super long sub is actually an experiment. I wrote a short one, and I noticed that there are a lot of variables, and passing them around to sub routines is no fun. ... So, I've tried to break up this sub into 5-6 smaller sub-routines, and the result is not nice. The code didn't look pretty. So, I don't know what to do...

That’s a pretty good indication that an object oriented approach is called for.

¹Well, new-ish. The latest poll made me realise that my version of Strawberry Perl (the newest they offer) is now two years out of date. :-(
²For example, on newer versions (5.26 and later) the current directory . is no longer included in @INC by default. This is actually a Good Thing.

Cheers,