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Re: package block syntax
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From:
David E. Wheeler
Date:
May 4, 2010 09:26
Subject:
Re: package block syntax
Message ID:
D84DE326-505D-4C86-92E3-E18ABC8FC9A7@kineticode.com
On May 4, 2010, at 9:18 AM, Dave Mitchell wrote:
> Personally I'm opposed to it. It doesn't particularly add anything
> useful, but will of course introduce a whole new round of bugs and
> edge cases to be teased out over the next few years. (This shouldn't be
> perceived as specific criticism of the quality of this patch; its more a
> general observation that *any* new feature will break perl in unexpected
> ways, due to the complexity of perl and the weird ways in which all its
> component parts interact, e.g. tieing, the debugger, introspection, XS etc
> etc.)
If I didn't know better, I would read this as a recommendation not to add any new features at all. The necessity of teasing out and fixing bugs introduced by new features is inherent in what we do as software developers, it's part of the job. Sometimes it turns out that a new feature was a mistake and caused too much trouble. But there's seldom any way to knot that in advance, and I for one believe that the trade-off is worth it.
I'm not saying that this particular patch is necessarily worth it, though I like it. I'm merely speaking more generally.
Best,
David
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