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Postings from December 2017
On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 23:43:36 +0100 avarab@gmail.com (Ãvar Arnfjörð Bjarmason) wrote: > I'm not ignoring that, but I think my point still stands. > > If we're going to play language police with perlpolicy.pod there's no > *explicit* mention of something that was previously a non-experimental > feature becoming experimental, so by that definition we can never change > given/when. > > However, immediately after defining what "experimental" means it talks > about how "deprecated" features may be removed in just two release > cycles. > > That's talking about removing a feature of perl that's never been > experimental, and has been there since 1987. > You're right although there's a one problem. We almost never remove widely used features. I can think of two notable exceptions, defined(@foo) and . in @INC. However, there's a one, extremely important difference between those features and smartmach/given/when: they were easily replaceable. All you had to do to fix code using defined(@foo) was remove defined(). All you had to do to fix code relying on '.' in @INC was add "use lib '.'" at the beginning of the script. With new smartmatch the situation is completely different. How would you fix $foo ~~ $bar? is it $foo ~~ any(stringwise($bar))? or maybe $bar is a regexp? Maybe it can be both? And that's our real problem. Old smartmatch and given/when have no real replacement. That's why we have to rethink everything from the beginning.Thread Previous | Thread Next