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Re: Announcing Perl 7

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From:
Karl Williamson
Date:
June 26, 2020 04:23
Subject:
Re: Announcing Perl 7
Message ID:
8dc69097-6aa5-6f5c-9a34-0725c93bb708@khwilliamson.com
I don't understand many of the objections.  No one is going to force 
people to move off 5.32, and we are promising a 5-10 year support 
window.  I think that is ample.

But let me cut to the chase.  I'm unclear as to what the tasks needed 
to move to 7 are, and who is going to be doing the work on them.  I 
don't see how there would be much to do in the C code of the core, where 
I spend most of my time.

I suggest we fork, and have a 5.33 repository, and a pre-7 repository. 
And then we can see where we are as the year progresses.  We would 
cherry pick from the alternate repository as we go along.

I would think the pre-7 changes would first be just adding the 
appropriate pragma calls, which later would become noops.  I have run 
for years the test suite with PERL5OPT=-w.  There used to be a lot of 
scary warnings come out, but almost all of those have been fixed over time.

Various portions of perl code in the 5.33 series could be considered 
off-limits until the 7 series had fixed it.  We could do an audit of 
code that already have the intended pragmas in the correct state, and 
whitelist them.

I also need some examples as to why unicode_strings is problematic.  The 
dodgy behavior it fixes can't be what is intended going forward.  Maybe 
the default becomes it goes on, and you can turn it off for binary-like 
data with a renamed 'use bytes'.

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