develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from July 2020

Re: Announcing Perl 7

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Scott Baker
Date:
July 3, 2020 18:29
Subject:
Re: Announcing Perl 7
Message ID:
1d08cd53-b54f-db7f-868d-de3fd0668465@perturb.org
I think this is a great solution. Certainly it's not sustainable to 
continue forever with:

use v7
use v8
use v9

As it's going to get crazy after a while.

As far as I know no other language requires you to *opt in *to latest 
version like this. Certainly not the languages I play in: C, C++, 
Python, PHP, Javascript.

I understand the use v7 thing because we have so much legacy code to 
support (for now). Over the course of the next X years/versions the 
amount of old and non-updated code will diminish and we could then 
assume the latest version unless we see a specificalyy use vX.

I support use v7 if the goal is to eventually get that legacy code 
(CPAN, etc) upgraded to support new features so that future versions of 
the interpreter can assume the current version and emit warnings or 
deprecations on old syntax/features.

I'm new to all of this so my vote means nothing, but I think this is a 
good goal. Use v7 for now, with the goal of "assuming current version" 
in the future when the code base catches up. The goal should be to make 
things easy for new developers. Right now there is a lot of tribal 
knowledge just to get started on "modern Perl".

- Scott

On 7/3/2020 10:47 AM, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans wrote:
> I'm saying that*right now*  it should continue to behave like Perl 5,
> but after a suitable announcement period it should start giving
> "version is ambiguous" warnings. At some further point after that we
> can have it be an outright error for there not to be a version
> declaration, at which point we're free to cut off an older version of
> perl if we so wish.
>
> And by forcing everyone to have declared their version requirements by
> then we can do a simple grep for "use v5" across all of CPAN to gain a
> very easy simple metric on how much actual CPAN code is actually still
> using v5. When we feel that number is small enough - or the remaining
> outliers unimportant enough - we can cut it off.

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About