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Postings from February 2021
`use feature 'signatures';` was added in 5.20 - May 2014 (over 6 years ago). Since then, it has seen some minor adjustment to the order of signatures vs. attribute notation; swapped in 5.22 then back again to its now-current form in 5.24 - May 2016 (over 4 years ago). It has remained "stable" (i.e. not being changed) in its current form ever since then, yet the "experimental" feature tag remains. Why? I know Dave M has plans to add lots more things (type assertions, generic query syntax, named variables, etc...) and I'm excited about and definitely want to see many of those things. But I don't know of any firm reason why signatures in their current form need to be marked "experimental" to do so. All over the language we are able to experimentally add new things without marking the entire surrounding context as "experimental". In the meantime, a lot of feedback I've been seeing for a long time on Freenode #perl, and more recently at FOSDEM over this weekend, is that folks don't want to wait, or aren't allowed to use signatures as they stand, because it is still marked "experimental" and thus they are forbidden by whatever local policy development houses may have. Yet other developers are simply put off by the scary "e" word. I have heard - on more than one occasion - that devs have been firmly told by their manager "do not use signatures" for the sole reason of them being "experimental". I would therefore like to propose that signatures - in their current form unchanged between 5.24 and 5.32 - be declared no longer experimental and promoted to a fully-fledged first-class language feature. Any further additions (which as already mentioned are very welcome and keenly anticipated) can perhaps be done either under a new experiment name, or by adding the "experimental" warning to that part of the syntax alone. I don't see why signatures *as a whole* should still be declared experimental. Many developers and CPAN modules are already using them as if they were stable first-class features. I think by now the ship has *already* sailed on us ever changing any existing details of them. (cross-posted to github as https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/18537 ) -- Paul "LeoNerd" Evans leonerd@leonerd.org.uk | https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS http://www.leonerd.org.uk/ | https://www.tindie.com/stores/leonerd/Thread Next