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Postings from October 2021
On Sun, 03 Oct 2021 16:41:37 -0400 "Ricardo Signes" <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> wrote: > *smartmatch* We have resisted removing this failure for years, as we want to replace it with something else. My take: we should just rip this out and later, *maybe*, put something else in. #13173 <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/13173> Back in 2017 we tried replacing smartmatch with "dumbmatch" and in result we made everyone angry and broke half of CPAN: http://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2017/12/smartmatch-in-5277.html https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2017/08/msg245769.html https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/16310 https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2017/12/msg248507.html I don't want that to happen again. Smartmatch is widely used because of two reasons. First of all, it solves an important problem: it provides "switch" and "in" operators. Of course, it does that in a completely insane way, but currently there are no (core) alternatives to it. The other reason is that we have completely failed to communicate that we don't want our users to use smartmatch. Until 5.18 it didn't warn at all, now it gives an "experimental" warning which is meaningless. Do signatures and smartmatch have the same status? Absolutely not. Yet that's what our documentation and warnings say. If we want to remove smartmatch, we need to properly deprecate it and provide a replacement for it. BTW, I believe LeoNerd is working on the latter. Speaking of deprecating things, the dumbmatch fiasco has showed that our two stable releases deprecation cycle is way too short. When the users of LTS distributions upgrade, they skip multiple Perl releases, so from their POV features disappear without any warnings! This worked OK for unimportant stuff that no one cared about, but I think something like smartmatch will need a longer deprecation period.Thread Previous | Thread Next