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Postings from December 2022
[With my PSC hat on] In Perl 5.10 we added `~~`, known as smartmatch, as a sort-of copy of what is now in Raku (known as "Perl 6" at the time). Initially looked at favourably, design problems were eventually found around it that mean it is a poor match for the different type system that Perl 5 has. This operator (and the related `given/when` syntax) sat in "experimental" status ever since Perl 5.18, while we attempted to work out what to do with it. The time has now come to finally declare an end to this experiment. It has not been possible to provide a meaningful, coherent set of semantics for this operator that sits well with users. Because of this, we feel it best to move the operator into "deprecated" status, announcing that we *will* be removing it in a later version of perl. This is currently scheduled for two releases later (Perl 5.42 in the current schedule). By the time that Perl 5.38 is released, we aim to have some updated documentation that explains the deprecated feature and the reasons behind it, and also gives advice to users who are already using this syntax on what they can write instead to replace it. We also aim to provide some thoughts on what new features may be added to Perl in the future to provide a better solution to these common situations that smartmatch and `given/when` are currently used for. -- 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