Hi
stevieb,
I certainly understand you objections. I haven't really thought about the scope of the overhaul that I would recommend (nobody really cares about my personal opinion on that anyway), but I was mainly thinking about changes that would break very old or lousy code, not code compliant with the modern Perl recommendations and commonly accepted best practices. For example: making strictures the default, forcing lexical filehandles (by default, possibly with a switch to make bareword FH possible on very old code), forcing a three argument file handle (also with a switch), include say into the core, making subroutine signatures a core feature, making some form of modern OO framework a core feature, and so on.
If carefully designed, all of these things would break only very bad or very old code, not code that has been properly maintained or that has been written in accordance with recent practices. In short, you probably wouldn't have to rewrite anything from your modules.