Nice straw man. I didn't advocate changing system($line) so arguing how that is a bad idea doesn't really support your point that system(@list) shouldn't be fixed on Win32 to (almost) work as documented (and how it works on other Perls).

But we should fix system(@list) to work as system(@list) is defined by the Perl documentation, as much as practical. Passing arguments to some command is something that is often needed. There really isn't anything not portable about code like:

system( $yourConfiguredEditor, $fileName )
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Nor is there some more portable way to enable a script to launch your favorite editor on some file.

And there is no reason to desire that everyone who does anything like that to have to write code like this instead:

    if(  $^O =~ /Win32/  ) {
        system( qq("$yourEditor" "$fileName") );
    } els...
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This is just a long-standing bug that should be fixed. Your position that we should improve the situation by requiring people to instead write:

    if(  $^O =~ /Win32/  ) {
        system( $yourEditor, qq("$fileName") );
    } els...
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makes little sense to me. (: