But no, I wasn't describing use 5.012;, I was talking about strict in Perl 5.12.
Now I'm utterly confused, and I've no longer the faintest clue what you're trying to say. If I run the binary that I build with the source that comes in the perl 5.12 tarball, I only get strictness by either 1) doing
use strict;, and 2)
use 5.012;. 1) certainly isn't new to 5.12, and you seem to disagree with me on 2). Can you show some code that shows strict on by default, with the
use 5.012; clause?
Actually, some of the regex and unicode changes require use 5.xxx; because they aren't backwards compatible.
Could you elaborate on this one? Which regexp or Unicode feature is only available after doing a
use 5.012;? According to
man feature, the only features are:
The ’switch’ feature
"use feature 'switch'" tells the compiler to enable the Perl 6
given/when construct.
See "Switch statements" in perlsyn for details.
The ’say’ feature
"use feature 'say'" tells the compiler to enable the Perl 6 "say"
function.
See "say" in perlfunc for details.
the ’state’ feature
"use feature 'state'" tells the compiler to enable "state" variables.
See "Persistent Private Variables" in perlsub for details.
the ’unicode_strings’ feature
"use feature 'unicode_strings'" tells the compiler to treat all strings
outside of "use locale" and "use bytes" as Unicode. It is available
starting with Perl 5.11.3.
See "The "Unicode Bug"" in perlunicode for details.
Now, checking
perlunicode, it's suggested that if the unicode_strings feature is in effect, Unicode semantics will be in effect on all strings (as long as use locale and use bytes aren't in effect), in particular when it comes to
/\w/ and
lc/uc. But that doesn't actually seem to work:
$ perl -wE 'my $foo = "ë"; say $foo =~ /\w/ || 0; say uc $foo'
0
ë
$ perl -wE 'my $foo = "ë"; utf8::upgrade $foo; say $foo =~ /\w/ || 0;
+say uc $foo'
1
ë
$
Note though that I wasn't thinking of this feature when I was talking about Unicode changes - I was thinking about Perl 5.12 implementing Unicode 5.2 (as opposed to Unicode 5.0.0 in 5.10).
Let's say it was impossible to export variables. Would you still say that use strict 'vars'; should be done by a linter instead of Perl itself?
Probably not. The problem is that "use strict 'vars';" creates compilation errors. Linters typically don't check for that - they warn about valid, but (for some value of) questionable constructs.
qw[hello, world] is certainly valid, and some think it to be questionable.
