Re^3: Recap: The Future of Perl 5

[doom]

Ovid:

Again, if you have to remember to do a particular thing to get benefits, it hurts the Perl community. For example, use strict; use warnings; should have been the default a long time ago, with additional action taken to disable them.

So, Joe SysAdmin does an upgrade one day, and finds half of the old perl scripts on the system are broken. This is not something you want to have happen, not when we're still fighting the fallout from the "perl is dead" smear campaign.

I could see an argument that stuff like "use 5.10.0" should've implied strict and warnings also... or for that matter that cromatic's Modern::Perl should ship with the core library, it's a lot easier to type correctly (I had to double-check that you really need "5.10.0").

Backwards compatibility is really and truly important, and it remains important-- it's one of the things that perl has always gotten right (and the new kids keep screwing up).

[tobyink]

use v5.16 and above does enable strict (though not warnings).

[Arunbear]

5.12 in fact already does that.

[soonix]

perl5120delta says under Implicit strictures

Using the use VERSION syntax with a version number greater or equal to 5.11.0 will lexically enable strictures just like use strict would do (in addition to enabling features.)

which is why my script template starts out with

use 5.011; # implies strict + feature 'say'

and when (not if) someone asks where to find that odd (pun intended) version of perl, it's a good time to remind them that use specifies the minimum version.

[tobyink]

Oh cool. I think I was getting confused because that feature was tweaked slightly in 5.16 to respect no strict even if it comes first.