If you believed the next version's documentation, here are errors that you would have had from various versions of Perl:
- In 5.003 you would have been left thinking that foreach my $var (@list) {...} should work, and would have wondered why it did not.
- In 5.004 you would have thought that you could use substr to replace text, not just extract it.
- In 5.005 you would have thought that our was a usable keyword and warnings was a usable module.
- In 5.6 you would think that you could have the new (and far more stable) threads implementation available.
I have either had or seen people who had questions about every one of these. For instance take a look at RE (3): Should I use $ and $# ? which is from a thread here caused because someone who bought the third edition of the Camel tried to use our in Perl 5.005_03 and then got confused. See RE: Perldoc's vrs. Books, and RTFM's from around the same time period. Since then my opinion about the importance of local documentation has not changed, although I have a better understanding of why people have trouble understanding things sometimes.
Now I haven't done any kind of survey to find out what kind of documentation patch is most prevalent. However my gut tells me that documentation far more often gets added than significantly rewritten. And added documentation is very often documentation added to describe new features which won't be there in old versions.
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