Re^6: Make $^V and "my" implicit

someone wanted to use new and shiny features to golf the code down a bit

The people who pay me need working Unicode. I don't have to release parts of that code so that you can use, modify, and redistribute it without paying me, but I do.

(Come to think of it, no one who's contributed to Perl itself in the past six years has charged you a penny to use it.)

Do you intend for your comments to sound condescending and insulting?

A faster regular expression engine is only good for golf? Working Unicode is only good for golf? A regular expression engine without recursion crashes is only good for golf? Memory optimizations are only good for golf? Self-recursive functions without memory leaks are only good for golf? Native casefolding is only good for golf? Fixed memory leaks are only good for golf? DoS-safe hashes are only good for golf? A working keyword extension mechanism is only good for golf?

Do you really mean to give the impression the only reason someone would use anything newer than 5.8 is because he or she thinks adding "\n" to the end of every print is onerous?

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Re^7: Make $^V and "my" implicit by FloydATC (Deacon) on Feb 07, 2014 at 07:40 UTC
Do you intend for your comments to sound condescending and insulting? No, that was never my intention. English is not my native language so if I came across that way then I apologize. -- FloydATC Time flies when you don't know what you're doing	[reply]
Re^8: Make $^V and "my" implicit by chromatic (Archbishop) on Feb 07, 2014 at 20:37 UTC
Your English is far, far better than my Norwegian or Finnish, so no apology necessary. I agree that backwards compatibility is a good feature of Perl, even though I do believe that organizations which choose to use Perl beyond its public supported date have taken on the responsibility to maintain the code on which they depend. That's all.	[reply]
Re^7: Make $^V and "my" implicit (insulting) by tye (Sage) on Feb 06, 2014 at 02:13 UTC
Perhaps you would benefit from stepping back from this for a bit? Do you intend for your comments to sound condescending and insulting? Do you mean for your comments to sound thin-skinned, whiny, and off-topic? Do you really mean to give the impression the only reason someone would use anything newer than 5.8 is because he or she thinks adding "\n" to the end of every print is onerous If you weren't being so thin-skinned, then you might have been able to read how clearly it was stated that none of what you say above is what was meant. That there exist quite valid even compelling reasons for a particular module to not support some particular older version of Perl does not contradict that there are module versions that explicitly don't work on versions of Perl for which the only reasons are trivial and/or stupid. Complaining about the latter is not the same as complaining about the former. If you have not produced instances of the latter, then you certainly shouldn't take such complaints as insults (and even if you have, you still don't need to). - tye	[reply]
Re^8: Make $^V and "my" implicit (insulting) by chromatic (Archbishop) on Feb 06, 2014 at 03:26 UTC
... there are module versions that explicitly don't work on versions of Perl for which the only reasons are trivial and/or stupid. I'm sure patches (or even bug reports) would be more welcome than general complaining, though I'm not sure who gets to decide where a reason is "trivial and/or stupid".	[reply]
Re^9: Make $^V and "my" implicit (choices) by davido (Cardinal) on Feb 06, 2014 at 06:07 UTC
The user gets to decide, by opting to use the module, or to not use the module. Minimum version requirements will weigh into the equation for some portion of users. The more modern the requirement, the more users will find themselves among the portion where minimum Perl version is a factor. Authors get to decide where to draw the line in the tug-of-war between hubris wanting to include as many potential users in their club as possible, and laziness wanting to avoid the work involved in providing a solid product that also works for older versions of Perl. (I'm trying to use the terms "hubris" and "laziness" in the Perlish sense, where they are both desirable attributes, and not character flaws.) Sometimes the issue is decided by bugs that were fixed in newer versions of Perl. (Sure, an author could probably find a work-around that doesn't cause the regexp engine to segfault under 5.8.4, but the work required may tip the scales for him.) Sometimes it's decided by improvements to Perl that make hard things possible, where they were once much harder. And sometimes hubris degenerates into the form of ego, manifested by simply not caring that the only reason 5.10 is necessary is because it's more idiomatic to write //= than a more verbose construct. The author decides where he finds personal balance. The user decides whether to use the module, find a different one, or reinvent. Either way, both the author and the user have a vote. Dave	[reply]


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