Modernizations worth breaking existing perl code
In my list there are two kind of reasons why backward compatibility could be broken:
- Sane behavior and completing already implemented features: for instance, all the bugs related to Unicode; Windows support; prototypes that really allow me to mimic any builtin; etc. There are lots of edge cases that perl does not handle correctly.
- Extensions that let me solve problems in different ways, or in other words, support for other programming paradigms: massive multi-threading; async programming, co-routines; type declarations; a modern, full-fledged object system; multi-methods; a proper exception system, that is used from the core; support for new platforms as the JVM, Android, the browser; binary compilation; etc.
In general, I don't think backward compatibility should be broken for features that are merely syntax sugar, specially when they can be activated on demand using a use feature foo or use v13 pragmas.
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