Ok, that clarifies, that I don't want to use v-strings. ;o)

But there's some confusion left because of the version pragma.

My Cygwin perl 5.10 and ActivePerl 5.8.8 both have that pragma available; but if I try to check the perldoc at http://perldoc.perl.org/ that pragma is undocumented?

I got curious because I read the chapter about versioning in "Perl Best Practices" and it presented the version pragma... Some minutes later I read your answer not to use it.

Perl doesn't have "pragmas". It has modules. Some module names are in lower-case. This is a community standard (not always followed!) to indicate that they affect something about the guts of how Perl works. Often, these modules will turn on a switch to enable (or disable) something with the Perl interpreter. Read the code of strict for more information about that.

As for version, all it does is provide the qv() function. This looks like qq, qw, and qr, so it's considered ok to be a pragma. But, that's all it does. If you want to use it, that's whatever. But, it's not as clean as you might like.

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My criteria for good software:

1. Does it work?
2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

I don't wanna start a discussion about the term "pragma" here (if perl has some or not or whatever). So I just thank you for your reply. It was clarifying enough for me.

Thanks.