I personally believe this is great news. I actually ignored that readpipe is the beast behind qw. Anyway, to quote from the post you linked to:
The prototype of readpipe() is now ($). Previously, it was broken:
$ perl5.8.8 -wle 'print prototype"CORE::readpipe"'
Can't find an opnumber for "readpipe" at -e line 1.
$ bleadperl -wle 'print prototype"CORE::readpipe"'
$
So an immediate observation is that -X are still "broken" (in Gabriel's own words, which thus I will take for absolutely true, and literally!) in 5.10.0 and I don't have the slightest idea in blead. Furthermore, I don't have the slightest idea of which is the beast behind them: if you check the rest of the thread @ clpmisc then you'll see that I tried with stat but evidence is it's not what "I" (actually, I'm just trying to help someone, but the matter became intriguing for me too...) was after:
actarus:~/test [13:02:32]$ ls
foo.pl
actarus:~/test [13:02:35]$ cat foo.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my %file;
BEGIN {
no strict 'refs';
*{'CORE::GLOBAL::stat'} = sub {
warn "trying mocked stat()\n";
(my $f)=@_;
CORE::stat( @_ && !ref($f) &&
exists $file{$f} ? $0 : @_ );
};
}
use Test::More qw(no_plan);
$file{foo} = 1;
ok( (scalar stat $_) => "file $_ exists") for qw/foo bar/;
ok( (-e $_) => "file $_ exists") for qw/foo bar/;
__END__
actarus:~/test [13:02:38]$ ./foo.pl
trying mocked stat()
ok 1 - file foo exists
trying mocked stat()
not ok 2 - file bar exists
# Failed test 'file bar exists'
# at ./foo.pl line 21.
not ok 3 - file foo exists
# Failed test 'file foo exists'
# at ./foo.pl line 22.
not ok 4 - file bar exists
# Failed test 'file bar exists'
# at ./foo.pl line 22.
1..4
# Looks like you failed 3 tests of 4.