comment on

~~<nit>3-arg open was added in 5.005_03, not 5.6.</nit>~~

Update: Don't you just hate being completely and thoroughly being proven wrong? I do ... :-/

I've just spent a while rewriting Tree::Simple into Tree and reworking PDF::Template. After discussion with stvn, we decided to require 5.6 as a minimum Perl version. We don't see a lot of benefit in attempting to maintain compat with anything before that.

In our work, we target 5.8.6 as a minimum. For one thing, Unicode is handled much better (though not perfectly) in 5.8, which is nice. As for other features, it's nice to know that one has a better toolbox to reach for, even if one doesn't use them on a regular basis (or ever!)

Other languages have the same issue. For example, in JS, there's no reason to target anything under 1.5 - all modern browsers implement 1.5 (for some value of "implement") and attempting to write JS for pre-1.5 is an exercise in baldness. Ruby is the same way - 1.8 is the modern version, so I target it. (Ruby's dbi is written under 1.6, which makes it throw warnings under 1.8 - very annoying!)

My criteria for good software:

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

In reply to Re: Writing for backwards compatibility by dragonchild
in thread Writing for backwards compatibility by xdg

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Think about Loose Coupling
	PerlMonks