The number of things new in 5.8.x as opposed to 5.6.x are extremely limited - and if they were it's mostly things that weren't possible in 5.6.x or are vastly improved (threads, Unicode).

The change between 5.005_xx and 5.6.x is bigger, our, lexical warnings, and autovivifying of filehandles come to mind.

Hence, a CPAN module either uses something specific to 5.8.x (and hence, you wouldn't even attempt to use it in 5.6.x), or it's just going to work in 5.6.x. And even if you're dragging 5 years behind in perl releases, you're on 5.6.x. 5.6.0 was released in March 2000.

BTW, you are talking about most developers in large corporate environments. Where does that statistic come from? How many large corporate environments do you have experience with?

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