Living with smart match breakage

[jason]

On 2013-06-14 09:11, Smylers wrote:
> There isn't such a list -- its "experimental" nature means anything
> might change. P5P doesn't have consensus, and no decision has been 
> made
> on what's going to happen.
>
> There are some on P5P suggesting that smartmatch is so broken it 
> should
> be removed entirely.

That was the impression I got from the sparse details in the 5.18 
announcement and what worried me more than anything else was precisely 
that uncertainty.

That there is no consensus that at least some of smart match and thus, 
given/when, can be considered non-experimental (and thus safe to use in 
production) means that a lot of application and library code may have to 
be rewritten at some point but nobody is really able to definitively 
determine what the scale of that risk is.

Certainly we can continue to declare use experimental and things will 
continue to work but that is a risky strategy.