Living with smart match breakage

[Kieren Diment]

Presumably CPAN testing of a blead perl with smartmatch removed/deprecated could pick that up pretty quickly.  I mean I have under-used experimental cpan modules that have some test failures, but if they suddenly started throwing do not compile errors[1], even I would pick them up.

[1] Not that I use many of the newer core features, occasionally I have to account for some of my $work code having to work on 5.8.

On 14/06/2013, at 6:32 PM, jason wrote:

> 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.
>