> Unfortunately many people WILL have to deal with such changes, and
> the question should be: Does a given change offer a clear improvement?
> As you said, if we're helping %1 of people %1 of the time, are the
> other 99% really going to change all their scripts? No chance.
You again misread what I said. "The other 99%" aren't even going to
notice the changes. Remember - 90% of all Perl code in the wild that
should use hashes doesn't. 90% of all Perl code that should use map
and grep doesn't. 90% of all Perl code that should use regexes
doesn't. The authors of those programs aren't even going to notice
that P6 changed. All they're going to see is that there's a few VERY
MINOR syntactical changes, they'll adjust, and they'll be happy.
Please remember the primary uses of Perl5 - systems administration,
package management, and CGI scripts. By far, those are the
overwhelming uses of Perl. In fact, I would argue that 99% of all Perl
code in the world falls under those three categories.
If you don't believe me, read "The Pragmatic Programmer". These are
excellent programmers and their view of Perl is for:
1) Writing tests (pp. 53, 197)
2) Project management and glue (pp. 100-101)
In fact, they specifically state in Tip 28 that every programmer
should learn a "Text Manipulation Language" (the authors prefer Ruby
and Perl) in order to do these things.
These are "The other 90%" you refer to. They're not going to care one
way or the other. And, if they do, /usr/local/bin/perl won't suddenly
disappear like Cindarella at the ball, you know.
Rob
