DEV Community

Discussion on: Should Perl die gracefully?

Collapse
 
thibaultduponchelle profile image
Tib

Your last sentence sounds a bit harsh 😃

His comment sounds like a non-sense to me, how could you blame Perl for compatibility? Especially compared to almost all other programming languages.

Perl is impressive by how stable and backward compatible it is. You can find a more than 10 years old perl script (even a bad one) and it will probably run without any problem on a perl interpreter installed on your system (whatever its version). At worst you would have a very small edit but nothing painful.

All the optional features sets introduced by the core team are not damaging this.

We even have some partial forward compatibility where some features can be retrofitted to old version of perl via modules. For instance, try/catch is added to perl 5.34.0 and is available for previous perl thanks to Feature::Compat::Try module.

This is mad 😀

Collapse
 
mjgardner profile image
Mark Gardner

Sorry, I get a bit impassioned when my livelihood is besmirched.