Overall, I think the Perl 7 announcement is great news.
I only have one small objection:
One of the proposed changes is to remove
Perl 4-style prototype definitions (use
:prototype()instead)
My objection to this is that :prototype was only introduced in Perl 5.20. Code using it won’t work as expected on older versions of Perl.
The wording of this proposed change mischaracterizes the older sub prototype syntax as something Perl-4-specific, whereas the reality is that up until Perl 5.20, it was the way to declare prototypes.
This means that if I want my code to support Perl 7, I need to abandon Perl 5.18 and below, or jump through some fairly ugly hoops.
I don’t like that.
