Experimental features now warn (reaching back to v5.10)

Perl 5.18 provides a new way to introduce experimental features in a program, augmenting the feature pragma that v5.10 added. This change marks certain broken v5.10 features as experimental with an eye toward possible removal from the language.

Smart matching in v5.10 led to several broken and conflated features. The given used a lexical version of $_, which broke many other common uses of that variable inside the given, which I explain in Use for() instead of given() and you can see in given/when and lexical $_ …. Continue reading “Experimental features now warn (reaching back to v5.10)”

The vertical tab is part of \s in Perl 5.18

Up to v5.18, the vertical tab wasn’t part of the \s character class shortcut for ASCII whitespace. No one really knows why. It was curious trivia that I pointed out in Know your character classes under different semantics. Whitespace in ASCII, POSIX, and Unicode represented different sets. Perl whitespace was different from POSIX whitespace by only the exclusion of the vertical tab. Now that little oversight is fixed. Continue reading “The vertical tab is part of \s in Perl 5.18”