> But how long can someone reasonably expect newer releases to support legacy code? IMHO as long as majority of your users are on a certain version, you need a

> But how long can someone reasonably expect newer releases to support legacy code? IMHO as long as majority of your users are on a certain version, you need at least to provide bug fixes for them. > It would make more sense to have pragmas to disable features for backwards compatibility. That would require people to edit all their old scripts to add these pragmas, which defeats the very idea of backwards compatibility. If only people could agree on what "modern perl" is, then we could create a single pragma that would enable all the features expected by this modern perl in a single line. Or, we could just declare that modern perl to be the starting point of Perl 7, as it was planned. Problem however is that there's no even consensus on what are the features that should go into this modern version, and that blocks the language development far worst than not being able to implement breaking changes (and of course the fact that most of old maintainers have left the project and team is seriously understaffed)