Backporting Features

One current discussion on p5p is the namespace of fixed versions of reftype(), refaddr(), and blessed(), recently added to bleadperl.

These functions are part of Scalar::Util right now. Unfortunately, they return undef for non references. This leads to code like:

my $ref_type = reftype( $maybe_ref );
do_something_with_ref( $ref_type ) if defined $ref_type;

(If you don't follow all of the reasons why you have to do that, that's good; you haven't imagined all of the odd and strange ways people might name their classes in various parts of the Perl 5 internals and DarkPAN modules. Safety dictates finding these corner cases.)

Anyhow.

Making these fixed functions available in the core without having to load Scalar::Util offers some advantages but also some disadvantages. It's the "You can't add new keywords to Perl 5" problem. What if someone else defined functions of that name?

Worse, what if someone loads Scalar::Util and imports its functions and expects those semantics instead of the new semantics?

(Apparently it's impossible to detect the declaration or importation of symbols with conflicting names so as to produce warnings or exceptions in this case, though I don't see why. If we were in the habit of declaring the version of Perl 5 our code uses, we wouldn't have these problems.)

The discussion inevitably circled back to the ineffable question of "If this new feature is going in the core, how do people use it in previous releases of Perl 5?" That is, "You've added a new feature to Perl 5 which will be in Perl 5.14 released next year. Is there any way to backport that feature to Perl 5.12? How about Perl 5.10? You know, RHEL 3 is still around. Why do you hate Perl .5.8?"

At some point the weight of ensuring that code written for a future version of Perl 5 can run correctly (if you cram in enough flying buttresses of CPAN shims) on code written for obsolete versions of Perl 5 will pull down the entire edifice. Allowing code written for previous versions of Perl 5 to run on modern versions unmodified (or with a simple use 5.10; at the top—I know a great combination of find and sed which can perform this kind of textual manipulation {and if you're on Windows, use PPT to get portable versions of these tools}) is often good and useful.

Going the other way... well, I don't understand it. If it's possible and someone wants to do it, fine. Why should it block improving the next release of Perl 5 though?