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> because Perl has not introduced breaking changes since 5.000.

I was curious and you made me check. There's a number of releases with incompatible changes listed if you google for it. For example a whole list at https://perldoc.perl.org/5.12.0/perldelta#Other-potentially-... So no, there's been quite a few.




> no, there's been quite a few.

Yes, most of them relatively minor though, which is why the OP has never stumbled across one.

(I found one once-- it turned out one coder had invented his own hash slice syntax. It wasn't supposed to work, but it did, until a particular upgrade...).

In general, Perl has been traditionally committed to backwards compatibility, but not fanatically so-- there is a deprecation cycle that can be used to remove the more problematic things.


Yes, and these changes are feature flagged and optional and would not affect existing scripts.


No, those are "real" breaking changes in that a script running in one version of the interpreter could break if it runs in a later version, without any modifications to the script itself. But in fairness, they're a very conservative definition of breaking changes - e.g. the output of the `--version` flag changing, or some Unicode characters classes changing.




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