Happy new year folks. People should be aware of this in the perldelta for 5.18:
Smartmatch family of features are now experimental Smart match, added in v5.10.0 and significantly revised in v5.10.1, has been a regular point of complaint. Although there are a number of ways in which it is useful, it has also proven problematic and confusing for both users and implementors of Perl. There have been a number of proposals on how to best address the problem. It is clear that smartmatch is almost ecrtainly either going to change or go away in the future. Relying on its current behavior is not recommended.
Warnings will now be issued when the parser sees "~~", "given", or "when". To disable these warnings, you can add this line to the appropriate scope:
no if $] >= 5.018, warnings => "experimental::smartmatch";
Consider, though, replacing the use of these features, as they may change behavior again before becoming stable.
Compiling and running the current master does generate a number of warnings triggered by these features. It looks as if it would be a wise move to avoid these features in new code. I'll try and look at those occurences and see if they can be addressed by using a less contentious structure. Most of the uses of given/when are syntactic sugar. But there are some uses of the smartmatch operator '~~' in indexing which may be affected by the various changes in behaviour. Incidentally on a make test on perl 5.18.1 a lot of the Quey Parser tests fail, but I havent as yet looked at this. Colin -- Colin Campbell Chief Software Engineer, PTFS Europe Limited Content Management and Library Solutions +44 (0) 800 756 6803 (phone) +44 (0) 7759 633626 (mobile) colin.campbell@ptfs-europe.com skype: colin_campbell2 http://www.ptfs-europe.com