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From: composer@chem.bu.edu (Jeff Kellem)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: the version problem
Message-ID: <COMPOSER.91Feb10231753@chem.bu.edu>
Date: 11 Feb 91 04:17:53 GMT
References: <1991Feb11.022847.14573@convex.com>
	<20326:Feb1103:33:0491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
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In-reply-to: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu's message of 11 Feb 91 03:33:04 GMT

In article <20326:Feb1103:33:0491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
 > Say someone jumps into Perl now, and writes some scripts that work under
 > 3.044. How does he figure out whether they'll work under 3.041 or 3.025
 > or older versions? Does he search through the change lists for each
 > patch and hope he doesn't miss anything?

I've been collecting notes which point out when features were added to
Perl.  At some point, I'll put all of them together in a single, organized
list.  In the future, I may include this "History of Feature Changes and
Enhancements to Perl" as part of a Perl guide.

 > In shell scripts (Configure, for example) you can test that system
 > programs have the features you need. Surely there must be a way to do
 > the same in Perl.

Sure.  There is a way.. it's called `eval'.  If you're want to test things
before using them (as you point out doing in shell scripts), you can slap
an `eval' around a Perl expression and test `$@' for errors.  Of course,
the user can always just upgrade to the latest version of Perl..  ;-}

Cheers...

			-jeff

Jeff Kellem
Internet: composer@chem.bu.edu