Re: [groff] 15/39: [grog]: Drop relic code and comments.

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi John,

At 2022-10-31T18:23:25+1100, John Gardner wrote:
> > Perl 5.6.1 is incredibly old (April 2001).  I cannot find any
> > evidence of any current distribution supporting it.
> 
> IIRC, declaring a program version is recommended practice, as future
> versions of Perl may have different defaults w.r.t opt-in behaviours
> like `use warnings` and `use strict`.

Thanks for shedding some light on this.

It appears to me that the only Perl script in groff that doesn't already
explicitly request both of these is "tmac/hyphenex.pl".[1]

Granted, there are other behaviors that might change.

>  The `use v5.6.1;` directive instructs Perl to assume the defaults for
>  that particular version, ensuring no accidental breakage.

I'd kind of like to be informed of breaking changes to Perl's default
behavior that impact our scripts.  They might point out latent bugs or
infelicities that we should fix.  Is it worth the trouble to implement
some mechanism for including "require" (or "use") statements only for
production builds?

Regards,
Branden

[1] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/tmac/hyphenex.pl?id=8446562250babffcb185cb1f75454c9ff950cae2

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