> 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.
Re:What Happened to Perl 7?
by forgotmypw17 on Thursday May 26, 2022 @05:49AM
(#31516450)
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.
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.