given, the real problem

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 9:29 AM, tchrist1 <perlbug-followup@perl.org> wrote:
> "GIVEN DELENDA EST"

Lacking time travel and reality editing, how exactly are we to move forward?

It's obvious to anyone with any sense of orthogonality that the Perl 5
smart match operator is anything but smart.  It is clever, but not
smart.  And it's obvious to anyone who's actually tried to use given
that it is at best an incredibly awkward graft onto Perl 5, offering
false hope of simplification but actually being more of a lateral
arabesque to a different kind of complexity.

But.  Here we are, two stable releases downstream of the first release
that actually implemented a vaguely usable smart match (5.10.1).  We
have a multitude of the most serious of developer problems: Users.
What can, seriously, be done?  Invention of a whole new regime of
smart match + given, with a flag day of incompatibility and a pragma
to mark the change?  How can we be sure we won't be trading one kludge
for another?  Or is something more nuanced available?