Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

"Let me deal with the breakage" is appropriate only for throwaway scripts, or scripts that are being modified continuously so that the additional porting effort doesn't matter.

Preferring backward compatibility over new features by default is more appropriate when you have lots of 'legacy' scripts that you want to keep running without too much porting effort; and this is seen as the primary use case for Perl 5.

That said, I'd be suprised if there wasn't a "use v-infinity" or a command-line option or something like that.