feature: switch no longer being removed

[tonycoz]

It no longer produces experimental warnings.

Fixes #23282

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• This set of changes does not require a perldelta entry.

[Grinnz]

Is it also no longer deprecated?

[book]

Is it also no longer deprecated?

Indeed: the warning seems to have been removed in 2dd81b7.

The deprecated::smartmatch warning was added in v5.38, when we wanted to remove smartmatch entirely. I personally think that smartmatch should remain deprecated, even if we only remove it from the feature bundle, and not from the language.

@haarg, @ap, what are your thoughts on this?

[Grinnz]

It can always be re-deprecated if removal is again attempted, but at the very least, the documentation should indicate that it is discouraged and will receive no further development.

[tonycoz]

pod/perldeprecation.pod implies to me that if we deprecate something, we are going to remove it.

I doubt(ed) we'll be removing these features, so I removed the deprecations. And it was applied as is.

It might be worth reinstating the deprecation message and re-wording it to indicate discouragement instead of deprecation.

There's still some references to these being experimental, I'm not sure if those need re-wording, or we considered it the remnants of a failed experiment (the apparatus exploded, leaving a mess all over the lab.)

[guest20]

I'd like to suggest a kind of hypothetical feature::CoreList, that lets software tools programatically query a feature's experimental / available / deprecated / re-precated‡ status.

__
‡. undeprecated? dedeprecated? just precated?

[book]

We discussed the topic during the PSC meeting today, and concluded:

It’s not deprecated any more and it’s not experimental either. It’s just a negative feature. It’s a mistake we made that is now part of older language versions but will not be part of future feature bundles.

[book]

Also, I confused the switch feature and the smartmatch feature in my earlier comments.

[book]

I'd like to suggest a kind of hypothetical feature::CoreList, that lets software tools programatically query a feature's experimental / available / deprecated / re-precated‡ status.

The information is already available in Perl::Version::Bumper. It might be interesting to come up with a proper interface to access that data (it's only used internally by the module so far.)

[Grinnz]

There is still a reference to the smartmatch operator being removed in perlglossary; to switch being removed in perlfaq7; and to smartmatch and switch being experimental in perlsyn and perlop which I noted in #23286 (comment). These may need a more comprehensive update to indicate the current state and plans for these two features. (perlglossary and perlfaq7 are maintained on CPAN so will need to be updated there)

[tonycoz]

I think I covered the suggested changes.