NAME

       experimental - Experimental features made easy

VERSION

       version 0.016

SYNOPSIS

        use experimental 'lexical_subs', 'smartmatch';
        my sub foo { $_[0] ~~ 1 }

DESCRIPTION

       This pragma provides an easy and convenient way to enable or disable experimental
       features.

       Every version of perl has some number of features present but considered "experimental."
       For much of the life of Perl 5, this was only a designation found in the documentation.
       Starting in Perl v5.10.0, and more aggressively in v5.18.0, experimental features were
       placed behind pragmata used to enable the feature and disable associated warnings.

       The "experimental" pragma exists to combine the required incantations into a single
       interface stable across releases of perl.  For every experimental feature, this should
       enable the feature and silence warnings for the enclosing lexical scope:

         use experimental 'feature-name';

       To disable the feature and, if applicable, re-enable any warnings, use:

         no experimental 'feature-name';

       The supported features, documented further below, are:

               array_base    - allow the use of $[ to change the starting index of @array
               autoderef     - allow push, each, keys, and other built-ins on references
               lexical_topic - allow the use of lexical $_ via "my $_"
               postderef     - allow the use of postfix dereferencing expressions, including
                               in interpolating strings
               refaliasing   - allow aliasing via \$x = \$y
               regex_sets    - allow extended bracketed character classes in regexps
               signatures    - allow subroutine signatures (for named arguments)
               smartmatch    - allow the use of ~~
               switch        - allow the use of ~~, given, and when

   Ordering matters
       Using this pragma to 'enable an experimental feature' is another way of saying that this
       pragma will disable the warnings which would result from using that feature.  Therefore,
       the order in which pragmas are applied is important.  In particular, you probably want to
       enable experimental features after you enable warnings:

         use warnings;
         use experimental 'smartmatch';

       You also need to take care with modules that enable warnings for you.  A common example
       being Moose.  In this example, warnings for the 'smartmatch' feature are first turned on
       by the warnings pragma, off by the experimental pragma and back on again by the Moose
       module (fix is to switch the last two lines):

         use warnings;
         use experimental 'smartmatch';
         use Moose;

   Disclaimer
       Because of the nature of the features it enables, forward compatibility can not be
       guaranteed in any way.

AUTHOR

       Leon Timmermans <leont@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Leon Timmermans.

       This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as
       the Perl 5 programming language system itself.