Deprecating $[

I just committed in perl a patch by James Mastros that emits a deprecation warning each time $[ is assigned to. This patch will go in the 5.12.X series.

What does this mean exactly? This only means that we discourage using $[ in any new code now. This doesn't necessarily mean that $[ will be removed in the 5.14.0. Some variables or features have been deprecated for a longer time before being actually removed. However, $[ is likely to be removed in 5.14, and here's why:

Basically, $[ allows the programmer to adjust the index of the first element of an array -- by default, 0. $[ has been in the past the source of many worrisome behaviours, and has evolved to accomodate them.

In Perl 4, if I remember correctly, $[ was global. This was not a good idea. Of course, you could set it with local(), but called subroutines would still see the new value. That's why $[ began to be treated like a lexical pragma in Perl 5.0; that way, all side-effects were avoided. The "downside" of this was that $[ needed to be assigned at compile-time. That could be surprising to "clever" programmers in search of novel obfuscation techniques.

However, memory was needed to keep track of the value of $[, in each lexical scope. That's why in 5.10 $[ was removed from the global compiler hints structure and was stored in the improved version of the %^H lexical hints variable. I'll spare you the details (perlpragma has some of them), but, shortly, that allowed us to reclaim the memory used for $[ (at least in programs that didn't use it).

So, now, in 5.10, the existence of $[ has no memory impact on perl. However, it's possible that it still has a small run-time impact. Removing the code that tests whether $[ exists and is non-zero before accessing an array element could make perl run a tiny bit faster. And that's why we're now deprecating $[.

Thanks to James Mastros for Friendly Doing It. And, by the way: that was a one-line patch to the C code of the interpreter. Useful stuff doesn't need to be difficult to implement!