One of the distinct advantages of writing code at the north pole is that Santa's elves always deployed the latest versions of perl to their production servers. This meant that the elves were able to make use of the latest Perl features to make their day easier.

In fact, the elves had gone one step further and become addicted to the new subroutine signatures feature of Perl - most of the younger elves would refuse to program without it. While still technically an experimental feature, it'd been available since seemingly forever (as of this Christmas it'd been available not only in the latest major release of perl, but also in the old maintenance release before that, and in the now deprecated major release before that, the now deprecated major release before that too, and even the now deprecated major release before that as well...you get the idea.)

Not only had subroutine signatures been around forever, but they made writing the code so much nicer. Rather than writing something complicated like this:

sub fetch_reindeer {
    my $self = shift;
    my $name = shift or die "Missing argument!";
    die "Extra argument" if @_;

    ...
}

The elves only had to write this:

use experimental 'signatures';

sub fetch_reindeer ($self, $name) {
   ...
}

Which was why it was such a shock when they suddenly found themselves unable to use them.

Time Waits For No Man (or Elf)

It'd probably been a mistake outsourcing hosting some of the application code to an organization not so full of the Christmas spirit. But Santa's operation was the definition of a seasonal business, and they'd just run out of capacity.

"Our rules of conduct say you're not allowed to use any experimental features at all. And while you're in our house, you follow our rules", Father Time said. Being the embodiment of 2018 by December he'd changed from the young baby he'd been back in January into the grouchy old man that was enforcing the pointless rules today.

There was nothing for it. The elves would have to go through all their code and rip out the subroutine signatures, replacing them with older style code. What a lot of work! And it's not like they were on a hard deadline or anything!

A fix!

One of the virtues of a Perl programmer is laziness. In particular, never doing by hand what you can get a computer to do for you.

The elves considered writing a Perl program to go through all their Perl code and remove all the signatures and insert comparable code. This, of course, would probably be a Hard problem. Traditionally parsing Perl code is one of the hardest things a Perl program can do, with its user friendly (but not necessarily compiler friendly) syntax making it a collection of nasty edge cases. The question is would the elves be prepared to put in the hard work to be sufficiently lazy?

Luckily the Wise Old Elf had been to The Perl Conference in Glasgow this year and had heard about a tool that could help them: App::sigfix.

sigfix is a command line program that you can run against your Perl code. It'll parse the source code, find signatures, and then transform them into code that executes on older versions of perl. For example given our ReindeerFactory code:

package ReindeerFactory;

use strict;
use warnings;

use experimental 'signatures';

sub fetch_reindeer ($self, $name) {
    ...
}

We can feed it into sigfix

    shell$ sigfix -i -t plain ReindeerFactory.pm

And get out the transformed version:

package ReindeerFactory;

use strict;
use warnings;



sub fetch_reindeer { my ($self, $name) = @_;
    ...
}

sigfix has worked hard to not change the line numbers code in the source code (so when the elves ship the generated version of their code out to Father Time any error messages will line up with the line numbers in the original version in git). The experimental line has been totally stripped (meaning that this code will work now on older versions of perl that don't ship with that module.)

With the right find command the elves could -exec sigfix on all their source code and make it shippable in seconds.

For Us Mere Mortals

While this is useful for the elves in removing the experimental subroutine feature as a matter of policy, the main advantage for most of us comes from being able to produce code that'll run on older versions of Perl that don't support subroutine signatures. It means that we can use subroutine signatures in our development environments and still produce a shippable version of our code that will run on older perls.

If only there was a way to remove other more modern features like say, //, state, etc too...you know, that sounds like something I could write about in another article...