Perl 5.20 and the fate of smart matching and given-when

There are problems with the design of smart-matching. The decision of what any given TYPE ~~ TYPE should do is most often unobvious, inconsistent and/or disputed. The idea isn't to remove smart matching; it's to fix it.

Specifically, ~~ will be greatly simplified, as you can see in a proposal by the 5.18 pumpking. Decisions as to how two things should match will be done with helpers such as those that already exist in Smart::Match.

... ~~ any(...)

It is much more readable, much more flexible (fully extensible), and solves a number of problems (such as "When should X be considered a number, and when should it be considered a string?").

Some insights might be gained by reading rjbs's proposed changes to smartmatch. He is the pumpking (Perl release manager) after all, so his comments and his view of the future is more relevant than most. There is also plenty of community comment on the matter; see here for instance. The 'experimental' status is in effect because, since things are likely to change in the future, it is responsible to inform users of that fact, even if we don't know what those changes will be.

Well, that's what's said in the description of the patch that downgraded this set of features to experimental:

The behavior of given/when/~~ are likely to change in perl 5.20.0: either smart match will be removed or stripped down. In light of this, users of these features should be warned. A category "experimental::smartmatch" warning should be issued for these features when they are used.

So while you can indeed turn these warnings off, with something like this (source):

no if $] >= 5.018, warnings => "experimental::smartmatch";

... it's just turning your eyes off the problem.