On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 04:02:11PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Tim Bunce <Tim.Bunce@pobox.com> writes:
> > On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 04:31:05PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> I still think that this is optimizing the wrong thing. We care about
> >> the clarity of the message the user sees, not about how short or clean
> >> the Perl code is.
>
> > There's no need to try to parse the perl -v output, which is intended
> > for humans and may change in future. Using
>
> > perl -e 'print $]'
>
> will give you the version number in floating point format for all
> versions of perl.
>
> $ /usr/local/bin/perl4 -e 'print $]'
> $RCSfile: perl.c,v $$Revision: 4.0.1.8 $$Date: 1993/02/05 19:39:30 $
> Patch level: 36
>
> I will refrain from further comment.
Ah, sorry. It needs to be in numeric context:
perl -e 'print($]+0)'
Tim.