[emilper]

Perl 4 ... the good days :)

I guess require-ing files all over the code and using the global scope for everything and using globals or even a global hash and having functions read and write to that hash is something to be regretted. Not that C is much better.

I have maintained and ported Perl 3 and 4 to Perl 5, I must say the existence of PHP3 made sense after that :)

There was that trick using goto and exit to simulate functions that people writing Perl 3/4 loved. Was it done for performance reasons ?

[beat]

It was done that way because that's how we learned to write functions. I dunno if it was the best way, I was just a kid then, but if you had the O'Reilly Perl books, that's how you learned it.