The maintainers are conservative about breaking changes. Almost all features are hidden behind “use” statements: for example, “use feature "bitwise"” splits the questionable & operators into & for numbers and &. for bitstrings. But old code will work exactly the same.

There are a few deprecations and things which have been removed from the language…like idioms that relied on interpreter bugs and have been obsolete for 20 years.

But if you run a Perl script without use strict, use warnings, or new command line flags, you’ll get a Perl experience largely unchanged since the turn of the century.

That’s my understanding anyways…

because it is a dead language.

Not dead, as in no one uses it, but dead as in it has stopped living and no longer moves around.

In the same way that sanskrit or latin, languages known by millions of people, are dead languages.

And finally a bit of snark. python2 also has the neat property that it does not rot.