When I started Excel::Writer::XLSX I had, more or less, a clean slate to start with. So I chose to use perl 5.10.

It was mainly because I wanted to use the defined-or operator //. There were other reasons as well but Excel::Writer::XLSX is an API heavy module and, although it may sound trivial, defined-or saved me a lot of time.

I also wanted to use some of the other Modern Perl features. In fact I would really have liked to have used perl 5.14 but I thought that was probably a step too far.

Perl 5.10 i…