What is the difference between parent and base in Perl 5?

Question

There appears to be a new pragma named parent that does roughly the same thing as base. What does parent do that warrants a new (non-core) module? I am missin

Answer 1

Armed with the extra bit of information from ysth, I was able to see the differences in the docs:

The base pragma does the following things:

• adds the named package to @ISA
• loads the module with the same name as the named package using require (unless it detects that the package has already been loaded)
• won't fail if a module with the same name as the package doesn't exist
• dies if there are no symbols in the named package
• if $VERSION does not exist in named package, base sets it to "-1, set by base.pm"
• initializes the fields of the named package if they exist
• does not call the import function of the named package

The parent pragma does the following things:

• adds the named package to @ISA
• loads the module with the same name as the named package using require
• accepts an option that tells it not to die if a module with the same name as the package doesn't exist