Deprecate unescaped literal "{" in regex patterns

This commit also causes escaped (by a backslash) "(", "[", and "{" to be
considered literally.  In the previous 2 Perl versions, the escaping was
ignored, and a (default-on) deprecation warning was raised.  Now that we
have warned for 2 release cycles, we can change the meaning.of escaping
to actually do something

Warning when a literal left brace is not escaped by a backslash, will
allow us to eventually use this character in more contexts as being
meta, allowing us to extend the language.  For example, the lower limit
of a quantifier could be omited, and better error checking instituted,
or things like \w could be followed by a {...} indicating some special
word character, like \w{Greek} to restrict to just Greek word
characters.

We tried to do this in v5.16, and many CPAN modules changed to backslash
their left braces at that time.  However we had to back out that change
before 5.16 shipped because it turned out that escaping a left brace in
some contexts didn't work, namely when the brace would normally be a
metacharacter (for example surrounding a quantifier), and the pattern
delimiters were { }.  Instead we raised the useless backslash warning
mentioned above, which has now been there for the requisite 2 cycles.

This patch partially reverts 2 patches.  The first,
e62d0b1335a7959680be5f7e56910067d6f33c1f, partially reverted
the deprecation of unescaped literal left brace.  The other,
4d68ffa0f7f345bc1ae6751744518ba4bc3859bd, instituted the deprecation of
the useless left-characters.

Note that, as in the original attempt to deprecate,  we don't raise a
warning if the left brace is the first character in the pattern.  This
is because in that position it can't be a metacharacter, so we don't
require any disambiguation, and we found that if we did raise an error,
there were quite a few places where this occurred.

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/handy.h b/handy.h
index b17d7f8750..c5c4d4b100 100644
--- a/handy.h
+++ b/handy.h
@@ -963,8 +963,7 @@ patched there.  The file as of this writing is cpan/Devel-PPPort/parts/inc/misc
 #  define _CC_QUOTEMETA                21
 #  define _CC_NON_FINAL_FOLD           22
 #  define _CC_IS_IN_SOME_FOLD          23
-#  define _CC_BACKSLASH_FOO_LBRACE_IS_META 31 /* temp, see mk_PL_charclass.pl */
-/* Unused: 24-30
+/* Unused: 24-31
  * If more bits are needed, one could add a second word for non-64bit
  * QUAD_IS_INT systems, using some #ifdefs to distinguish between having a 2nd
  * word or not.  The IS_IN_SOME_FOLD bit is the most easily expendable, as it