Unquoted empty heredoc terminators are now fatal

Continuing its quest to clean up long deprecated features, v5.28 takes care of another feature deprecated since v5.0. You can no longer neglect to specify a heredoc separator. This was a warning in v5.26 and is now fatal. You probably weren’t doing this anyway (I’ve never seen it in the wild), but it’s nice to know the edge cases are disappearing.

Usually, you give a heredoc some string that marks its end. The quotes around that terminator string denote the type of string it is. This one is a double-quoted string:

my $position = "first";
print <<"HERE";
This is the $position line
This is a different line
This is the last line
HERE

With no quoting, it’s still a double-quoted string:

my $position = "first";
print <<HERE;
This is the $position line
This is a different line
This is the last line
HERE

With v5.26, you can indent the heredoc. This gives the same output:

my $position = "first";
print <<~"HERE";
	This is the $position line
	This is a different line
	This is the last line
	HERE

Single quotes around the delimiter string make for a single-quoted string:

print <<'HERE';
This is the first line
This is a different line
This is the last line
HERE

You can even use the empty string (single- or double-quoted), which is probably a bad idea for future maintainers:

print <<'';
This is the first line
This is a different line
This is the last line

print "New statement!";

Prior to v5.26, you could leave off the quotes and the delimiter string:

print <<;
This is the first line
This is a different line
This is the last line

print "New statement!";

Starting with v5.26, that still works but gives a warning:

Use of bare << to mean <<"" is deprecated. Its use will
be fatal in Perl 5.28

Now, with v5.28, it's fatal:

Use of bare << to mean <<"" is forbidden