Re: announce-gen: Fix copyright year in --version output.

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Collin,

> I've pushed the two attached patches to derive the copyright year from
> the time-stamp string.

> +(my $copyright_year = $VERSION) =~ s/^(\d*)-.*$/$1/;

Can this be rewritten in a simpler way, that does not use idioms
from perl's bag of tricks? Something like

  my $copyright_year = <some_expression>;

like one would do it in every other programming language?

Thanks.

Bruno