First Perl revamp in five years released

(Credit: Perl Foundation)

The Perl Foundation has released Perl 5.10, the first new version in five years of a programming language with an emphasis on rough-and-ready practicality over syntactical formality.

The new version has some features designed to make programming a notch easier, according to the announcement last week. Among those features is a "say" command that eases some text-output chores, a "switch" operator to send a program in various directions depending on different situations, and improvements to the all-important "regular expression" methods for handling text. The Perl interpreter, which runs Perl programs, also is faster and requires less memory, the foundation said.

The official list of changes is available at the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

Perl programmers, meanwhile, are working on two future versions, 5.12 and Perl 6.0. Neither has a due date, said foundation spokesman Andy Lester.

"Perl 5 and Perl 6 will stay in dual development. Perl 5 has such a huge installed base, it won't be going away any time soon after Perl," he said.

Perl founder Larry Wall initially announced Perl 6 in 2000, and development is still under way. For somewhat technical discussion of the differences between Perl 5 and 6, try reading this O'Reilly Media piece.

Perl 6 attempts, among other things, to clean up some of the problems caused by the informality of Perl 5. Closely related but separate is Parrot, an attempt to create a virtual machine that can execute programs written not just in Perl 6 but also in Ruby, Lua, Javascript, Python, and PHP. (Virtual machine software provides an insulating layer that shields programs from the particulars of the computer and operating system they're running on.) Programmers released Parrot version 0.5.1 on December 18. More recently, Audrey Tang started another project called Pugs that can run Perl 6 programs.

"I suspect that one implementation will win out as 'the' implementation," Lester said.

Perl 6 today is "still sort of a big research project," Lester said, but some of its elements, including the "say" command and the regular-expression features were retrofitted to 5.10.

Available packaged versions of Perl 5.10 include ActiveState's ActivePerl and Adam Kennedy's Strawberry Perl, Lester said

[krosavcheg]

1/2 Right

The correct response is PYTHON!!! ;)

[edrodgers]

Remember: perl is your friend!

Perl does what perl does, and MS script and Python, (and PHP and ...)do what they do.<br /><br />It's very naive to think that perl is outdated or is somehow inferior to other scripting languages.<br /><br />I've spent decades working with various languages for various applications, and I have to say that perl was the biggest adventure of all. It takes poetry skills to make good perl scripts, and there is an elegance to it that is lacking in most every other language I have used.<br /><br />Just because I prefer PHP for web scripting, doesn't mean that I wouldn't pull out perl for log analysis.<br /><br />If you don't like perl, you don't know what it's for or how to use it. It's just too much for some people to grasp I guess. Silly Windows users.. :)

[djacobow1]

Perl forever

Ah, the language wars. What would a day without the debate of the relative merits of different programming languages be?<br /><br />I just wanted to say that I continue to use and love perl. It is an amazing language backed with an insanely rich universe of libraries from CPAN. The main criticism against perl that I have heard all my life is that it is so *ugly* and that it is a write-only language. It's true, you can write garbage in perl, perhaps a little more easily than some languages, but there is nothing in the language that forces you to write dense, cryptic code. I have used perl for some rather large projects with no problems.<br /><br />I have never met another language that is so flexible, allowing me to write inelegant but efficient one-off hacks in minutes, while supporting everything I need to write object-oriented, thousand+ line, database-backed full-blown applications.<br /><br />Congratulations to perl on its 20th birthday, and I hope it continues to grow for 20 more.<br /><br />-- dj