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Perl New Version 5.5.660

Posted by jamie on from the don't-look-at-those-high-bits dept.

aarestad writes, "Just saw this on perl.com: the new beta leading to perl 5.6. Read the announcement." It's mostly bugfixes. Pumpking Sarathy says we're on track for a 5.6 final release candidate by Feb.28.

4 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Is /. turning into Freshmeat? by Mekanix · · Score: 3


    I mean, why all these release updates?

    Bjarne

  2. A more complete list of what has changed by Mneme · · Score: 3

    For those who want to know what is actually new in Perl 5.6, you want to look at perldelta . (The message linked to above is just what was new since the last beta).

  3. People, read the detailed link by tilly · · Score: 5

    As was pointed out there are a number of changes. This is not just a bug-fix. The biggest new item is Unicode support. If you have to do things like match patterns in multi-byte character sets, this will be really cool. If you don't it will still be a nice feature since a lot of things (eg the web, file-systems, etc) are moving towards Unicode as internationalization becomes more and more important.

    The biggest "missing features" continue to be solid multi-threading, compilation, and solid 64-bit support. If you want the first one, rethink whether the fork model works. If you want the second think about embedding an interpreter. If you need the third I suggest getting used to opening pipes to and from programs that can handle large files...

    A "cool feature" that was discussed (I have ignored the Perl development list for the last half year so I don't know if it is in) was embedding Perl and a directory structure in a zip format. Imagine shipping an executable which had an encrypted zip appended which was Perl, with your scripts, and a directory structure of all of the modules your script used... :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben

    --
    My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
  4. Re:learning perl... by joneshenry · · Score: 3

    Start with Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. This book is superior to Learning Perl because it will teach you skills that will apply to all languages and utilities. This book starts from the very basics of using regular expressions.

    Next try Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan. This will introduce the higher level concepts of Perl that will explain what about Perl makes it suitable for various tasks.

    Before one can use Perl effectively one must wade through a substantial fraction of its excellent man pages. Actually, Perl's man pages are written in its own lightly marked up documentation format perldoc which can be translated into man pages, plain text, html, whatever. I read it "straight" by downloading the latest development Perl source.

    Perl is basically a fusion of the C library functions and Unix system calls with excellent abilities to handle regular expressions. For this reason is is quite probable that one can learn more about actually using Perl by reading W. Richard Stevens book Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment then any beginners Perl book.

    For my money if one had only about 40 US dollars to spend on one Perl book, I'd get Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington's Perl Cookbook and try to make do learning from the Perl manpages.