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Perl 5.8.0 RC1 Released

Posted by pudge on from the bleading-goodness dept.

mbadolato writes "use Perl; is reporting that the long-awaited Perl 5.8 has just been released in the form of RC1. It is a release candidate, and is not recommended for use in a production environment, but downloading and testing is strongly encouraged. Read the story for the announcement, and also read perldelta to see what's changed." I think this might be the best .0 release in Perl 5's history, and is will also be the first release of perl to ship with full support for Mac OS X (perl 5.6.1 had a few nagging issues), as well as Classic Mac OS.

11 comments

  1. uh, pudge.....? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    a ".0" release refers to a x.0, not x.y.0, as you implied. For example, Perl 6.0 would be a .0 release, while this Perl 5.8[.0] is not.

    1. Re:uh, pudge.....? by mjstrom · · Score: 3, Informative

      From the release notes :

      Please note that Perl 5.8.0 is a major new release of Perl containing many new features, enhancements to existing features and bug fixes

      Since this is a "major" release in the 5.X branch of perl this does qualify for a ".0" release.

      In recent history:
      First there was the 5.005_X (which was like 5.5.X).
      Next there was the 5.6.X branch
      Now there is the 5.8.X branch

      All of these are part of the perl5 language version like there was a perl4 language.

      The 6.X will be a major (or complete, depending on how you look at it) rewrite of the language, it would be a major major release?

    2. Re:uh, pudge.....? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Since this is a "major" release in the 5.X branch of perl this does qualify for a ".0" release.

      It's either not a "major" release or the concept of a .0 release doesn't apply. Version x.y.z is major version x, minor version y and revision z. Since going from 5.6 to 5.8 only the minor version increases this is not a "major" release. Of course if they're insisting this is a major release this is just another case of an Open Source project that doesn't understand the concept of versioning.

    3. Re:uh, pudge.....? by pudge · · Score: 1

      I wrote ".0" in the context of "Perl 5". The meaning was clear, no matter how you read it. You're being overly pedantic and hypercritical.

  2. Mac OS X Issues? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    full support for Mac OS X (perl 5.6.1 had a few nagging issues)

    From what I've seen, c/few/many and c/nagging/fatal

  3. "Perl ... is not recommended for use " by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I agree with that.

    1. Re:"Perl ... is not recommended for use " by ultrabot · · Score: 0, Troll

      Yes. It is generally recommended to use the 2.2.1 or 2.1.3 versions of Python instead.

      --
      Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
    2. Re:"Perl ... is not recommended for use " by whanau · · Score: 1, Troll

      No joke guys. Python is where its at. If your feeling jaded bout computing at all, python will make you feel like a little kid at christmas

    3. Re:"Perl ... is not recommended for use " by dthable · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I'm not into counting spaces to debug why my statement isn't executing in a block with the other statements.

  4. Great release by AFaus · · Score: 2, Informative


    I had been not following the development of 5.8, so It's been a bit of shocking to see the impresssing range of changes.

    It looks that the two major issues that had been hampering perl (threads and unicode) have now improved a lot. And the PerlIO api is great.

    I've downloaded it and I am testing it already. Big Kudos and thanks for the hard work.