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Perl 5.8.0 RC1 Released
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Sorry, I'm not into counting spaces to debug why my statement isn't executing in a block with the other statements.