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Perl 5.8.0 Released
twoshortplanks writes "The latest version of Perl has been released, with new features such as better Unicode support, a new threads implementation, new IO layer support, and a whole plethora of bundled modules - plus a wonderful collection of regression tests and new documentation. The release notes and links to mirrors for download are on dev.perl.org." This is not a release candidate, it's the real thing, representing over two years of work by patch pumpkin holder Jarkko Hietaniemi and his merry band. Hugo van der Sanden is the new pumpking for perl 5.10.
or at least make it easier to write readable code...
The fundamental point of perl is its a quick way to write one-off scripts to do quick repetitive jobs - therefore maintainable code is not necessary. I accept there are other times when it needs to be readable tho...
Nonsense.
Would you say
" quick way to write one-off scripts to do quick repetitive jobs"
Accurately describes the slashdot application?
I suppose it's only a 'real' language if you have to compile it? I'll never understand that mentality.
It's been done. They are called Python and Ruby.
Frankly, Ruby has a lot of promise. I've been toying with it, and it feels like a pretty good compromize between java and perl.
Stop the brainwash
Now if only Apple would get the Cocoa bindings for Perl cooked up, so I could back-end in Perl and GUI in Cocoa...
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
not true, here is a sample brainfuck program :
;)
hello world
I would include it in this body but it fails the lameness filter for having too many 'junk' characters, but its a program....
as you are not allowed comments and none of the operations are particularly obvious because of the lack of verbosity, its very hard to understand what it does even if you know brainfuck.
it prints out 'Hello World' by the way.
things are even worse when programming in machine code, because the commands' binary syntax is not very human readable, although at least you can put comments in machine code.
In short, some languages are better than others for promoting code readability, but I think the exact opposite of your statement is true : you can write unreadable code in any language.
I for one think Perl suffers from write-only tendancies, mainly due to the horrible mess that is called array access. Good clear types really help maintainability, and the last time I saw Perl's collection type(s) it was neither good nor clear.
I was happy to move over to Python mainly based on the quality of its type system, not that this was the only strength. But I must confess to being fully able to produce unreadable bits of Python that could make some Perl fragments look like angels.
At Yet Another Perl Conference this year there was a book auction to raise funds for Perl development. Tons and tons of O'Reilly, Manning, and other books, and not just Perl books. It was interesting to see where the interests lay. There were plenty of wisecracks and groans for Java, Python, and PHP books. (I picked up Learning Python for $10.) Interestingly enough, there was intense interest in the Ruby books, and no wisecracks. Went for a higher than average price, I believe.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
ActiveState Perl is still 5.6. Any ideas when it'll be updated?
I run the scripts on Linux, but I do my coding on a WinAMD machine.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
On the contrary, if the choice was the developer's and he/she made a poor choice, that is very much a reflection of their (lack of) ability.
The language used has little to do with the quality of the final result, and has a lot more to do with the person coding with it.
Generally speaking, given the choice, a good programmer won't make a poor choice of language for a project. (We don't always have that choice, of course, but a good programmer knows the difference and will readily admit to suboptimal management constraints.)
The maintainability of a language seems weakly related to individual languages.
Most of the garbage code I see these days, both proportionally and in absolute terms, is written in Perl. I believe that this is due to design problems with the language itself, and due to the fact that the language is so popular, therefore drawing to it many unskilled programmers, and due to the compounding interaction of these two factors.
Perl was there first, and Larry Wall deserves accolades for it, IMO. These days, though, is there anyone that doesn't cringe at the thought of having another bale of newbie Perl code dumped on them to maintain?
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Huh?
No, Perl was removed becuase it has started to become very bloated, plain and simple. 5, 10 or even 20 MB could be handled, but it is starting to get a little bit bigger. Plus the language bigots had crept in too...:)
Atleast I got Perl in there, JKH and others were voting for TCL instead. (YUCK)
When I added Perl to FreeBSD 2.0 way back when, it came in very handy for things which needed to be written. In this day and age, FreeBSD has started to take more and more things out of the base installation and allow people to add them back in via a port. Which I agree with, why does a web server need Sendmail installed???
BWP