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.

Comments

finally

[tps12]

Like most programmers, I use perl on a daily, if not hourly, basis. It is great for prototyping, proofs of concept, and the inevitable "glue" code. So I have been anticipating 5.8 for some time.

It's great to hear that they finally fixed the problems with threading, and Unicode support was a long time coming, but I'm sure well worth the wait. It is a shame the Perl team wasn't able to add true OO support and exception handling to this release, but I guess it is just another reality of open source software that projects are steered according to the whims of the programmers and not to what the users actually want. I'll be switching to Python, and I urge others to do the same.

Re:Request

[Stary]

I almost reached for a flounder to smack you with while yelling "Read the post before you reply!" but chose not to.

Quote from that post: "Is there anywhere that summarizes the various changes to perl since version 5? there are the perldoc perldelta documents (here is the perldelta document for 5.8.0 [perl.org]). However, these are complete, technical changelogs, and cover everything from language changes to small inconsistency smoothings to changes to obscure library functions to bugfixes in internal perl functions." (emphasis added)

To which your incredibly clever answer was to look up perldelta, even explaining how to do it with perldoc (in a rather clumsy way; perldoc perldelta will do fine). Now: Since you seem to be such an amazingly clever person, could you actually come with some information that could actually help? Thanks.