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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.

18 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Will it enforce readable code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    or at least make it easier to write readable code...
    we could only wish

    1. Re:Will it enforce readable code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      pointers are inefficient. Let me explain. When you copy a pointer, you need to copy the pointer, as well as the data that is being pointed to. Additionally, each pointer memory read requires an extra level of indirection, and prevents cache optimizations. Also, since the data the pointer points at may be changed at any time, you must either disable multi-threading, or recopy the data before every read.

      That's why "C" is slower than more low-level languages, such as VB and Ruby. They deal with data directly, so you get better performance, and can optimize the data burst pipeline.

    2. Re:Will it enforce readable code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Ooo the poor widdle modewator can't bear it when other people can read things he doesn't agree with... How many mod points you got left now?

    3. Re:Will it enforce readable code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Preach on, Brutha Smooth!

  2. first jay-z post again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    g to the oatse

    c to the x

    fuck you, CLiT.. i bet this appears before you even claim FP on this thread.

    goatse.cx

  3. Yay! by PhysicsGenius · · Score: -1, Troll
    This is great news, with all the new features and bugfixes I can fix some long-outstanding problems in my code. "It's so usable, no wonder Perl is #1!"

    Or is it? This release actually came out a few days ago (typical slashdot slowness on the announcment) and we haven't seen many downloads happen yet. In fact, the mailing list has gotten a lot of traffic saying that they shouldn't have released 5.8 because nobody uses Perl anymore because it's error-prone and poorly-documented. I hope this doesn't spell the end for Perl...

  4. finally by tps12 · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.

    --

    Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
  5. Perl 5 is not a bad language, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    I've been using perl pretty much constantly since the Pink Camel, and believe me, Perl 5 is an extremely good language for quick scripting things. That's what it was designed for. Sure, you can do big projects in it, but it's not exactly ideal. Recently I've started using Ruby as well, and I intend to move my department over to it instead of wasting time with Perl 6.

    One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

    The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

    Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

    On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

    I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

    Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^HPerl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

  6. Re:Slashcode Updates by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    this post shouldn't have been modded offtopic.. the post is ABOUT Slashdot and what site are we on right now? SLASHDOT. FUcking mods.. this will probably be the most informative post on Slashdot today. So go ahead and mark this flamebait or offtopic and waste your mod points. Dumbasses.

  7. Censorship 1.1 Released! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    unique lameness filter cracking id : 000000 (change this when reposting this information)
    Version 1.1

    Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and
    support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA


    Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

    Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

    They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!
    • Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
    • Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
    • Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.
    The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.
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    But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

    We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

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    Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
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  8. TROLL! by PhysicsGenius · · Score: -1, Troll
    Python, are you kidding? Perl is the only acceptable language for writing any software in, especially maintainable software for an enterprise nature.

    We use Perl down at the lab to check our email, write our reports and control our particle accelerator. If you are using a legacy language like C or C++ to perform any of these tasks, you have no business being in the software field. These languages are hard to maintain and produce buggy code. Perl is the only way to go for your needs, no matter what they are.

  9. Pumpking... by MikeD83 · · Score: -1, Troll

    In all due respect to Mr.Hugo van der Sanden the editors should change this. You make him sound like the Guinea pig at AdultToy.com.

  10. Which is better? Perl or HTML? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Which is better? Perl or HTML?

    1. Re:Which is better? Perl or HTML? by roadkill999 · · Score: -1, Troll

      homosaywhat? Speak zee english language to me. It was only a simple question. Which is better Perl HTML? One does something, the other does something else. One must be better. Its obvious. But which one?

  11. Re:pumpkin pumpkin whos got the pumpkin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    This is God - all must repent - meet me at the coffee machine

    God, this is your mom! Go do your homework NOW!

  12. Hi. My names Chad. Any cute girls want to chat? by roadkill999 · · Score: -1, Troll

    pppllleeeaaassseee

  13. Re:pumpkin pumpkin whos got the pumpkin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    God, this is your mom! Go do your homework NOW!

    Get your bitch ass back in the kitchen and make me some pie!

  14. Re:Request by Stary · · Score: 1, Troll
    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.

    --
    Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest