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Perl 5.8.1 RC1 Released

Posted by michael on from the when-life-gives-you-perls,-make-oysters dept.

moksliukas writes "Perl 5.8.1 RC1 has been released. A major change is that due to security reasons, the "random ordering" of hashes has been made even more random. As always, there are other numerous changes, including some improved utf-8 handling support, deprecation of 5.005 style threads, $* magic variable, pseudo-hashes and a number of other improvements. As usual, perldelta summarises all changes."

2 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. ...and "upgrading" will be a headache by tibike77 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ...for some.

    Quoting from their "delta":
    Incompatible Changes:
    Hash Randomisation (The added randomness may affect applications[...])
    Unsafe signals again available(from safe to unsafe then back to safe then back again and so on and so forth until your head explodes)

    ...and that's just quoting *some* small portion of it...
    Makes you wonder "why bother upgrading when they'll change it back again in a few and I'll have to re-check my code"...
    --
    By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
  2. Re:Perl6 is a mistake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    no the whitespace is great. the poster above is obviously a troll but personally I could never dig python's object model, or the scoping rules, last time I checked them out. I could never remember what was a method and what was a builtin. And making lambda functions was goofy (no closurers).

    I think this all is being fixed but I was turned off by the "work in progress" feel that Python had. It's like Guido had a few good ideas and hammered them into a language without thinking it through.

    Ruby on the other hand was like a breath of fresh air. The fact everything is an object instantly frees up needed brain cells to remember other things.

    Just an idea. If you're a "I hate Perl" fanatic, don't blindly choose Python as your "new favorite language", give Ruby a try.

    I'm saying this mostly because I REALLY wish Ruby had a nice collection of add-ons the way Perl does, and the more people are interested, the more will write cool modules and I won't have to grudgingly return to Perl for my projects.

    Also, the poster above is WRONG about the regular expressions in Perl 6. We NEED a new regex syntax desperately. I'm tired of writing '(?:foo|bar)' when something like '[foo|bar]' or '(foo|bar)' would be clearer. Unfortunately all the other languages picked up this crap as "perl-style regexps".

    I also wish Perl6 would allow folks to define their own regexp metacharacters, there are tons of cool unicode characters to use.... my co-workers would kill me but fuck 'em and their unicode-ignorant computers. :-)