Perl 5.8.1 Released

langles writes "Perl 5.8.1 has been released. Read the official announcement, then download it from a CPAN mirror near you. If you've been following the Perl5 Porters List, you'll know this version was very well tested before they released it. However, there may be some modules that will need to be fixed before they will work with this release." The announcement also contains full details on incompatibilities and known issues, so give it a once over before upgrading, especially if from a pre-5.8 version.

Comments

breakage:

[Tirel]

from New ``read() on %s filehandle %s''

You cannot read() (or sysread()) from a closed or unopened filehandle.

This has the potential to break a whole lot of applications, trust me, I've seen many, I'm a Perl hacker.

Sorry, but I cannot recommend Perl.

[Krapangor]

From my consulting experience usually 67 percent of all system contracts is porting Perl to some sane language. Furthermore the cause of about 80 percent of all forced system conversion due to scalability or relyability issues is Perl. Other system conversion is usually Cobol (the Cobold never dies...) or Fortran. However, these languages have the disthinguished advantage that porting the sources to a modern language like C,C++ or Java is relatively easy. This usually doesn't hold for Perl. Even if you go into "pervent mode" and wildly mix Python, C++ and Java to simulate similar behavior, then you still have heaps of trouble. And of course a disgusting, unmaintainable code base.

After going trought Perl hell often enough I started lobbying customers to use different solutions than Perl. This gives content customers in long term (and longer contracts ;) and less headache from trying to get the meaning of some Perl gibberish an intern (usually now burger flipping expert) wrote 3 years ago.

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl release you!