Perl 5.10, 20 Year Anniversary

alfcateat writes "Perl 1 was released to the public by Larry Wall 20 years ago yesterday. To celebrate, Perl5Porters have released Perl5.10, the latest stable version of Perl 5. Happy Birthday Perl! Perl 5.10 isn't just a bug fix version: it's full of new features that I'm eager to use: named captures in regular expressions, state variables for subroutines, the defined-or operator, a switch statement (called given-when, though), a faster regex engine, and more. You can read more about the changes in perldelta."

Comments

Re:Switch statements are syntactic sugar

[mccalli]

"Perl" and "readability" don't fit in the same sentence to begin with. :)

Lean on your keyboard for long enough, and you will eventually have produced a valid Perl script. Of course you won't know what it actually does, but then how does that differ from 90% of Perl scripts anyway?

Cheers,
Ian

Oh dear.

[Xargle]

"say() is a new built-in, only available when use feature 'say' is in effect, that is similar to print(), but that implicitly appends a newline to the printed string".

*sigh* Nice to see they're still adding to the elegance of the language :(

I wonder if threading actually works in production yet?

Re:Oh dear.

[macshit]

"say() is a new built-in ... similar to print(), but that implicitly appends a newline ..."
*sigh* Nice to see they're still adding to the elegance of the language :(

Not to mention the new "lol()" built-in, which is like say(), but also removes random letters from the string, and appends 17 exclamation points.

Sometimes I wonder about Larry Wall.

Re:Oh dear.

[Speare]

Not to mention the new "lol()" built-in, which is like say(), but also removes random letters from the string, and appends 17 exclamation points. Better than the first draft of lol() which replaced letters from the string with l33t equivalents. They found it was a security risk because people could just inject eval { lol($_) } and it was valid Perl code to cause a kernel panic.

Re:Oh dear.

[funaho]

So Perl is getting kinky. You can tell it to "say my $name" now. :)

Re:Aren't these two unrelated events?

[supersnail]

Get real -- this is perl we are talking about.

A programming language used for poetry.

A programming language where "bless" is a basic operation.

A programming language which borrows the "understood" syntax from English.

A programming language where all published examples contain variables "Foo" and "Bar".

Of course they are going publish a new release on the twentieth anniversary. I dont think it occurred to anyone in the perl community not to.

Re:Switch statements are syntactic sugar

[ajs318]

At least Perl knows that adding numbers and concatenating string are different operations.

2 + 3 == 5 (Perl isn't that weird)
2 + "3" == 5 (not a TypeError as in Python)
"2" + 3 == 5 (not "23" as in JavaScript)
"2" + "3" == 5 (not "23" as in both JavaScript and Python)

Re:Switch statements are syntactic sugar

[mccalli]

>>Yeah, and who needs if statements anyway...
>You wrote something accidentally insightful. Look at the following expression:...

Away - away foul Lisp advocate, and darken not my doors again!

Cheers,
Ian
/tongue-in-cheek

Re:Hmmmmmm

[Tony Hoyle]

I always though of Parrot as of a project that was born dead.

You *know* what kind of responses you are asking for when you write something like that don't you....

Re:Hmmmmmm

[doti]

I always though of Parrot as of a project that was born dead. It's not dead, it's resting.

recursive patterns

[hey]

The new recursive patterns should increase perl's readability.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[$RANDOMLUSER]

It's not dead, it's resting.

I bloody well know a dead parrot when I see one!

Re:Is this the version

[vagabond_gr]

This is Perl we're talking about here. It would be "orels". Or whatever you set the $=] variable to.

Bold perl hackers, I salute you

[anilg]

With 'given-when', you have broken into lands no other languages dared. I now await the addition of 'conclude-basedon' and 'eithernot-ifonly' to complete the glory that is perl.