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

Hmmmmmm

[Billosaur]

I was right... we hit double-digits with Perl 5 before Perl 6 became available... and don't go on about Parrot -- it's not Perl 6. I'll be interested to download 5.10 and see what it can do. The speedier regex engine is going to be a great boon.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[fbjon]

The speedier regex engine is going to be a great boon. Not to mention the named captures. Finally, no more empty capture vars because some parentheses were removed in the middle of the expression!

Much Thanks to Mr. Wall

[BodhiCat]

Much thanks to Mr. Wall for creating a fast and dirty lannguage. The Oscar Madison of programming languages, much easier to learn and use than Java, the script equivilent of Felix Unger. Perl has been great for small cgi web things, not a lot of fuss and bother. Wouldn't use it for anything over a few hundred lines, tho, too easy for variable to get confused, even when using strict. Now if I can just get the DBI to MySQL on OS 10.5 to work my life would be perfect.

Re:Switch statements are syntactic sugar

[Phroggy]

Hey now - those of us who write Perl code know exactly what our own code does, or at least we did when we wrote it. It's reading somebody else's code (or our own, years later) that's the tricky part. Perl is a lot of fun to write!