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!

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.

Re:Hmmmmmm

[$RANDOMLUSER]

It's not dead, it's resting.

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

Re:Hmmmmmm

[ricegf]

are there any other reasons for working on this project?

If Parrot becomes "efficient enough", then hosting Perl, Python and Ruby on Parrot should permit writing programs in a mixture of all three. Python has a very extensive library, but I certainly wouldn't mind having all of CPAN for which to choose as well - or access to Rails, for that matter. (Yes, I know, much of Rails' value is in its elegant fit to Ruby syntax, but I'd still like access from Python. Call me a library pack rat. :-)

For another example of recent interest to me, Perl and Ruby have excellent integrations with GraphicsMagick; Python has Python Image Library (PIL) instead. Why can't I choose the graphics library I want from any of the big three dynamic languages?

Nor would Parrot implementations of those languages need to replace the main implementations to be useful. The JVM has Jython and JRuby, granting access to Java libraries like Swing. Similarly, Microsoft's .NET has IronPython and IronRuby to avoid the much-maligned VB6. Interoperable implementations of Perl 6, Python 3, and Ruby 2 on Parrot would be very nice indeed.

Well, for a dynamic language junkie like me, at least. ;-)

Switch statements are syntactic sugar

[morgan_greywolf]

Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing. There are also other constructs that you can use to get around the whole nested if/then/else thing too in many cases.

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

Re:Switch statements are syntactic sugar

[chris_eineke]

Yeah, and who needs if statements anyway,

You wrote something accidentally insightful. Look at the following expression:
(if (> 3 2) 5 4)
which obviously evaluates to 5. But you know what? You can eliminate the if operator entirely if you let > (and any other predicate) return a two-ary function:
(define true (x y) (x))
(define false (x y) (y))
and stuff the arguments into separate functions for deferred evaluation:
((> 3 2) (lambda () 5) (lambda () 4))
:-)

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: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!

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.

recursive patterns

[hey]

The new recursive patterns should increase perl's readability.

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: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.

Implicit vs. explicit parsing

[SamP2]

2 + "3" == 5 (not a TypeError as in Python)
"2" + 3 == 5 (not "23" as in JavaScript)

And this is intuitive, useful, or best practice, how exactly?

Implicit parsing a num to a string is straightforward and will pretty much always work, even if you may get wierd results like "1.66666666666666666667". But the other way is just too careless to let be implicitly done. You may unexpected errors when for some reason the string you use cannot be parsed, and you may get either an unexpected datatype or a truncated result when a parsed string would not match the other num you add to it (such as int a = x+5 where x is a string "3.5").

Casting from string to number should always be done explicitly, with precise definition of the data type you cast to, and ideally with an error catching block in case something goes wrong. Letting it be done implicitly is a recipe for headache.

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.