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Perl 5.10, 20 Year Anniversary

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thats-a-lotta-candles dept.

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."

9 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Oh dear. by Xargle · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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?

    1. Re:Oh dear. by macshit · · Score: 5, Funny

      "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.
      --
      We live, as we dream -- alone....
    2. Re:Oh dear. by Speare · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.
      --
      [ .sig file not found ]
    3. Re:Oh dear. by funaho · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Re:Aren't these two unrelated events? by supersnail · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
  3. Re:Hmmmmmm by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 5, Funny

    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....

  4. Re:Hmmmmmm by doti · · Score: 5, Funny

    I always though of Parrot as of a project that was born dead. It's not dead, it's resting.
    --
    factor 966971: 966971
  5. recursive patterns by hey · · Score: 5, Funny

    The new recursive patterns should increase perl's readability.

  6. Much Thanks to Mr. Wall by BodhiCat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.