On Perl 5.6

bryan schwab writes "Perl 5.6 is in development, here is a list of all the new features" The article is an interview with the "Patch Pumpkin" - one of the guys from ActiveState in charge of putting together the development release. Seems there is a lot planned for the next release.

Comments

Be Not Afraid!

[Tom Christiansen]

Once again, the rabble rousing has begun. For those of you who don't know me, I completely assure you that you'll never find anyone more anti-MS than me -- although many of you are at the same level. There is a FAQ that explains why your fears of MS involvement with Perl are unfounded. You could also search the perl5-porters mailing list. It's on DejaNews under the newsgroup perl.* (I forget exactly) and also has its own search archive. Search for articles by Sarathy (that's gsar) about this.

If you were on p5p, I'm quite certain you wouldn't be joining the other Illuminati wannabes with these unsubstantiated delusions of evil conspiracies and take-overs. Please try to simmer down, and do a little research. You'll see that all is well. Or talk to one of us directly if you'd prefer.

The truth

[gnat]

0) Tsk tsk on those of you who believe everything Microsoft say. When they said they were paying Activestate to make Perl work better on NT, you forgot to translate that back into honest English: they're paying Activestate to implement fork() on NT so that NT can become more like Unix (a slower buggier more crashprone Unix). Yes, Microsoft for "bring up to baseline of minimum acceptable functionality" is "make it work better". Another way of saying this is "make NT suck less for Perl users". Perl is all about making your OS suck less.

1) Perl's version numbering is changing because major changes in functionality (e.g., the introduction of threads and a compiler) were hidden in the thousands decimal point of the version number. Hopefully this new numbering system will make it more obvious that things have changed. It's a small cosmetic change, not technical, but it's something people wanted.

2) Lexical warnings. Perl's philosophy is "there's more than one way to do it". With warnings as they were, there were only two ways to do it: all warnings enabled, no warnings enabled. Now you can say "I know it looks to the compiler as though I only use this variable once, but don't issue a warning". If you don't see yourself wanting to use it, don't panic--unless you explicitly use the new warning doodads, your programs will emit as few or as many warnings as before.

3) Sarathy is a smart smart guy. He's not an NT flack. He's a smart Unix guy who happens to be employed at Activestate because that's about the only place a guy can be hired to work on the Perl internals. He does far more work on the Perl core to benefit everyone than he does Windoze-specific work. If you're going to be at the Perl+Apache+Linux+... uberconference that O'Reilly are organizing, I urge you to seek him out (he won't be hard to find) and have a talk about your concerns. He'll be the first to agree that NT sucks hard.

4) Unicode reading (via UTF8) is implemented as an add-on module, so that only the part of your program that needs to know about Unicode takes any speed hit. It's also simple to turn programs that used to read ASCII text into programs that read Unicode text: just add "use utf8" at the top. We don't anticipate slowdowns anything like those that one Slashdot reader reported in Tcl.

5) The Unicode support only extends to reading and processing text, not to Perl's interaction with the system (filenames, error messages, etc.) I believe that Windows deals with UTF in the same way that many Unices deal with long files: a separate set of OS functions are provided. The Unicodification of Perl is being extended to use these parallel functions, if present. Generalizing this is hard because, like Unix and long files, everyone does it different. That doesn't mean that Sarathy's work precludes this happening for any other operating systems that provide Unicode support like this. In fact, having the first work done will make support for other operating systems easier. And the best bit is that Microsoft are paying for it.

I don't know about you, but I'm all for fleecing Uncle Bill.

Nat

At least the numbering's beginning to make sense

[arthurs_sidekick]

As far as casual programmers like myself go, I really appreciate a numbering system that's more "industry standard." I mean, sticking a couple of decimal places out in front of a major revision number is pretty confusing for those of us who can't keep up. Until I read this piece, I'd though 5.005 was only marginally different from 5.004. (Raster, Mandrake: if you're reading this -- why is E still at .16? Are you planning 83 more releases between now and the one where it's finally ready?)

Now, if they'd add support for *irregular* expressions, that's something I could really go for; programmin' Yoda-style!