December 2007 Archives

For those that haven't already heard, perl 5.10 was just released for perls 20th birthday.  I had hoped to note this earlier, but was in my car the last two days transporting the family to the Holiday festivities.  So, what's with 5.10? why a big deal for just another small release?  Well, unlike some languages that change major version numbers at each small release, Perl has actually kept its numbering sane.  So what is in 5.10?  A lot of new features, many of which were specifically brought down from the perl6 design.

Syntactic things like the say operator, built in switch statement, smart match, named regex captures, regex plugins and more.  Add to that interpreter improvements for speed and memory.

A good help with understanding some of the new syntactic sugar can be found in Ricardo's Slides.