According to the foundation, this is the first new version in five years, and it has an emphasis on rough-and-ready practicality over syntactical formality.
Perl 5.0 has some features designed to make programming a little easier, according to the Perl Foundation. Among them is a "say" command that could ease some text-output chores, a "switch" operator to send a program in various directions depending on different situations, and improvements to the all-important "regular expression" methods for handling text. The Perl interpreter, which runs Perl programs, is also faster and requires less memory, the foundation said.
Perl programmers have been working already on two other future versions, 5.12 and Perl 6, but neither has a launch date yet, according to foundation spokesman Andy Lester. "Perl 5 and Perl 6 will stay in dual development. Perl 5 has such a huge installed base, it won't be going away any time soon after Perl," he said.
Perl founder Larry Wall initially announced Perl 6 in 2000, and development is still under way. Perl 6 attempts, among other things, to clean up some of the problems caused by the informality of Perl 5.
Closely related to Perl but separate is Parrot, an attempt to create a virtual machine that can execute programs written not just in Perl 6 but also in Ruby, Lua, Javascript, Python and PHP. (Virtual machine software provides an insulating layer that shields programs from the particulars of the computer and operating system they're running on.) Programmers released Parrot version 0.5.1 on 18 December.
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