Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Perl 7

Brian D Foy (via Hacker News):

Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults. You won’t have to enable most of the things you are already doing because they are enabled for you. The major version jump sets the boundary between how we have been doing things and what we can do in the future.

Remember, Perl was the “Do what I mean” language where the defaults were probably what you wanted to do. In Perl 4 and the early days of Perl 5, that was easy. But, it’s been a couple of decades and the world is more complicated now. We kept adding pragmas, but with Perl’s commitment to backward compatibility, we can’t change the default settings.

[…]

Perl 7 is a chance to make some of these the default even without specifying the version. Perl 5 still has Perl 5’s extreme backward compatibility behavior, but Perl 7 gets modern practice with minimal historical baggage.

Previously:

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Ben Kennedy

Seems to be in vogue for major software to skip version 6 after screwing something up badly. PHP, MySQL, now Perl… any others?

Perl 6 (now named Raku) is actually pretty good. It's just very different from Perl in many ways that wound up being more important that people thought it would be. So they're skipping to 7 to keep people from getting confused, not because things got screwed up.

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