What’s happening in the front of Perl 5 development? I bring you some rumours that cheer me up.

Good news came from the perl5-porters mailing list (a communication channel of the core developers of the Perl 5 interpreter). Rafaël Garcia-Suarez (the pumpking of the development release of Perl) is getting married. While I wish him all the best, that’s not the sole subject of this entry and neither of Rafaël’s message. In the same e-mail, he announced his quite short list of things to be worked out before releasing Perl 5.10.

The list is short indeed with six items. None of them looks particularly hard or earth-shattering, even more after the substantial work of the last months that gave shape to this forthcoming version of Perl.

Among the changes, one can mention:

• a brand new switch construct, which was backported from Perl 6 and which supersedes the infamuous Switch.pm core module (cursed by being a source filter and its related griefs),
• improvements and new features of the regular expression engine, so many and so deep that I barely started to learn them by now,
• solutions to long-standing “issues” with closures, evals and lexicals, which means that code such as below would now work more “correctly”.

  {
    my $answer = 42;
    my $anon = sub {
      #0 and $answer; # once needed to anchor the vars in the inner sub
      sub { $answer; } -> ();
    };
    sub what { $anon->(); };
  };
  print what();
  

But there is more, much more, condensed in perldelta595, perldelta594, perldelta593, perldelta592, perldelta591, perldelta590.

If you would like to take Perl 5.10 for a spin now, access the APC (All Perl Changes) repository and grab a snapshot via a tarball or via rsync. If you want to know about hacking perl, perlhack is what you were looking for.

It’s just a matter of time before Perl 5.10 hits the streets.