Major version upgrade in 25 years… Pearl 7 was announced

Perl 7, a new version of the scripting language Perl, was announced at The Perl Conference in the Cloud on June 24th. This is a modernization of Perl 5, and there are no major changes to the code base itself.

The Perl 7 is pretty much the same as the Perl 5.32, but it’s more modern. Most of what was used in previous versions can be used as is. It is said that the reason why the version was modified with Perl 7 rather than a new version of Perl 5 is to set the boundary between the method so far. Also, the reason for upgrading to Perl 7 instead of Perl 6 is to avoid confusion with Raku, which was originally developing with Perl 6. There are cases of upgrading from PHP5 to PHP7.

Perl needed to add new programs, but I couldn’t change the default settings to deal with Perl’s compatibility. It is pointed out that Perl currently has to write a lot of prerequisite code before starting anything, and it is the same situation as in the old C language era. This improvement can be seen in the Perl 5 minor update. In version 5.12, there is no need to use’strict’ by specifying the minimum version.

This technology can be configured by default without specifying the Perl 7 version. Perl 5 remains extreme compatibility, but Perl 7 minimizes the impact for backwards compatibility and achieves modern behavior. The target for the release of Perl 7 is that there will be several release candidates next year. Perl 5 will go into long-term maintenance mode and will be supported for up to 10 years.

There are about 200,000 modules in CPAN, which is a collection of Perl libraries and modules. The modules that are in CPAN and maintained will work in Perl 7 as well, and if not, they are said to have compatibility mode ready. Of course, there may be a possibility that a CPAN for Perl 7 will be prepared, but it can be easy to manage as little work as possible. In addition, PAUSE (Perl Authors Upload Server), which has been loved over the years, makes it easier to respond to future needs and makes the code base more manageable for people with experience and talent in PAUSE.

Functions available in Perl 7 include file handles by’bareword’ in indirect object notation, pseudo-multidimensional arrays and multidimensional hashes, and Perl 4 type prototype declarations. Newly activated functions in Perl 7 are’Postfix’ reference and new ‘ isa’ operator, etc. In addition, all features, including Perl 5.32 features, are enabled by default. If you are using file handles or indirect object techniques by’bareword’, you need to perform conversion, but there is a compatibility mode that supports migration from Perl5 to Perl7 in cumbersome code that cannot do this. Also, you can check if you can migrate to Perl 7 without any problems because you can disable version 5.32 of the features that are basically available in Perl 7. Related information can be found here .