Reputation: 9611

What are the most interesting/useful new things in Perl 5.12?

I remember quickly adopting given .. when, say, //, and the smart matching operator when Perl 5.10 came around.

What do you consider the most useful fixes and features introduced with Perl 5.12.0?

Upvotes: 5

Answers (5)

Adam Kennedy

Reputation: 1612

There's some subtle but non-trivial improvements that will make Portable (flash drive) Perl distributions work better (or at all).

Perl also now has support for 64-bit on Windows with GCC, so Strawberry Perl 64-bit should come out soon.

Upvotes: 3

tsee

Reputation: 5072

This is my favourite feature by far:

use 5.012; # enables 'use strict' implicitly!

Upvotes: 5

DVK

Reputation: 129403

Raw data:

Interesting:

Regexps are now first class
Pluggable keywords
New syntax allows developers to specify package version numbers directly in "package" statements
Perl now warns the user about the use of deprecated features by default.

Wonderful:

Not sure if any of the info is new, but perlperf - Perl Performance and Optimization Techniques was added to documentation!!!

Useful:

DTRACE (some) support!
\N regex escape
... (aka Yada Yada) operator
Y2038 Compliance - Perl now has a better sense of time and will be able to keep accurate time well past the "Y2038" barrier.

Upvotes: 6

Brad Gilbert

Reputation: 34120

while( readdir $dir ){} now works a lot more like while( readline $file ){}.

perl -MO=Deparse -e'while( readline $f ){}'

while (defined($_ = <$f>)) {
    ();
}

_{<$f> is the same as readline $f}

This is how Perl versions prior to v5.11.2 have been handling while( readdir $dir ){}

perl-5.10 -MO=Deparse -e'while( readdir $d ){}'

while (readdir $d) {
    ();
}

It is worth noting that the above will fail to work correctly if there is a file, or directory with the name of 0. Which doesn't matter that much since it doesn't do anything useful anyway.

In Perl version 5.11.2 there was a patch added that brought it more into line with the handling of while( readline $file ){...}.

perl-5.12.0 -MO=Deparse -e'while( readdir $d ){}'

while (defined($_ = readdir $d)) {
    ();
}

I would like to note that I was the one who provided that patch. It was the first thing I have ever tried to fix in the Perl core. So it was also the first patch I wrote, that made it into Perl.

Upvotes: 6

Quentin

Reputation: 943556

I like the idea of Yada Yada, although time will tell if it is actually useful.

Upvotes: 3

What are the most interesting/useful new things in Perl 5.12?

Answers (5)

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