Perl-5.10.0 in FBSD-7.0

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Wednesday 23 January 2008 21:19, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> Historically, new versions of perl are a recipe for large amounts of
> pain because of all the old perl code that stops working.

I haven't used perl 5.10 yet, but looking at the changes (available at 
<http://search.cpan.org/~rgarcia/perl-5.10.0/pod/perl5100delta.pod>), and in 
particular the section headed ``incompatible changes'', it looks like a small 
number of odd corners (for example, chdir FOO - unquoted argument now treated 
as filehandle not directory name) rather than a wholesale change like perl 
5.8, which was binary-incompatible with earlier perls and therefore required 
any modules using the XS interface to C code to be recompiled.

Perl 5.10 does introduce a couple of new operators (defined-or, spelt //, and 
smart-match, spelt ~~), and a number of enhancements which have to be 
switched on using the ``feature'' pragma - most of these changes have 
filtered back from the Perl 6 effort.

Jonathan