LARRY WALL ANNOUNCES BROAD VISION FOR PERL 6

[Tim Chambers]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JULY 18, 2000 contact brian d foy,
brian+perl6 at smithrenaud.com

LARRY WALL ANNOUNCES BROAD VISION FOR PERL 6

In his keynote address to the O'Reilly Second Open Source
Convention, Larry Wall laid out his vision for the future
development of Perl 6.  Larry reports that "Perl 6
development has began in earnest".

The next version of Perl is a chance for the language
developers to both rewrite the internals and externals of
Perl based on their experience from developing Perl 5, and
Chip Salzenbergs work with Topaz. Larry promises that Perl
6 will be "better, stronger, faster" and that there will be
a clear, clean migration path from Perl 5 to Perl 6.  A
preview release of should be available by next summer.

Perl 6 will use a development model that draws from the
lessons learned from perl5-porters and other large open
source projects such as the Apache web server and the Linux
operating system. Development topics will be assigned to
working groups which will work under a central project
manager.  Nat Torkington is the interim project manager.
Details will be made available in the Perl 6 section of
www.perl.org.

The current major release of Perl will continue to be
supported.  The maintenance track will be led by Jarkko
Hietaniemi. Current development tracks, such as Unicode
support, will be finished in Perl 5.

Interested developers can subscribe to the Perl 6
development mailing list by sending a message to
bootstrap-subscribe at perl.org.