[Purdue-pm] Perl 5, 6, 7, and 11

[Mark Senn]

The numbering system for Perl is getting messy.

Perl 5 is the Perl that has been in use many years.

Perl 6 is the newest member of the Perl family---the language was
announced in ~2001 and was released in ~2018.  The language was
completely redesigned and all software was rewritten.  Perl 6 was
renamed to "Raku" in the last year or so.

>From https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/
    Perl 7.0 is going to be Perl 5.32 but with different, saner, more
    modern defaults. You won’t have to enable most of the things you are
    already doing because they are enabled for you. The major version
    jump sets the boundary between how we have been doing things and
    what we can do in the future.
These lines will probably not be needed at the the top of each Perl program
    use utf8;
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use open qw(:std :utf8);
    no feature qw(indirect);
    use feature qw(signatures);
    no warnings qw(experimental::signatures);

Perl 11 is the proposed reunification of Perl 5 and Perl 6.  It will
probably run faster than Perl 5 when completed.  It hasn't been released
yet.  See https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/interviews/william-braswell/
for more information.

My favorite language that started in the Perl family is Raku.

Mark Senn, Senior Software Engineer,
Engineering Computer Network, Purdue University