The holiday season tends to find me writing Perl books. This time it’s the next edition of Learning Perl, last published for Perl v5.14. This time we’re targeting v5.24, and there are lots of exciting new features that we want to tell the new Perl users.
We can’t make promises at the beginning of the book, but here’s the rough idea so far:
- Goodbye, smart match. We gave it a chapter, but now it’s experimental .
- But, subroutine signatures! People are going to love those.
- So, an appendix on experimental features. Or maybe a chapter. Mostly on how to enable them.
- the
/rmodifier fors/// - Removing most of the stuff that Perl has discarded without abandoning people using older versions.
- Key-value slices, and slices, and
splice. - The double diamond operator
<<>>. - New Unicode regex stuff
I’ve done this too many times to promise a release date either, but late summer wouldn’t be a bad guess. When I get the current version into something editable and fixed up, I’ll start putting out review versions somehow. I don’t know how that will work yet.
Would there be Learning Perl 6 anytime soon? I have not seen you or chromatic write/blog anything on perl 6. What is your take on Perl 6?
We’re starting to think about Learning Perl 6.
As a reader, I would rather have a diff version of the book with what has changed. If necessary, I might do the diff myself. It would save me a lot of reading.
About the new features, how many of them will be there in the long run? The smart match operator’s situation has been unfortunate. There are few other languages that change this way.
In the front of the book, as well as on this website, we’ll write about what is different. But, you could read the various perldelta documentation for each major version to figure out the changes in the language. I also write about the interesting new features in The Effective Perler.