mifflin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

My Unix SA finally upgraded Perl on our Sun boxes. We have gone from 5.005_03 to 5.8. Where can I find a list of all the new and cool things that are now available to me?

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Re: Perl upgraded from 5.005_03 -> 5.8
by broquaint (Abbot) on May 14, 2003 at 21:36 UTC
    Where can I find a list of all the new and cool things that are now available to me?
    You should be able to find pretty much all of the changes in perl561delta and perldelta for 5.8.0.
    HTH

    _________
    broquaint

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Re: Perl upgraded from 5.005_03 -> 5.8
by graff (Chancellor) on May 15, 2003 at 00:12 UTC
    I probably have a biased perspective, but I think the most dramatic differences in 5.8 relative to 5.005 involve the use of utf8 as the internal string representation, and all the amazing regex magic that this enables, plus the extensive encoding/decoding support for dealing with non-unicode character sets -- and (fireworks, please) Perl::IO.

    Look at the perluniintro, perlunicode, Encode and Perl::IO docs, and notice how a lot of the perlfunc and perlre content has been enhanced to take these new facilities into account (esp. "open" and "binmode").

    (I made the same leap -- also coming mostly from a solaris background -- from 5.5 to 5.8, so I don't really know what I missed in 5.6, or how much many of 5.8's extras were previewed there. That doesn't bother me; 5.8 is all I need now.)

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