Disclaimer: This post is entirely hypothetical. No decisions regarding Perl 5 have been made, or to my knowledge even been seriously discussed. It's entirely possible that Perl 5 will stay Perl 5 forever, or that the "5" will simply be dropped from the numbering (which would mean the next release of Perl is Perl 32), or something else happens.
Now that Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku, that theoretically leaves open the possibility of Perl 5 upgrading to Perl 7. I've thought about what features would warrant a major version number change, and that's what I'm writing about here. My list is probably not complete, and I might update it if I think of more.
First off, in my opinion, Perl should continue its tradition of being mostly backwards-compatible from release to release. If you want radical changes to the language, see Raku (and define your own slang) ;-)
I imagine that, similar to Perl 6, a Perl 7 binary might be called perl7, with files being called .p7 or .pl7, .pm7, etc. Using this interpreter or this file extension would be the same as a use v7; (and turn on the corresponding feature bundle, etc.).
Again, these are just hypothetical and unfinished thoughts of mine :-)
Update: I accidentally created this post too early, sorry for all the additional edits. I'm done for now and further significant edits will be marked as such.
In reply to If Perl 5 were to become Perl 7, what (backward-compatible) features would you want to see? by haukex
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