I have been using the Pronto mail client for a while and have always been confused why it's My Info panel reports my Perl version as 5.006. I thought it was just a weird bug in it's detection system but I noticed a couple other programs showed it the same way.
Then last night discovered the $] "magic" variable that they all use to get the perl version number. Sure enough this code prints 5.006: perl -e 'print "$]\n";' I am using Perl version 5.6.0, or at least all the documentation and `perl --version` tell me so.
My question is this: Why does $] report the version as 5.006 and `perl --version` report it as 5.6.0? Re: Re: Re: use _specific_ version describes this behavior, so I understand what it does, I just don't get why the decision to do this was made. It seems unnecissarily confusing, but I have no doubt St. Larry Wall had a reason for it.

sm3g
perl -e 's;;uoli;;$a=length;y;g-w;e-u;;;$a--;s;j;$a;;print"$_\n";'

In reply to Perl reporting versions 5.006 and 5.6.0 by sm3g

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.