I've been reading about the upcoming Itanium and AMD-64 chips. In them, the discussion has been that the OSes and some databases have been ported to handle 64-bit instruction sets, but that application developers have not.

I'm wondering

  1. Will Perl will be updated to handle 64-bit?
  2. How will that happen?
  3. How will that affect a Perl developer?
Ideally, you would recompile Perl to be 64-bit compatible, then run your programs without change. Or, will there be 64-bit pragmas? Is Perl5.x going to be the 32-bit standard and Perl6 the 64-bit?

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In reply to 64-bit Perl by dragonchild

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