I've been meaning to try Perl 5.10 for a while ... and I'm glad to say() that I finally have.

The things I was mostly looking forward to were state, the builtin switch statement, the // operator and say.

However, today I very happily discovered that Perl 5.10 eliminates my previously number one complaint about error messages.

A colleague asked me today whether I knew of a way to find which variable was undefined in a line containing a string composed of many variables.  On the off-chance that this was better handled in 5.10 (which I hadn't yet read about), I tried a sample program in Perl 5.10, and was pleasantly surprised to find that: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $a = 1;
my $b = 1;
my $c = 1;
my $d;
my $e = 1;
my $f = 1;
my $g = 1;
my $h = 1;

print "$a$b$c$d$e$f$g$h\n";

[download]

Run this with Perl 5.8.0 and you get: 

    
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at x.pl line
+ 14.
1111111

[download]

Whereas with Perl 5.10.0: 

    
Use of uninitialized value $d in concatenation (.) or string at x.pl l
+ine 14.
1111111

[download]

It's a minor textual difference, but a huge difference diagnostically!

I'm very happy to upgrade to Perl 5.10!

s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/

In reply to Re: Why should I use perl 5.10? by liverpole
in thread Why should I use perl 5.10? by saintmike

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.