Other than just way much better and more efficient and reliable Unicode support in the most recent version, also the supported Unicode standard was followed:

 Perl      Unicode
 release   version
 --------- -------
  v5.8.8     4.1.0
  v5.8.9     5.1.0
  v5.10.0    5.0.0
  v5.10.1    5.1.0
  v5.12.0    5.2.0
  v5.12.1    5.2.0
  v5.12.2    5.2.0
  v5.12.3    5.2.0
  v5.12.4    5.2.0
  v5.14.0    6.0.0
  v5.14.1    6.0.0

[download]

Improvements in 5.14 made it virtually impossible to backport those improvements to 5.12 and older: you cannot take a single (Unicode) module from 5.14's CORE distribution and "upgrade" Unicode to 6.0.0 in 5.12.x


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

In reply to Re^5: Arguements for upgrading from Perl 5.8 by Tux
in thread Arguements for upgrading from Perl 5.8 by dlarochelle

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