You don't say what processor or OS you have, so it's very difficult to recommend a binary. Perl is easy and fast to build from source, but you need the tools for that; a C compiler, make, and a yacc-alike.
I'd recommend 5.8+, particularly if unicode has any importance to you. Whichever version you choose, you should get the most recent patch level - 5.6.3 or 5.8.4, I think. 5.6.0 has some serious bugs which were quickly fixed in 5.6.1.
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Sorry...I'm using a Windows 2000 machine. And unicode has no importance to us in the foreseeable future.
If we were to use 5.8.4, for example, would we have to modify scripts that were written to run with 5.6?
Thanks again
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Most people seem more or less happy with the ActiveState binary distributions for win32. Cygwin is another, and it has the advantage of a C compiler, a unix-alike shell, and make. Learning to use cygwin is a significant commitment.
Most scripts written for 5.6 work fine in 5.8. If you used nothing marked 'deprecated', the worst you will see is warning of newly deprecated misfeatures. The perldelta docs will tell you what has changed.
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For Windows, the best thing to do is to download the version maintained by ActiveState. Go here: http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/
and click the "download" button on the upper left hand corner. | [reply] |
Great, thank you both! I'm going to download it now, test it and let you know.
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What platform are you using? If you are using the Windows platform the easiest way to upgrade is to use Activestate's distribution. It is easy to install, and the package manager is simple and easy to understand. They even have a web based visual version. See www.activestate.com
If you are on a NIX flavor, I am a little less knowledgable, but you probably already have perl and can just use CPAN. I personally use Gentoo Linux, and it is simple to just emerge dev-lang/perl and voila you have the latest version of perl.
Hope this helps you.
Ketema | [reply] |