in reply to What is modern Perl?

For me, "modern Perl" refers to 5.8, with its use of utf8 internally for all character-based operations, its Encode module for inter-operating with virtually all non-Unicode character sets, and the PerlIO layers. The first two points make Perl a serious player (in fact, a tremendous asset) for dealing with human languages other than English, and PerlIO brings amazing simplicity to the scripting of some really powerful concepts.

When I write scripts using these resources, it's hard (or scary) to imagine how I would get my work done without them.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: What is modern Perl?
by ysth (Canon) on Dec 19, 2004 at 08:51 UTC
    Yikes, I hope you don't mean 5.8.0 by that. If you are using all of those features, you want at least 5.8.4 IMO.
[reply]
      No, of course not. I know there were some problems with 5.8.0 (I even discovered one or two myself), and I was deeply grateful when 5.8.1 came out; 5.8.5 is working great in production for me now.

      I was just using "5.8" as a cover term for "anything later than 5.7".

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom