I'm trying to come out of the stone ages (5.005003) and figure out what's new for the 5.8.x series. A quick google found a few sources: To summarize the majors:
  1. Good Unicode support
  2. PerlIO
  3. Improved threading
  4. Bug fixes!
  5. Safe signals
  6. Speed improvements
  7. Documentation
But I have to say that I don't seem to need many of these features. I program pretty much exclusively in english, don't use threads, and aren't (yet) doing anything cool IO. Seems to me that the primary benefit is just being able to use modern versions of CPAN releases (DBI, Class::DBI, WWW::Mechanize, etc). Right now at $work we're stuck using older releases until we find the time to upgrade the system perl. So I'm looking for the "killer app" of 5.8.x. What is so essential to you that you just can't live without it?

In reply to The latest & greatest in 5.8.x? by drewbie

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