My talk on Perl 5.10 at the London Perl Workshop 2009.

1. Perl .
Léon Brocard
London Perl Workshop

2. Me
Léon Brocard
French, live in London
Like food
Like the colour orange
Founded Amsterdam.pm, Bath.pm, Croydon.pm
Now leader of London.pm
Started YAPC::Europe
perl hacker

3. Releases
- - Perl
- - Perl
- - Perl
- - Perl
- - Perl
...
Perl is years old
Perl is years old

4. Perl releases
- - Perl
- - Perl .
- - Perl .
- - Perl .
- - Perl .
- - Perl .
- - Perl . .
- - Perl . .
- - Perl . .
- - Perl . .

5. Perl . New features

6. Perl . New feature
use feature ’say’;
use feature ’state’;
use feature ’switch’;
...
use feature ’:5.10’;

7. Say operator
Just like print, but implicitly appends a newline
use feature ’say’;
say ’Hello!’;

8. State operator
Persistent private variables
use feature ’state’;
sub gimme_another { state $x; return ++$x }

9. Smart match operator
$a ~~ /foo/
@a ~~ /foo/
$a ~~ @b
$a ~~ %b
...

10. Switch and smart match operator
use feature ’switch’;
given ($foo) {
when (/^abc/) { $abc = 1; }
when (/^def/) { $def = 1; }
when (/^xyz/) { $xyz = 1; }
default { $nothing = 1; }
}

11. Switch and smart match operator
use feature ":5.10";
given($foo) {
when (undef) { say ’$foo is undefined’; }
when ("foo") {
say ’$foo is the string "foo"’;
}
when ([1,3,5,7,9]) {
say ’$foo is an odd digit’;
continue; # Fall through
}
when ($_ < 100) { say ’< 100’; }
when (&complicated_check) {
say ’a complicated check for $foo is true’;
}
default { die ’Eeeeek’; }
}

12. De ned-or operator
$a // $b
defined $a ? $a : $b
$c //= $d;
$c = $d unless defined $c;

13. Regular expressions
Recursive patterns
Named capture bu ers
Possessive quanti ers
Backtracking control verbs
Relative backreferences
Vertical and horizontal whitespace, and linebreak

14. Named capture bu ers
use feature ’say’;
my $time = ’Time: 01:02:03’;
if ($time =~ /Time:s(d+):(d+):(d+)/) {
say "$1 / $2 / $3";
}
if ($time =~ /Time:s(?<hours>d+):
(?<minutes>d+):(?<seconds>d+)/x) {
say "$+{hours} / $+{minutes} / $+{seconds}";
}

15. New modules
Archive::Extract, Archive::Tar,
Compress::Zlib, CPANPLUS, Digest::SHA,
encoding::warnings, ExtUtils::CBuilder,
ExtUtils::ParseXS, File::Fetch,
Hash::Util::FieldHash, IO::Zlib, IPC::Cmd,
Locale::Maketext::Simple, Log::Message,
Log::Message::Simple, Math::BigInt::FastCalc,
Module::Build, Module::CoreList, Module::Load,
Module::Load::Conditional, Module::Loaded,
Module::Pluggable, Object::Accessor,
Package::Constants, Params::Check,
Pod::Escapes, Pod::Simple, Term::UI,
Time::Piece, Win32API::File.

16. New documentation
perlpragma — How to write a user pragma
perlglossary — Perl Glossary
perlreguts — Regular expression engine internals
perlreapi — Regular expression plugin interface
perlunitut — Perl Unicode Tutorial
perlunifaq — Perl Unicode FAQ
perlcommunity — Overview of the Perl community
CORE — Pseudo-namespace for Perl’s core routines

17. Performance enhancements
In-place sorting
Lexical array access
XS-assisted SWASHGET
Constant subroutines
PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV
Weak references are cheaper
sort() enhancements
Memory optimisations
UTF- cache optimisation
Sloppy stat on Windows
Regular expressions optimisations

18. Deprecations
Pseudo-hashes have been removed
Removal of the bytecode compiler and of perlcc
Removal of the JPL

19. Other
Lexical $_, _ prototype, UNITCHECK blocks, mro pragma,
readpipe() is now overridable, default argument for
readline(), UNIVERSAL::DOES(), formats, byte-order
modi ers for pack() and unpack(), no VERSION,
chdir, chmod, chown on lehandles, OS groups, recursive
sort subs, exceptions in constant folding, source lters in @INC,
new internal variables, UCD . . , Miscellaneous Attribute
Decoration, con guration improvements, compilation
improvements, relocatable installations, nicer internals
bison-based parser . . .

20. Perl . .
Many bug xes: @_
Optimised internals: isa()

21. New features, modules
DTrace support
autodie
Compress::Raw::Bzip
parent
Parse::CPAN::Meta

22. Platform updates
AIX
Cygwin
FreeBSD
Irix
Haiku
MirOS BSD
NetBSD
Stratus VOS
Symbian
Win
VMS

23. Feature tweaks
given/when
switch
smart match

24. Deprecations
Switch
suidperl

25. Internal changes
Moved from Perforce to Git
Changed directory structure

26. Better quotes
e J.R.R. Tolkien quotes at the head of each C source
le have been checked and proper citations added

27. More tests
Perl . , core tests
(+ , more for bundled libraries)
Perl . . , core tests
(+ , more for bundled libraries)
Perl . . , core tests
(+ , more for bundled libraries)

28. Recent past and future
Perl . . : Léon Brocard on Nov ,
Perl . . : Jesse Vincent on Dec ,
Perl . . : Ricardo Signes on Jan ,
Perl . . : Steve Hay on Feb ,
Perl . . : Ask Bjørn Hansen on Mar ,
...
Perl . : Jesse Vincent early

29. Use Perl . now!
Perl . is faster
Perl . uses less memory
Perl . has more features
Perl . is backwards compatible