Perl 5.10 new features

Perl 5.10 introduced many new features that had built up over the years. Some of these we covered in the book, but we’ll cover some of those that we neglected. It might take us some time to get around to them all, but we’ll eventually make it. If you want to read about some sooner than others, let us know.

We covered these in the book:

  • given-when (Item 24: Use given-when to make a switch statement)
  • Use named captures (Item 31: Use named captures to label matches)
  • Use relative back references (Item 31: Use named captures to label matches)
  • Automatically add newlines with say (Item 2: Enable new Perl features when you need them)
  • Use lexical versions of $_ (Item 15: Use $_ for elegance and brevity)
  • Declare persistent variables with state (Item 49: Create closures to capture data)
  • Stacked filetests (Item 51: Don’t ignore the file test operators)

We’ll cover these on the website: