Ten years after developers began working on Perl 6, the release still isn’t ready. In the meantime, a group has released some new enhancements to Perl 5.
Key changes to version 5.12 include a pluggable keywords feature, which allows extension modules to add new keywords to the language, and a date fix, which allows Perl to handle dates beyond 2038 (just in case it takes a REALLY long time to finish Perl 6).
According to release manager Jesse Vincent said, “Perl 5.12.0 represents approximately two years of development since version 5.10.0 and contains over 750,000 lines of changes across over 3,000 files from over 200 authors and committers. Based on extensive testing over the past three months, we believe that Perl 5.12.0 is ready for production deployments.”
