Perl Advent Calendar 2024
December is not the only season for gifts. Every year, sometime around the end of May, the Perl 5 Porters gift us with a new version of Perl. Or is it perl?
"Perl" is the name of the language. Only the "P" is capitalized. The name of the interpreter (the program which runs the Perl script) is "perl" with a lowercase "p".
You can also run this (the interpreter version is available in two different formats, either as a floating-point number, or a v-string):
New versions of Perl come with bug fixes, speed improvements, deprecations and also new features. It's still the same old Perl, that will continue to run your existing code. Perl version upgrades are so simple and drama-less they're almost boring. (The Perl 5 Porters support the two most recent stable releases of Perl, which should be reason enough to upgrade your binary.)
Long story short, Perl is extremely backwards compatible. This means that sensibly-written code from 20 years ago should still run under the next release of Perl. In other words, any perl interpreter should understand code written against older versions of the Perl language just fine. As I have personally experimented, this actually even applies to scripts targetting version 4 of the language!
