There is no Perl 6 looming any more, so the only thing “Perl” now refers to is Perl 5. That has also forever been the language that people mean

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2024-11-21 22:00:04

There is no Perl 6 looming any more, so the only thing “Perl” now refers to is Perl 5. That has also forever been the language that people mean when they say just “Perl” rather than specifying “Perl 5”. There were earlier versions of Perl, but they are ancient history. All the history that created a distinction between “Perl” and “Perl 5” has fallen away while nobody was paying conscious attention.

The interpreter already identifies itself as “perl 5, version 40, subversion 0”. We should just drop the 5 and make it official.

In its early years Perl went through versions rapidly. 1.0 came out in December 1987, less than 7 years earlier. Up to Perl 4 (itself just a release of Perl 3 re-badged for the convenience of the first Camel book), Perl had been a different, distinct, earlier language, in the sense that code written in it would be structured differently. This early Perl was not well suited to programming in the large.

Perl 5 changed that. It expanded the power of the language drastically and enabled the creation of CPAN. In so doing it also broke compatibility in some small ways, famously breaking some older Perl poetry.