Perl 5.42 Released - Still Going Strong
The last time we reported a new Perl release was in July 2024 with Perl v5.40.0 Shows That It Is Too Resilient To Die which started with:
Perl was always among the first languages supporting the newest versions of Unicode. As such v5.42 fully supports Unicode 16. That means 5,185 it has new characters which include new scripts and of course emojis. When we say support, we mean not only being able to see and write Unicode but also incorporate it in regular expressions.
declares that the portion of a program for the remainder of the lexical scope of this pragma is encoded either entirely in ASCII (for use source::encoding 'ascii') or if UTF-8 is allowed as well (for use source::encoding 'utf8').
It's useful when you have source files which use UTF8 for variable names or strings and have forgotten to use 'use utf8', something that can lead to encoding issues.
Moving on to the OOP front, classes defined using 'class' get proper setters under the new keyword :writer , which comes in addition to the pre-existing getters with :reader .
