Perl Foundation Announces Availability of Perl 5.8 HOLLAND, Michigan, date /Perl-Foundation.org/ v 0.3 The Perl Foundation today announced the release of Perl 5.8, the latest version of the successful Perl programming language. The new release is the culmination of over 2 years of work with input from some 700 developers. This release responds to the changing needs of its users and adds new functionality based on recent trends and developments in the computing world. Improvements include overhauled 64 bit support, enhanced Unicode awareness, better large number support, improved threading, regular expressions and IO and some 3000 uploads to the CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - the repository of Perl extensions). More details of these improvements are included in the fact sheet below. Perl, the Practical Extraction and Report Language (or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister to its friends) was first released by Larry Wall, a linguist and programmer, in 1987. Since then it has gone through many revisions, become the automation tool of choice for systems administrators round the world (who refer to it as the "Swiss Army Chainsaw" of languages) and is the language of choice for many people doing dynamic, data driven web pages. According to Security Space (http://www.securityspace.com) mod_perl, the enterprise class Perl web application module is deployed on over 16 million Apache web servers - a figure that appears to be climbing all the time. This of course does not factor in the many web application written in perl which don't choose to use mod_perl. These sites include Amazon.com, Wired, Slashdot.org Alexa and the Internet Way Back machine - a hundred terabyte archive which si five times largere than the the Library of Congress. "Perl makes our lives at Slashdot tremendously simpler than they would be otherwise. Whether it is running our internal ticket system with RT, or handling millions of page views a day with mod_perl, or writing tools for maintenance and administration, Perl is the glue that holds everything together." -- Chris Nandor, Senior Programmer, OSDN Furthermore Perl is used to run the critical systems of a hugely varied number of people and corporations. Examples include the Swedish pension system, updating seven centuries of Scottish Land rights, running the 300 plus gigabyte enterprise relationship management system of UniCredito Italiano bank, NBCi, managing the documents of the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, running the famous netcraft internet survey and protects the British government (and 7 million other messages) from email viruses via MessageLabs' SkyScan Anti Virus system "Perl is our language of choice here at MessageLabs for the majority our infrastructure components. It has definitely contributed to our success - being able to rapidly bring solutions to the table gives us a competitive edge. I think we would find it very difficult as a company to live without both Perl and the CPAN." -- Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs On top of everything else Perl is free both in monetary terms (the latest version is always available for download from http://www.perl.com) and because it is dually licensed under the GNU General Public Licence and the Artistic Licence as well as being backed by a huge community that voluntarily runs bug tracking, testing, support groups, free lectures, grass roots conferences and mailing lists aimed at complete beginners through to experts in obscure fields. GET QUOTES NOW! GET QUOTES NOW! GET QUOTES NOW! GET QUOTES NOW! GET QUOTES NOW! GET QUOTES NOW! GET QUOTES NOW! Jarkko Hietaniemi, release manager for Perl 5.8, said "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet." Larry Wall, inventor of Perl, said "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet." ----------------------------------- EDITOR'S NOTES: ----------------------------------- Larry Wall : (email:larry@wall.org) Larry Wall originally created Perl while a programmer at Unisys. He now works full time guiding the future development of the language as a researcher and developer at O'Reilly & Associates. Larry is known for his idiosyncratic and thought-provoking approach to programming, as well as for his groundbreaking contributions to the culture of free software programming. He is the principal author of the bestselling Programming Perl, known colloquially as "the Camel book." Larry received the Dr. Dobbs Journal Excellence in Programming Award in March 1993 and the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in October 1998. Jarkko Hietaniemi : (email:jhi@iki.fi) Jarkko Hietaniemi is the perl 5.8 release manager and was also the creator and Master Librarian of CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. After getting his MSc in Computer Science, specialising in the field of parallel computing. He now works for Nokia Research Center. The Perl Foundation : (http://www.perl-foundation.org/) The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Foundation is a unit of the Yet Another Society (YAS), a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization based in Holland, Michigan. ----------------------------------- FACT SHEET : ----------------------------------- Improvements in Perl 5.8 over v5.6 include: - Overhauled 64 bit support Although Perl has long supported 64 bit architectures, 5.8 now includes support for the very latest Intel platforms placing it at the cutting edge of language support. In contrast to Java, which runs on only 15 to 20 platforms (source: Sun Microsystems web page) Perl scripts run (in most cases, completely unmodified) on over 60 platforms. These include virtually every flavour of Unix, most versions of MacOS (it ships as standard as part of MacOSX), all versions of Windows, and many 'Big Iron' mainframes such as IBM z/OS. - Better, faster large-number support Perl has always been popular with the scientific community who enjoyed its easy but powerful data manipulation features and its wealth of free statistics, charting, graphing and output formatting add-ons. In response to feedback, large-number support has been extended - valuable in statistical, mathematical and cryptographic applicationsBugs in platforms have been worked round to ensure that Perl scripts run unmodified on as many platforms as possible. - Improved threading Perl provides multi-platform support for threading and forking, attempting to provide facilities in emulation which aren't available natively. This latest release makes it even easier to build multi-threaded applications in Perl on a wider range of operating systems. - Enhanced Unicode awareness Perl's reputation as the premier text manipulation language available is well deserved. With the formalisation of the Unicode standards for text representation (designed to represent text in a multitude of languages and character sets such as Kanji and Hebrew), Perl has extended its internal string and regular expression functions, providing an unrivalled ability for naturally dealing with internationalisation issues. - Regular expression extensions The regular expression package in Perl has always been one its strongest features and is much envied by other languages. The 1.4 version of the Java programming language has finally received facilities for coping with so called 'Perl Compatible Regular Expressions'. - Stackable IO The Perl platform agnostic IO (Input/Ouput) layer now allows various operations such as line ending handling, Unicode support and compression silently and transparently. - Testing Because this is the most complete release of Perl ever a team of volunteers have put in place mechanisms which thoroughly checked every aspect of Perl automatically every night on computers round the world. This testing, which is unglamourous but invaluable, has helped make Perl the stable, reliable, enterprise class language that it is. - Improvements to the CPAN One of Perl's major strengths is the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) which serves as a library for Perl extensions and utilities. The envy of many other languages it hosts an eclectic range of add-ons ranging from Complex number support, to graphics and chart drawers, a superb database abstraction interface and even a few comedy modules. Staggeringly, since the release of Perl 5.6 in March 2000 there have been more than 3000 uploads and changes to the repository which only serves to highlight how active the Perl community is. Recently an automated bug submission and tracking system has been added. ----------------------------------- References ----------------------------------- 16 Million installations http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200206/apachemods.html Airforce, Sweden, Scotland, Italy, Canada, NBCi http://perl.oreilly.com/news/success_stories.html Message Labs http://www.messagelabs.com/viewNewsPR.asp?id=100&cmd=PR