Misplaced Pages

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75-429: Perl is a high-level , general-purpose , interpreted , dynamic programming language . Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl originally

150-467: A switch statement (called "given"/"when"), regular expressions updates, and the smart match operator (~~). Around this same time, development began in earnest on another implementation of Perl 6 known as Rakudo Perl, developed in tandem with the Parrot virtual machine . As of November 2009, Rakudo Perl has had regular monthly releases and now is the most complete implementation of Perl 6. A major change in

225-637: A "How to get started" section to the Third Edition introduction, and Lorinda Cherry provided the "Purple Card" pocket reference for the Sixth and Seventh Editions. Versions of the software were named after the revision of the manual; the seventh edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual , for example, came with the 7th Edition or Version 7 of Unix. For the Fourth Edition the man pages were formatted using

300-476: A base object from which all classes were automatically derived and the ability to require versions of modules. Another significant development was the inclusion of the CGI.pm module, which contributed to Perl's popularity as a CGI scripting language . Perl 5.004 added support for Microsoft Windows , Plan 9 , QNX , and AmigaOS . Perl 5.005 was released on July 22, 1998. This release included several enhancements to

375-498: A case for a major new language initiative. This led to a decision to begin work on a redesign of the language, to be called Perl 6. Proposals for new language features were solicited from the Perl community at large, which submitted more than 300 RFCs . Wall spent the next few years digesting the RFCs and synthesizing them into a coherent framework for Perl 6. He presented his design for Perl 6 in

450-402: A different order: POSIX APIs are present in both sections 2 and 3, where section 2 contains APIs that are implemented as system calls and section 3 contains APIs that are implemented as library routines. On some systems, additional sections may be included such as: Some sections are further subdivided by means of a suffix; for example, in some systems, section 3C is for C library calls, 3M

525-428: A focus on usability over optimal program efficiency. Unlike low-level assembly languages , high-level languages have few, if any, language elements that translate directly into a machine's native opcodes . Other features, such as string handling routines, object-oriented language features, and file input/output, may also be present. One thing to note about high-level programming languages is that these languages allow

600-399: A formatting program such as nroff with a macro and also a terminal pager program such as more or less to display its output on the users screen. Man pages are often referred to as an online form of software documentation, even though the man command does not require internet access. The environment variable MANPATH often specifies a list of directory paths to search for

675-453: A fully general lambda abstraction in a programming language for the first time. "High-level language" refers to the higher level of abstraction from machine language . Rather than dealing with registers, memory addresses, and call stacks, high-level languages deal with variables, arrays, objects , complex arithmetic or Boolean expressions , subroutines and functions, loops, threads , locks, and other abstract computer science concepts, with

750-592: A large collection of language primitives . Perl favors language constructs that are concise and natural for humans to write, even where they complicate the Perl interpreter. High-level programming language In computer science , a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer . In contrast to low-level programming languages , it may use natural language elements , be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management ), making

825-413: A man page into PostScript , PDF , and various other formats for viewing or printing. Some Unix systems have a package for the man2html command, which enables users to browse their man pages using an HTML browser. Systems with groff and man-db should use the higher-quality native HTML output ( man --html ) instead. The GNU Emacs program WoMan (from "WithOut man") allows to browse man pages from

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900-468: A new I/O implementation, added a new thread implementation, improved numeric accuracy, and added several new modules. As of 2013, this version was still the most popular Perl version and was used by Red Hat Linux 5, SUSE Linux 10, Solaris 10, HP-UX 11.31, and AIX 5. In 2004, work began on the "Synopses" – documents that originally summarized the Apocalypses, but which became the specification for

975-420: A program's lack of man pages as a sign of low quality or incompleteness. Indeed, some projects, such as Debian , go out of their way to write man pages for programs lacking one. The modern descendants of 4.4BSD also distribute man pages as one of the primary forms of system documentation (having replaced the old -man macros with the newer -mdoc ). There was a hidden Easter egg in the man-db version of

1050-560: A rand() function using a consistent random number generator. Some observers credit the release of Perl 5.10 with the start of the Modern Perl movement. In particular, this phrase describes a style of development that embraces the use of the CPAN, takes advantage of recent developments in the language, and is rigorous about creating high quality code. While the book Modern Perl may be the most visible standard-bearer of this idea, other groups such as

1125-482: A separate mdoc(7) converter. Man pages are usually written in English, but translations into other languages may be available on the system. The GNU man-db and the mandoc man is known to search for localized manual pages under subdirectories. Few alternatives to man have enjoyed much popularity, with the possible exception of GNU Project's " info " system, an early and simple hypertext system. There

1200-565: A series of documents called "apocalypses" – numbered to correspond to chapters in Programming Perl . As of January 2011, the developing specification of Perl 6 was encapsulated in design documents called Synopses – numbered to correspond to Apocalypses. Thesis work by Bradley M. Kuhn , overseen by Wall, considered the possible use of the Java virtual machine as a runtime for Perl. Kuhn's thesis showed this approach to be problematic. In 2001, it

1275-623: A specific system architecture . Abstraction penalty is the cost that high-level programming techniques pay for being unable to optimize performance or use certain hardware because they don't take advantage of certain low-level architectural resources. High-level programming exhibits features like more generic data structures and operations, run-time interpretation, and intermediate code files; which often result in execution of far more operations than necessary, higher memory consumption, and larger binary program size. For this reason, code which needs to run particularly quickly and efficiently may require

1350-514: Is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible". The design of Perl can be understood as a response to three broad trends in the computer industry: falling hardware costs, rising labor costs, and improvements in compiler technology. Many earlier computer languages, such as Fortran and C, aimed to make efficient use of expensive computer hardware. In contrast, Perl was designed so that computer programmers could write programs more quickly and easily. Perl has many features that ease

1425-519: Is a visual pun on pearl onion . Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while employed as a programmer at Unisys ; he released version 1.0 on December 18, 1987. Wall based early Perl on some methods existing languages used for text manipulation. Perl 2, released in June 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in October 1989, added support for binary data streams. Originally,

1500-571: Is also a third-party effort known as TLDR pages ( tldr ) that provides simple examples for common use cases, similar to a cheatsheet . In addition, some Unix GUI applications (particularly those built using the GNOME and KDE development environments) now provide end-user documentation in HTML and include embedded HTML viewers such as yelp for reading the help within the application. An HTML system in Emacs

1575-434: Is for the math library, and so on. A consequence of this is that section 8 (system administration commands) is sometimes relegated to the 1M subsection of the main commands section. Some subsection suffixes have a general meaning across sections: (Section 3 tends to be the exception with the many suffixes for different languages.) Some versions of man cache the formatted versions of the last several pages viewed. One form

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1650-498: Is inherently at a slightly higher level than the microcode or micro-operations used internally in many processors. There are three general modes of execution for modern high-level languages: Note that languages are not strictly interpreted languages or compiled languages. Rather, implementations of language behavior use interpreting or compiling. For example, ALGOL 60 and Fortran have both been interpreted (even though they were more typically compiled). Similarly, Java shows

1725-402: Is not an issue as texinfo is the main documentation system. A number of tools, including pandoc , ronn, and md2man support conversion from Markdown to manual pages. All these tools emit the man format, as Markdown is not expressive enough to match the semantic content of mdoc . DocBook has an inbuilt man(7) converter – of appalling quality, according to mandoc's author who wrote

1800-491: Is not yet implemented), implicit strictures, full Y2038 compliance, regex conversion overloading, DTrace support, and Unicode 5.2. On May 14, 2011, Perl 5.14 was released with JSON support built-in. On May 20, 2012, Perl 5.16 was released. Notable new features include the ability to specify a given version of Perl that one wishes to emulate, allowing users to upgrade their version of Perl, but still run old scripts that would normally be incompatible. Perl 5.16 also updates

1875-471: Is possible for a high-level language to be directly implemented by a computer – the computer directly executes the HLL code. This is known as a high-level language computer architecture – the computer architecture itself is designed to be targeted by a specific high-level language. The Burroughs large systems were target machines for ALGOL 60 , for example. Man page By default, man typically uses

1950-517: Is the cat page , simply piped to the pager for display. All man pages follow a common layout that is optimized for presentation on a simple ASCII text display, possibly without any form of highlighting or font control. Sections present may include: Other sections may be present, but these are not well standardized across man pages. Common examples include: OPTIONS, EXIT STATUS, RETURN VALUE, ENVIRONMENT, BUGS, FILES, AUTHOR, REPORTING BUGS, HISTORY and COPYRIGHT. Manual pages can be written either in

2025-420: Is usually moot because man pages are viewed in the terminal (TTY) instead of laid out on paper. As a result, the "small font" macro is seldom used. On the other hand, bold and italic text is supported by the terminal via ECMA-48 , and groff's grotty does emit them as requested when it detects a supporting terminal. The BSD mandoc however only supports bold and underlined (as a replacement for italics) text via

2100-453: The BSD community saw a new open source mdoc.su service launched, which unified and shortened access to the man.cgi scripts of the major modern BSD projects through a unique nginx -based deterministic URL shortening service for the *BSD man pages. For Linux, a man7.org service has been set up to serve manuals specific to the system. A ManKier service provides a wider selection, and integrates

2175-426: The C programming language, and tools such as Yacc ), and others more detailed descriptions of operating system features. The printed version of the manual initially fit into a single binder, but as of PWB/UNIX and the 7th Edition of Research Unix , it was split into two volumes with the printed man pages forming Volume 1. Later versions of the documentation imitated the first man pages' terseness. Ritchie added

2250-520: The C language , and similar languages, were most often considered "high-level", as it supported concepts such as expression evaluation, parameterised recursive functions, and data types and structures, while assembly language was considered "low-level". Today, many programmers might refer to C as low-level, as it lacks a large runtime-system (no garbage collection, etc.), basically supports only scalar operations, and provides direct memory addressing; it therefore, readily blends with assembly language and

2325-532: The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules ; as of December 2022, it carries over 211,850 modules in 43,865 distributions, written by more than 14,324 authors, and is mirrored worldwide at more than 245 locations. Perl 5.004 was released on May 15, 1997, and included, among other things, the UNIVERSAL package, giving Perl

Perl - Misplaced Pages Continue

2400-589: The Libera Chat #raku IRC channel. Many functional programming influences were absorbed by the Perl 6 design team. In 2012, Perl 6 development was centered primarily on two compilers: In 2013, MoarVM ("Metamodel On A Runtime"), a C language-based virtual machine designed primarily for Rakudo was announced. In October 2019, Perl 6 was renamed to Raku. As of 2017 only the Rakudo implementation and MoarVM are under active development, and other virtual machines, such as

2475-465: The regex engine, new hooks into the backend through the B::* modules, the qr// regex quote operator, a large selection of other new core modules, and added support for several more operating systems, including BeOS . Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000. Major changes included 64-bit support, Unicode string representation, support for files over 2 GiB, and the "our" keyword. When developing Perl 5.6,

2550-420: The system architecture which they were written for without major revision. This is the engineering 'trade-off' for the 'Abstraction Penalty'. Examples of high-level programming languages in active use today include Python , JavaScript , Visual Basic , Delphi , Perl , PHP , ECMAScript , Ruby , C# , Java and many others. The terms high-level and low-level are inherently relative. Some decades ago,

2625-517: The troff typesetting package and its set of -man macros (which were completely revised between the Sixth and Seventh Editions of the Manual , but have since not drastically changed). At the time, the availability of online documentation through the manual page system was regarded as a great advance. To this day, virtually every Unix command line application comes with a man page, and many Unix users perceive

2700-453: The "Apocalypses" for Perl 6, a series of documents meant to summarize the change requests and present the design of the next generation of Perl. They were presented as a digest of the RFCs, rather than a formal document. At this time, Perl 6 existed only as a description of a language. Perl 5.8 was first released on July 18, 2002, and further 5.X versions have been released approximately yearly since then. Perl 5.8 improved Unicode support, added

2775-431: The "a" from the name. The name is occasionally expanded as a backronym : Practical Extraction and Report Language and Wall's own Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister , which is in the manual page for perl. Programming Perl , published by O'Reilly Media , features a picture of a dromedary camel on the cover and is commonly called the "Camel Book". This image has become an unofficial symbol of Perl. O'Reilly owns

2850-658: The Enlightened Perl Organization have taken up the cause. In late 2012 and 2013, several projects for alternative implementations for Perl 5 started: Perl5 in Perl6 by the Rakudo Perl team, moe by Stevan Little and friends, p2 by the Perl11 team under Reini Urban, gperl by goccy, and rperl, a Kickstarter project led by Will Braswell and affiliated with the Perl11 project. At the 2000 Perl Conference , Jon Orwant made

2925-657: The Java Virtual Machine and JavaScript , are supported. In June 2020, Perl 7 was announced as the successor to Perl 5. Perl 7 was to initially be based on Perl 5.32 with a release expected in first half of 2021, and release candidates sooner. This plan was revised in May 2021, without any release timeframe or version of Perl 5 for use as a baseline specified. When Perl 7 would be released, Perl 5 would have gone into long term maintenance. Supported Perl 5 versions however would continue to get important security and bug fixes. Perl 7

3000-491: The Perl 6 language. In February 2005, Audrey Tang began work on Pugs , a Perl 6 interpreter written in Haskell . This was the first concerted effort toward making Perl 6 a reality. This effort stalled in 2006. The Perl On New Internal Engine (PONIE) project existed from 2003 until 2006. It was to be a bridge between Perl 5 and 6, and an effort to rewrite the Perl 5 interpreter to run on the Perl 6 Parrot virtual machine . The goal

3075-615: The Perl Steering Committee canceled it to avoid issues with backward compatibility for scripts that were not written to the pragmas and modules that would become the default in Perl 7. Perl 7 will only come out when the developers add enough features to warrant a major release upgrade. According to Wall, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it," commonly known as TMTOWTDI, (pronounced Tim Toady ). As proponents of this motto argue, this philosophy makes it easy to write concise statements. The second slogan

Perl - Misplaced Pages Continue

3150-506: The TLDR pages too. To read a manual page for a Unix command, a user can type: Pages are traditionally referred to using the notation "name(section)": for example, ftp(1) . The section refers to different ways the topic might be referenced - for example, as a system call, or a shell (command line) command or package, or a package's configuration file, or as a coding construct / header. The same page name may appear in more than one section of

3225-731: The arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools . Perl is a highly expressive programming language: source code for a given algorithm can be short and highly compressible. Perl gained widespread popularity in the mid-1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its powerful regular expression and string parsing abilities. In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for system administration , network programming , finance, bioinformatics , and other applications, such as for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power. In 1998, it

3300-408: The core to support Unicode 6.1. On May 18, 2013, Perl 5.18 was released. Notable new features include the new dtrace hooks, lexical subs, more CORE:: subs, overhaul of the hash for security reasons, support for Unicode 6.2. On May 27, 2014, Perl 5.20 was released. Notable new features include subroutine signatures, hash slices/new slice syntax, postfix dereferencing (experimental), Unicode 6.3, and

3375-493: The decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects; after 5.005_63, the next version became 5.5.640, with plans for development versions to have odd numbers and stable versions to have even numbers. In 2000, Wall put forth a call for suggestions for a new version of Perl from the community. The process resulted in 361 RFC ( Request for Comments ) documents that were to be used in guiding development of Perl 6. In 2001, work began on

3450-463: The development process of Perl 5 occurred with Perl 5.11; the development community has switched to a monthly release cycle of development releases, with a yearly schedule of stable releases. By that plan, bugfix point releases will follow the stable releases every three months. On April 12, 2010, Perl 5.12.0 was released. Notable core enhancements include new package NAME VERSION syntax, the yada yada operator (intended to mark placeholder code that

3525-473: The difficulty of trying to apply these labels to languages, rather than to implementations; Java is compiled to bytecode which is then executed by either interpreting (in a Java virtual machine (JVM)) or compiling (typically with a just-in-time compiler such as HotSpot , again in a JVM). Moreover, compiling, transcompiling, and interpreting is not strictly limited to only a description of the compiler artifact (binary executable or IL assembly). Alternatively, it

3600-499: The editor. In 2010, OpenBSD deprecated troff for formatting man pages in favour of mandoc , a specialised compiler/formatter for man pages with native support for output in PostScript , HTML , XHTML , and the terminal. It is meant to only support a subset of troff used in manual pages, specifically those using mdoc macros. Quite a few websites offer online access to manual pages from various Unix-like systems. In February 2013,

3675-484: The first two years of the history of Unix , no documentation existed. The Unix Programmer's Manual was first published on November 3, 1971. The first actual man pages were written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at the insistence of their manager Doug McIlroy in 1971. Aside from the man pages, the Programmer's Manual also accumulated a set of short papers, some of them tutorials (e.g. for general Unix usage,

3750-478: The goal of aggregating the most popular constructs with new or improved features. An example of this is Scala which maintains backward compatibility with Java , meaning that programs and libraries written in Java will continue to be usable even if a programming shop switches to Scala; this makes the transition easier and the lifespan of such high-level coding indefinite. In contrast, low-level programs rarely survive beyond

3825-605: The higher abstraction may allow for more powerful techniques providing better overall results than their low-level counterparts in particular settings. High-level languages are designed independent of a specific computing system architecture . This facilitates executing a program written in such a language on any computing system with compatible support for the Interpreted or JIT program. High-level languages can be improved as their designers develop improvements. In other cases, new high-level languages evolve from one or more others with

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3900-502: The image as a trademark but licenses it for non-commercial use, requiring only an acknowledgement and a link to www.perl.com. Licensing for commercial use is decided on a case-by-case basis. O'Reilly also provides "Programming Republic of Perl" logos for non-commercial sites and "Powered by Perl" buttons for any site that uses Perl. The Perl Foundation owns an alternative symbol, an onion, which it licenses to its subsidiaries, Perl Mongers , PerlMonks , Perl.org, and others. The symbol

3975-534: The machine level of CPUs and microcontrollers . Also, in the introduction chapter of The C Programming Language (second edition) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie , C is described as "not a very high level" language. Assembly language may itself be regarded as a higher level (but often still one-to-one if used without macros ) representation of machine code , as it supports concepts such as constants and (limited) expressions, sometimes even variables, procedures, and data structures . Machine code , in turn,

4050-487: The man command that would cause the command to return "gimme gimme gimme" when run at 00:30 (a reference to the ABBA song Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) . It was introduced in 2011 but first restricted and then removed in 2017 after finally being found. The default format of man pages is troff , with either the macro package man (appearance oriented) or mdoc (semantic oriented). This makes it possible to typeset

4125-402: The manual, such as when the names of system calls , user commands , or macro packages coincide. Examples are man(1) and man(7) , or exit(2) and exit(3) . The syntax for accessing the non-default manual section varies between different man implementations. On Solaris and illumos, for example, the syntax for reading printf(3C) is: On Linux and BSD derivatives

4200-470: The name of the authors. This information can be used to implement a semantic search for manuals by programs such as mandoc . Although it also includes directives to directly control the styling, it is expected that the specialized macros will cover most of the use-cases. Both the mandoc and the groff projects consider mdoc the preferred format for new documents. Although man pages are, to troff, text laid out using 10-point Roman type , this distinction

4275-445: The old man macros, the new doc macros, or a combination of both ( mandoc ). The man macro set provides minimal rich text functions, with directives for the title line, section headers, (bold, small or italic) fonts, paragraphs and adding/reducing indentation. The newer mdoc language is more semantic in nature, and contains specialized macros for most standard sections such as program name, synopsis, function names, and

4350-409: The only documentation for Perl was a single lengthy man page . In 1991, Programming Perl , known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language but to identify the version that was well documented by the book. Perl 4

4425-419: The process of developing a program simpler and more understandable than when using a lower-level language. The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is. In the 1960s, a high-level programming language using a compiler was commonly called an autocode . Examples of autocodes are COBOL and Fortran . The first high-level programming language designed for computers

4500-620: The programmer to be detached and separated from the machine. That is, unlike low-level languages like assembly or machine language, high-level programming can amplify the programmer's instructions and trigger a lot of data movements in the background without their knowledge. The responsibility and power of executing instructions have been handed over to the machine from the programmer. High-level languages intend to provide features that standardize common tasks, permit rich debugging, and maintain architectural agnosticism; while low-level languages often produce more efficient code through optimization for

4575-460: The same invocation would be: which searches for printf in section 3 of the man pages. The actual file name likely includes the section. Continuing this example, printf.3.gz would be a compressed manual page file in section 3 for printf . The manual is generally split into eight numbered sections. Most systems today (e.g. BSD , macOS , Linux , and Solaris 11.4) inherit the numbering scheme used by Research Unix . While System V uses

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4650-646: The task of the programmer at the expense of greater CPU and memory requirements. These include automatic memory management; dynamic typing ; strings, lists, and hashes; regular expressions; introspection ; and an eval() function. Perl follows the theory of "no built-in limits", an idea similar to the Zero One Infinity rule. Wall was trained as a linguist, and the design of Perl is very much informed by linguistic principles. Examples include Huffman coding (common constructions should be short), good end-weighting (the important information should come first), and

4725-412: The typewriter backspace-then-overstrike sequence, which needs to be translated into ECMA-48 by less . Some tools have been used to convert documents in a less contrived format to manual pages. Examples include GNU's help2man , which takes a --help output and some additional content to generate a manual page. The manual would be barely more useful than the said output, but for GNU programs this

4800-549: The use of a lower-level language, even if a higher-level language would make the coding easier. In many cases, critical portions of a program mostly in a high-level language can be hand-coded in assembly language , leading to a much faster, more efficient, or simply reliably functioning optimised program . However, with the growing complexity of modern microprocessor architectures, well-designed compilers for high-level languages frequently produce code comparable in efficiency to what most low-level programmers can produce by hand, and

4875-439: The various documentation pages. Manual pages date back to the times when printed documentation was the norm. Before Unix (e.g., GCOS ), documentation was printed pages, available on the premises to users (staff, students...), organized into steel binders, locked together in one monolithic steel reading rack, bolted to a table or counter, with pages organized for modular information updates, replacement, errata, and addenda. In

4950-678: Was Plankalkül , created by Konrad Zuse . However, it was not implemented in his time, and his original contributions were largely isolated from other developments due to World War II , aside from the language's influence on the "Superplan" language by Heinz Rutishauser and also to some degree ALGOL . The first significantly widespread high-level language was Fortran , a machine-independent development of IBM's earlier Autocode systems. The ALGOL family, with ALGOL 58 defined in 1958 and ALGOL 60 defined in 1960 by committees of European and American computer scientists, introduced recursion as well as nested functions under lexical scope . ALGOL 60

5025-664: Was also referred to as the " duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance. Perl was originally named "Pearl". Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations. It is also a Christian reference to the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew. However, Wall discovered the existing PEARL language before Perl's official release and dropped

5100-451: Was also the first language with a clear distinction between value and name-parameters and their corresponding semantics . ALGOL also introduced several structured programming concepts, such as the while-do and if-then-else constructs and its syntax was the first to be described in formal notation – Backus–Naur form (BNF). During roughly the same period, COBOL introduced records (also called structs) and Lisp introduced

5175-460: Was announced on 24 June 2020 at "The Perl Conference in the Cloud" as the successor to Perl 5. Based on Perl 5.32, Perl 7 was planned to be backward compatible with modern Perl 5 code; Perl 5 code, without boilerplate (pragma) header needs adding use compat::perl5; to stay compatible, but modern code can drop some of the boilerplate. The plan to go to Perl 7 brought up more discussion, however, and

5250-504: Was decided that Perl 6 would run on a cross-language virtual machine called Parrot . In 2005, Audrey Tang created the Pugs project, an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell . This acted as, and continues to act as, a test platform for the Perl 6 language (separate from the development of the actual implementation), allowing the language designers to explore. The Pugs project spawned an active Perl/Haskell cross-language community centered around

5325-544: Was not capitalized and the name was changed to being capitalized by the time Perl 4 was released. The latest release is Perl 5, first released in 1994. From 2000 to October 2019 a sixth version of Perl was in development; the sixth version's name was changed to Raku . Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams which liberally borrow ideas from each other. Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C , sh , AWK , and sed . It provides text processing facilities without

5400-490: Was released in March 1991. Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases , culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993, whereupon Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5. Perl 5.000

5475-417: Was released on March 13, 1995. Perl 5.002 was released on February 29, 1996 with the new prototypes feature. This allowed module authors to make subroutines that behaved like Perl builtins . Perl 5.003 was released June 25, 1996, as a security release. One of the most important events in Perl 5 history took place outside of the language proper and was a consequence of its module support. On October 26, 1995,

5550-502: Was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter , and it added many new features to the language, including objects , references , lexical (my) variables , and modules . Importantly, modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter. This allowed the core interpreter to stabilize, even as it enabled ordinary Perl programmers to add new language features. Perl 5 has been in active development since then. Perl 5.001

5625-464: Was to ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code at thousands of companies around the world. The PONIE project ended in 2006 and is no longer being actively developed. Some of the improvements made to the Perl 5 interpreter as part of PONIE were folded into that project. On December 18, 2007, the 20th anniversary of Perl 1.0, Perl 5.10.0 was released. Perl 5.10.0 included notable new features, which brought it closer to Perl 6. These included

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