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50-500: Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages . Formerly named Perl 6 , it was renamed in October 2019. Raku introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl was not a goal, though a compatibility mode is part of the specification. The design process for Raku began in 2000. In Perl 6, we decided it would be better to fix the language than fix

100-479: 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 the image as a trademark but licenses it for non-commercial use, requiring only an acknowledgement and

150-560: 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 the "a" from the name. The name is occasionally expanded as

200-469: 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

250-475: 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,

300-479: 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

350-500: 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

400-440: 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. MoarVM Work began on MoarVM on March 31, 2012; the project was first publicly announced the following year on May 31, 2013. As of March 2014, it is the fastest virtual machine for Rakudo and NQP in terms of startup time and build speed. MoarVM

450-401: 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 is

500-469: 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

550-564: 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

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600-537: A series of Request for Comments (RFCs). This process was open to all contributors, and left no aspect of the language closed to change. Once the RFC process was complete, Wall reviewed and classified each of the 361 requests received. He then began the process of writing several "Apocalypses", using the original meaning of the term , "revealing". While the original goal was to write one Apocalypse for each chapter of Programming Perl , it became obvious that, as each Apocalypse

650-568: 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

700-474: Is "Camelia, the Raku bug". Her name is a nod to the camel mascot associated with Perl , and her form, in the pun-loving tradition of the Perl community, is a play on " software bug ". Spiral designs embedded in her butterfly-like wings resemble the characters "P6", the favored nickname for Perl 6, and off-center eye placement is an intentional pun on "Wall-eyed". One of the goals behind the lively and colorful design of

750-516: 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

800-429: 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

850-566: Is not a completely self-hosting implementation , nor are there concrete plans at this point to make Rakudo a bootstrapping compiler . Pugs was an initial implementation of Perl 6 written in Haskell , led by Audrey Tang . Pugs used to be the most advanced implementation of Perl 6, but since mid 2007, it is mostly dormant (with updates made only to track the current version of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC)). As of November 2014, Pugs

900-438: Is possible to load only a specific version of a module, or even two modules of the same name that differ in version or authority. As a convenience, aliasing to a short name is provided. CPAN , the Perl module distribution system, does not yet handle Raku modules. Instead a prototype module system is in use. Also, a book dedicated to one of the first Perl 6 virtual machines, Parrot, was published in 2009. Perl Perl

950-504: 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 was also referred to as the " duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to both its ubiquitous use as

1000-534: 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

1050-540: The Java Virtual Machine , and JavaScript . MoarVM is a virtual machine built especially for Rakudo and the NQP Compiler Toolchain. There is a layer between Raku and the virtual machines named Not Quite Perl 6 (NQP), which implements Raku rules for parsing Raku, and an abstract syntax tree and backend-specific code generation . Large portions of Rakudo are written in Raku, or in its subset NQP. Rakudo

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1100-594: 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

1150-468: 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,

1200-560: The yada yada operator (intended to mark placeholder code that 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

1250-454: 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

1300-664: 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

1350-662: 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

1400-444: 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

1450-619: 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

1500-405: 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

1550-610: The content of each Apocalypse in terms of practical usage. Each Exegesis consists of code examples along with a discussion of the usage and implications of the examples. There are three primary methods of communication used in the development of Raku today. The first is the Raku Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel on Libera Chat . The second is a set of mailing lists . The third is the Git source code repository hosted at GitHub . The major goal Wall suggested in his initial speech

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1600-410: 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

1650-495: 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

1700-399: 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,

1750-405: The existing Perl codebase. This meant that some code which was correctly interpreted by a Perl 5 compiler would not be accepted by a Perl 6 compiler. Since backward compatibility is a common goal when enhancing software, the breaking changes in Perl 6 had to be stated explicitly. The distinction between Perl 5 and Perl 6 became so large that eventually Perl 6 was renamed Raku. The language's mascot

1800-484: The logo was to discourage misogyny in the community and for it to be an opportunity for those of "masculine persuasion" to show their sensitive side. As of 2017, only the Rakudo implementation is under active development. No implementation will be designated as the official Raku implementation; rather, "Raku is anything that passes the official test suite." Rakudo Perl 6 targets a number of virtual machines, such as MoarVM ,

1850-626: The minimum featureset required to bootstrap a full Perl 6 compiler. Yapsi was a Perl 6 compiler and runtime written in Perl 6. As a result, it required an existing Perl 6 interpreter, such as one of the Rakudo Star releases, to run. Niecza, another major Perl 6 implementation effort, focused on optimization and efficient implementation research. It targets the Common Language Infrastructure . The Raku specification requests that modules be identified by name, version, and authority. It

1900-411: 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

1950-647: 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

2000-532: The user. The Raku design process was first announced on 19 July 2000, on the fourth day of that year's Perl Conference , by Larry Wall in his State of the Onion 2000 talk. At that time, the primary goals were to remove "historical warts" from the language; "easy things should stay easy, hard things should get easier, and impossible things should get hard"; and a general cleanup of the internal design and application programming interfaces (APIs). The process began with

2050-462: 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

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2100-504: 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

2150-612: Was not being maintained. In 2007, v6-MiniPerl6 ("mp6") and its reimplementation, v6-KindaPerl6 ("kp6") were written as a means to bootstrap the Perl-6.0.0 STD, using Perl 5. The STD is a full grammar for Perl 6 and is written in Perl 6. In theory, anything capable of parsing the STD and generating executable code is a suitable bootstrapping system for Perl 6. kp6 is currently compiled by mp6 and can work with multiple backends. mp6 and kp6 are not full Perl 6 implementations and are designed only to implement

2200-548: 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

2250-492: 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

2300-418: 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,

2350-503: 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

2400-444: Was the removal of historical warts. These included the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and the syntactic impact of bareword filehandles . There were many other problems that Perl programmers had discussed fixing for years, and these were explicitly addressed by Wall in his speech. An implication of these goals was that Perl 6 would not have backward compatibility with

2450-466: 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

2500-488: Was written, previous Apocalypses were being invalidated by later changes. For this reason, a set of Synopses was published, each one relating the contents of an Apocalypse, but with any subsequent changes reflected in updates. Today, the Raku specification is managed through the "roast" testing suite, while the Synopses are kept as a historical reference. There is also a series of Exegeses written by Damian Conway that explain

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