Summary of changes from 5.X to 5.LATEST

[qhen]

Greets

Is there a single document somewhere which summarizes the improvements/enhancements/changes in Perl from 5.10 to 5.LATEST?

I've been googling around but can't find a nice clean and concise presentation. I'm particularly interested in language changes/improvements and performance enhancements. perlnews.org and perldoc.perl.org/perldelta.html has the info, but it's spread across a myriad of pages.

I'm considering using perlbrew or the like to install the latest 'n greatest (ie, without touching the distro's installed Perl) and enjoy some of the creamy goodness which is available (yes, I'm tired of missing out), whilst also speeding up data crunching a bit - always a good thing.

We're about to refactor a large code base after it's first iteration, and this is a good opportunity to consider doing a major upgrade of Perl and leveraging some of those much yodeled about improvements.

[preaction]

I wrote a presentation on the topic for Chicago.PM: perldelta - What's changed in Perl from 5.8 to 5.20.

I'd like to add "Recursive Regex" (5.10) and the new List::Util enhancements (5.20).

View the example code on Github

[qhen]

hmm, thanks, qhen clicks link 'n starts reading...

Update: Nice! That is precisely what I was looking for. Nice work preaction, how about creating a blog page somewhere where those nice concise highlights are maintained -- especially as new versions of Perl come out?

[preaction]

That's the idea with the Github repository. Anyone can ask for an improvement, or fork and make their own improvements.

[Anonymous Monk]

perldeltas ought to still work (click the download code link) ... but its the verbose version (2.2MB) ... you can however trim the headings with Pod::Simple or with XML::Libxml or some such tool :)

A little snippet from the headings/TOC

p5200-Core Enhancements

    p5200-Experimental Subroutine signatures
    p5200-subs now take a prototype attribute 


p5180-Core Enhancements

    p5180-New mechanism for experimental features
    p5180-Hash overhaul
        p5180-Hash randomization 


p5160-Core Enhancements

    p5160-use VERSION
    p5160-__SUB__
    p5160-New and Improved Built-ins
        p5160-More consistent eval
        p5160-substr lvalue revamp
        p5160-Return value of tied 
     

p5140-Core Enhancements

p5140-Regular Expressions

    p5140-(?^...) construct signifies default modifiers
    p5140-/d, /l, /u, and /a modifiers
    p5140-Non-destructive substitution

Get it, try it out, still works :) I just tried it, 2.2M perldeltas from p5004 to p5211