Re: Summary of salient changes to Perl 5 between the major releases?

[tobyink]

I'd say the big ones are:

Perl 5.8

Decent Unicode

Decent threading

PerlIO layer

Perl 5.10

Smart match operator

Defined-or operator

given and when

state

say

Perl 5.12

Implicit strictures

each(@array), keys(@array), values(@array)

package Foo::Bar 1.23;

Postfix form of when

Yada-yada-yada operator

Perl 5.14

push $arrayref, @items, etc

package Foo::Bar 1.23 { ... }

s///r

Perl 5.16

__SUB__

fc

I've specifically ignored any new pragmata and core modules, as those are often also available on CPAN for older versions.