http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1034212


in reply to Re: 5.18.0 is available NOW!
in thread 5.18.0 is available NOW!

Off the top of my head, the big ones are:

* Lexical subroutines! package Foo { my sub bar { ... } } Now you can use bar() inside Foo, but there is no way to access that from the outside. There's also state subs, in case you ever seen those.

* Regexp code blocks that actually work! /(?{...})/ and /(??{...})/ now work exactly as you'd expect them to. Before it was a buggy pain.

* Character class set operations! This is my personal favorite. Basically, now you can write /(?[ \p{Math} & \p{Symbol} ])+/ where before you had to do /((?=\p{Math})\p{Symbol})+/. There's other operations too, like + or -.