Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl,comp.unix.admin,comp.lang.misc,comp.unix.misc,comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.unix.questions,alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d Followups-To: comp.lang.perl From: Larry Wall Organization: NetLabs, Inc. Table of Contents for this Message: Intro New Features List New Documentation List Getting Source and Documentation Extension Modules WWW Info Known Bugs Bug Reports FAQ ------------------------------------------------------------ Intro: After months of laborious bug fixes and configuration testing, release 5 of Perl is now officially launched into its production release! Many new features are supported and an extremely high level of compatibility with previous versions. Perl 5.0 should configure and build straight out of the box (as it were) on virtually any UNIX system, and even on VMS, too! Ports to other architectures (MS-DOS, Windows/NT) are in the works. Enjoy, Larry Wall lwall@netlabs.com Wednesday, 19 October 1994 (tsc) ------------------------------------------------------------ New Features: cleaner and more portable configuration and build process greatly simplified grammar and faster, tighter interpreter numerous legibility enhancements optional compile-time restrictions on dubious constructs greatly improved diagnostics both lexical and dynamic scoping anonymous data types: scalars, lists, hash table, functions both deep and shallow binding of lambda-like functions arbitrarily nested data structures modularity and reusability object-oriented programming package constructors and destructors embeddibility and extensibility dynamic loading of C libraries a POSIX 1003.1 compliant interphase multiple simultaneous DBM implementations (dbm, sdbm, ndbm, gdbm, berkeley db) operator overloading on arithmetic types supplied: Complex, BigInt, and BigFloat regular expression enhancements extensions: curses, X11 support via Sx (Athena, Xlib) and Tk ------------------------------------------------------------ New Documentation: The once onerous Perl man page has been broken up into many different pieces, suitable for viewing with the standard man interface or via HTML. The following separate sections are included: perl Perl overview perldata Perl data structures perlsyn Perl syntax perlop Perl operators and precedence perlre Perl regular expressions perlrun Perl execution and options perlfunc Perl builtin functions perlvar Perl predefined variables perlsub Perl subroutines perlmod Perl modules perlref Perl references and nested data structures perlobj Perl objects perlbot Perl OO tricks and examples perldebug Perl debugging perldiag Perl diagnostic messages (*ALL* of them, w/ explanations!) perlform Perl formats perlipc Perl interprocess communication perlsec Perl security perltrap Perl traps for the unwary (includes perl4 vs perl5) perlstyle Perl style guide perlapi Perl application programming interface perlguts Perl internal functions for those doing extensions perlcall Perl calling conventions from C perlovl Perl overloading semantics perlbook Perl book information Furthermore, there is documentation on the standalone programs and the all Perl library modules. A pre-formatted postscript version of these is available in one piece (240 pages); see the "Docs" ftp entries below. ------------------------------------------------------------ Getting Source and Documentation: North America ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/src/5.0/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://ftp.uu.net/languages/perl/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://ftp.cbi.tamucc.edu/pub/duff/Perl/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://ftp.metronet.com/perlinfo/source/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://genetics.upenn.edu/perl5/perl5_000.zip Europe ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/ports/perl5/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://ftp.zrz.tu-berlin.de/pub/unix/perl/perl5.000.tar.gz ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl5/perl5.000.tar.gz http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl5/perl5.000.tar.gz gopher://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/0/packages/perl5/perl5.000.tar.gz Australia ftp://sungear.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/src/5.0/perl5.000.tar.gz Docs: ftp://ftp.uu.net/languages/perl/PerlDoc.ps.gz ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/PerlDoc.ps.gz ftp://ftp.cbi.tamucc.edu/pub/duff/Perl/PerlDoc.ps.gz ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/PerlDoc.ps.gz (Europe) ftp://sungear.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/doc/PerlDoc.ps.gz (Oz) Email access: If you simply do *NOT* have ftp access, there is a mail server in the Netherlands. Send a message to "mail-server@cs.ruu.nl" containing: begin path your_email_address send PERL/perl5.000.tar.gz send PERL/PerlDoc.ps.gz end The path-line may be omitted if your message contains a normal From:-line. *PLEASE* use this only has a last recourse. ------------------------------------------------------------ Extension Modules: Tk (as in tcl/tk, but sans tcl) ftp://black.ox.ac.uk/src/ALPHA/tkperl5a4.tar.gz ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/src/tkperl/tkperl5a4.tar.gz ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/extensions/tkperl5a4.tar.gz ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perlinfo/perl5/tkperl/tkperl5a4.tar.gz ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/tkperl5a4.tar.gz Curses (standard C library) ftp://ftp.ncsu.edu/pub/math/wsetzer/cursperl5a6.tar.gz ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perlinfo/perl5/cursperl5a6.tar.gz ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/cursperl5a6.tar.gz Msql (SQL) ftp://ftp.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE/pub/unix/perl/MsqlPerl-a1.tgz ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/extensions/MsqlPerl-a1.tgz ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perlinfo/perl5/MsqlPerl5-a1.tgz ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/MsqlPerl-a1.tar.gz Sx (Athena & Xlib) ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/Perl/Sx.tar.gz ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/extensions/Sx.tar.gz ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perlinfo/perl5/Sx.tar.gz ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/PerlDoc.ps.gz Database (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingress, etc) ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk:/pub/perl/db ftp::/ftp.cis.ufl.edu//pub/perl/scripts/db ------------------------------------------------------------ WWW Info: Web access to random perl information is found here: http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/perl5.html And a gamma version (not production) of the doc set can be found here: http://www.mit.edu:8001/perl/perl.html ------------------------------------------------------------ Known Bugs: The README says it's a pre-release. Workaround: ignore this sentence. Installs perl0.000 and sperl0.000 instead of 5.000. Workaround: rename the files. The debugger appears to be broken on "my" variables; Workaround: none yet Recursive signal handlers eventually core dump. Workaround: ease up on the ^C key. The following code misbehaves: print ++$_ . "\n" until /0/; Workaround: none yet ------------------------------------------------------------ Bug Reports: The best place to send your bug is to the Perl Porters mailing list . You may subscribe to the list in the customary fashion via mail to . Feel free to post your bugs to the comp.lang.perl newsgroup as well, but do make sure they still go to the mailing list. ------------------------------------------------------------ FAQ: The Perl Frequently Asked Questions list (in somewhat antiquated form, especially now that Perl 5.0 is out) may be found here, amongst other places: ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/doc/faq.gz ftp://sungear.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/doc/faq.gz