Perl 5.18 new features

Perl v5.18 is out and there are some major changes that you should know about before you upgrade. Most notably, some features from v5.10 are now marked experimental. If you use those features, you get warnings.

You can download the Perl source from CPAN. For Windows, Strawberry Perl 5.18 is available now.

• Experimental features now warn (reaching back to v5.10)
• Perl regex character classes now have set operations
• Use computed labels with loop controllers
• \s now matches the vertical tab
• The new copy-on-write internal string management obviates English’s -no_match_vars.
• given now aliases $_ like foreach does
• readline now reads characters instead of octets
• CPANPLUS and Archive::Extract are deprecated and marked for removal in v5.20.
• The ${^LAST_FH} refers to the last used filehandle.