Perl v5.26 has lots of improvements and some big changes with module loading. This might be the most backward-incompatible version this decade! As with any new perl, try it before you commit to it. You don’t want to install it over your currently working perl to later find out something doesn’t work.
- Mix conventional list assignments and ref aliasing
- Updated to Unicode 9 with 72 new emojis.
- You must escape literal left braces,
{
, in regular expressions. - The
/xx
match operator flag allows insignificant whitespace in character class. - Here-docs can strip leading whitespace.
- Removal of . from
@INC
- New variables
@{^CAPTURE}
,%{^CAPTURE}
, and%{^CAPTURE_ALL}
- A hash in scalar context will return the number of keys, not the hash statistics.
- Named lexical subroutines are no longer experimental.
POSIX::tmpnam()
is out; useFile::Temp
- Deprecation warnings now tell you when the feature will be removed
- Perl detects version control markers
You can read through the perldelta5.26.0 documentation.