The Perl 5 Porters released 5.14. By reading the perldelta51[34]* documentation, you can see what’s new in this maintenance version of Perl. David Golden, one of the Perl 5.13 release managers, put together what he’s calling the perldeltadelta, which is just the most interesting bits of the longish perl*delta files for Perl 5.13, the experimental track that led up to Perl 5.14. He’s covered most of the interesting bits.
Some things you’ll find include:
- A non-destructive substitution with the
/rflag:s///r - Non-destructive tr///r and y///r
- Set default regex flags
- The new
package NAME BLOCKsyntax - Use the
/amatch flag for ASCII semantics - Use the
/aamatch flag for even more ASCII semantics - Specify any character with its ordinal value in octal.
givenreturns its last evaluated expression.- The forward-compatible
(?^:)regex option stringification srandreturns its seed so you can reuse it.- Use array references with push, pop, shift, and unshift.
You may need to compile a development perl to try these features.
People who don’t follow perl5porters might not know where to go to find the perl deltas (5.13 docs aren’t available on perldoc.perl.org). It took me a tiny bit of digging to find them in http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/tree/HEAD:/pod.
You can also find them on CPAN with each of the Perl distributions. I just use Google to find them. :)