The Perl programming language, still the most popular language used on dynamic Web sites, has gone through a significant upgrade with the recently released version 5.005.
The new version includes improved Win32 support and has the potential to attract the growing market of Windows programmers, according to O’Reilly & Associates, the company that is coordinating the oneperl group.
The oneperl group played a key role in the integration of divergent platform ports in Perl version 5.005.
The newest release of Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) includes dozens of significant new features, enhancements and bug fixes:
- Perl is now capable of running threads if the operating system supports them
- It includes a new compiler to generate native executables that cut down the startup overhead of scripts
- It also includes a Perl Object C++ Application Programming Interface (API), and improved regular expressions.
Perl was developed in 1987 by Larry Wall, senior programmer with O’Reilly. In the last several years, Perl has been used by Web developers who rely on Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to create compelling Web sites.
For more information on Perl, visit the Perl Web site.
