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What Happened to Perl 7? (2022)

ith Perl 5.36.0 just around the corner, we thought that this is a good time to clarify plans for the future of the Perl programming language. We realised that the future was hammered out in a number of steps, across several months.

A key idea for Perl 7 was to significantly reduce the boilerplate needed at the top of your code, by enabling a lot of widely used modules / pragmas, but this would have come at the price of breaking some backwards compatibility. At some point in the future, the PSC may decide that the set of features, taken together, represent a big enough step forward to justify a new baseline for Perl. The other job is to alert casual observers that the new release is a significant milestone, and that folks who wouldn't otherwise give much thought to the upgrade should take this time to re-evaluate the tool's fitness.

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