The granddaddy of modern scripting languages is getting an extreme makeover. Perl, a high-level programming language that was critical in the initial construction of the Internet, is undergoing major renovations from author Larry Wall with the help of the Perl development community. The general release is about 18 months away. Although Wall still is designing Perl 6, there is a good sense of what it will include. One thing is certain: Perl 6 will look vastly different from its predecessor.
Letting Go
"Perl 6 is a complete rewrite of the internals of Perl and a revision of the Perl syntax," said Allison Randal, a member of the Perl 6 core developer team and president of The Perl Foundation. "On the syntax side, we wanted to re-examine the language from the ground up, clean up the inconsistencies and add a few new features," she said. Although Perl 5"s expressions are the most sophisticated available and aspired to by other programming languages, "no one pretends for a moment that they"re anything but hideously ugly," said Damian Conway, a core Perl developer and associate professor at Monash University in Australia.