Uh, no. Rumors of Perl6 being so radically different are just that, rumors.

Most of the discussion about Perl6 has been the "RFCs", which are basically wishlists. Larry will then accept, modify, or veto each one. I know Larry pretty well by now. I know he'll accept them in such a way that a Perl5 hacker will still be a Perl6 hacker. After all, Larry himself doesn't want to learn a new language. {grin}

As an example, look how much the regular expressions got more powerful between Perl4 and Perl5. And yet, if you could write Perl4 regex, you had no problem using Perl5 regex--you just didn't get to take advantage of the cooler features.

But if you used the fringe features like $[, your code found only limited support, if it even worked at all.

Similarly, I'd bet that the number of things that really breaks between Perl5 and Perl6 will be minimal--just enough to open up a new realm of cool things, but perhaps things in the category of $[ will fall by the wayside.

So, in the words of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "don't panic!"

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker