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

Excellent points. The things most likely to not work with perl6 are your obfuscated scripts - but I'm sure perl6 will have a bunch of new ways to say things in a non-straightforward way. Sure seems to be a lot of speculation about a revision that is practically decades away in Internet Time(tm) :)

Perl 6 may seem decades away in internet time, but given how each release lasts longer, it is likely to survive for over a decade of real time once released!

:-)