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Re: Arguments for upgrading from Perl 5.8

by chromatic (Archbishop)
on Nov 17, 2011 at 19:21 UTC ( [id://938671]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Arguements for upgrading from Perl 5.8

Perl 5.8 has been unsupported for a while now, so if you find a bug in Perl 5 itself, you're going to have to fix it yourself. (Canonical probably isn't going to support it for you.)

If you find a bug in one of your CPAN modules, you may or may not get support from the author for Perl 5.8. That depends on the author. (I don't support 5.8. Canonical probably isn't going to support it for you.)

If you need working Unicode, 5.12 is really the earliest version of Perl 5 that has anything close to complete support. 5.14 is your best option.

(Perl 5.12 is a bit faster than 5.10 and uses a little less memory, and 5.14 continues that trend.)


Improve your skills with Modern Perl: the free book.

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Re^2: Arguments for upgrading from Perl 5.8
by dlarochelle (Sexton) on Nov 17, 2011 at 22:05 UTC
    Unicode support is very important to us since we process international text.

    I thought that Unicode was added in Perl 5.8. I'm curious as to how much better the Unicode support is in Perl 5.12 vs. Perl 5.10 vs. Perl 5.8.

    Thanks

      Only as of 5.14 are most of the builtin operations fully aware of Unicode; too many of them default to assuming the semantics of whatever the local character set is. unicode mentions this as "The Unicode Bug". Perl 5.12 fixed some of that, but only as of Perl 5.14 can you use use feature 'unicode_strings'; to get Perl to do the right thing.

      I haven't encountered huge problems in my work, but most of what I do uses nothing more exotic than Latin-1 and UTF-8, so I've been fortunate. Then again, everything I care about runs on Perl 5.14.1 (and soon Perl 5.14.2).


      Improve your skills with Modern Perl: the free book.

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