New release of Perl - Perl 5.8.0, 24th July.  Improvements particularly in the area of unicode handling, but other features too.  Perl 5.8.0 replaces Perl 5.6.0, but incorporates all the changes of maintenance release 5.6.1 as well.

After 5.8, plans are that there will be a production release 5.10 at some stage in the future; the "gekk of geeks" are talking about what should / should not go in there but, frankly, if it's not already in Perl by 5.8 then it's probably not a major "core" feaure, so don't expect huge leaps forward at 5.10

Work on Perl 6 progresses, and chances are that there won't be a Perl 5.12. I know we've been talking "Perl 6" for a while, but I would suggest that it's still a little early to make any major plans for it in a user environment.  The best advice sis to write good code in Perl 5, without resorting to wierd and wonderful facilities that noone else uses any more, and you'll be in good stead for the conversion!

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