Perl 7 Announced As Evolving Perl 5 With Modern Defaults

Taking place this week is the virtual Perl + Raku "Conference in the Cloud" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic causing the event to go virtual. A big announcement out of it is Perl 7.

Perl 7 basically amounts to Perl 5 with more modern defaults and foregoing some of the extensive backward compatibility support found with Perl 5. News of Perl 7 comes a few days after the release of Perl 5.32.

Perl 7 succeeds Perl 5 due to the Perl 6 initiative previously for what is now known as the Raku programming language. So to avoid confusion, similar to the PHP 6 debacle, Perl 7 is the next version.

For details on what is expected to be dropped and added by Perl 7, see this article on Perl.com looking at all at what was announced at this week's conference. For the most part though Perl 7 is close to Perl 5.32 with changed defaults and is more forward looking with less commitment to backward compatibility support.