perl 5_6 ideas

Perl 6 is the next major evolution of the language known as Perl.  It represents
a major break in syntactic compatibility from Perl 5, thus a major version
number increase.  However, this does not mean that Perl 5 is going away.  In
fact, quite the opposite.  Both Perl 5 and Perl 6 have an active developer 
community ...


One of Perl's mottos is "easy things easy, hard things possible" and yet 
in the late 1990s, perl practicioners were increasingly running into 
things that seemed like they should be easy, but were not.


While Perl 6 may seem like the next best version of Perl because 6 is
greater than 5, that is a grosse over simplification. In reality there
is a family of languages that claim the Perl moniker with two main
branches in the family tree: Perl 5 and Perl 6. Both of these branches
are growing independently of each other and will continue to do so for
the foreseeable future. Of course, since they are both Perl, if one
branch comes up with a good idea, it's highly likely that the other
branch will borrow it. In fact, this has already happened more than
once; the latest release of Perl 5 has facilities that were specified
for Perl 6 and vetted in several Perl 6 implementations and Moose (a
modern object system for Perl 5) was inspired by Perl 6's object model.


But Perl is more than just a programming language. It is the language
and all of the cultural artifacts that have become part and parcel with
using that language. For instance, anyone using Perl today also uses the
CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). The CPAN is an extension of
the language. It's a resource that Perl programmers expect to have
available. 


So, on the Perl 5 side of the family tree we have things like Strawberry
Perl and ActivePerl (two Perl distributions aimed specifically at making
Perl more useful on the Windows platform), and the canonical Perl 5
distribution. On the Perl 6 side of the family tree we have Rakudo,
SMOP, elf, kp6, pugs, and others.