What's Coming in Perl 6

The next major revision of Perl will be Perl 6. The development team will continue releasing versions of Perl under version number 5 until Perl 6 is released. Perl 6 is going to be a rewrite of Perl from the ground up. In most ways, it will be the same language that Perl 5 is, but everything in the language has been evaluated for inclusion in Perl 6, and lots of new things will be added as well. Unfortunately, there's so much going on with Perl 6 that it can't all be described here, especially because nothing is final until it's released.

The design for Perl 6 started with a request for comments process that yielded 361 RFC documents. The documents are currently being sifted through by Larry Wall and converted into a cohesive design of the next version of the language. The architecture of Perl will be changing fundamentally. Perl 6 will consist of a parser, a compiler, a byte code optimizer, and a virtual machine. This will make Perl 6 significantly more flexible than Perl 5. For example, there can be parsers for multiple languages, which produce syntax trees that can be compiled by the Perl 6 compiler. The compiler will produce byte code for the new Perl 6 runtime engine. Alternate compilers will be able to produce byte code for other runtime engines, like Microsoft .NET or the Java Virtual Machine.

As you can see, the emphasis with Perl 6 will be on creating a more flexible architecture for the language. There will also be plenty of syntax enhancements and features added to make life easier for Perl programmers. Also, thanks to the flexible parser built into Perl 6, Perl 5 programs will run without changes.