Perl 5.26.0 is now out with tons of improvements

The Perl community has received version 26 of Perl 5. This new release is a collaborative effort from 86 authors.

Perl 5.26.0 contains approximately 360,000 lines of code across 2600 files. Most of the changes in the latest version have originated in the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) modules. According to the official changelog, new variables such as @ {^CAPTURE}, %{^CAPTURE} and %{^CAPTURE_ALL} are included in the Perl 5.26.0 release.

“Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 230,000 lines of changes to 1,800 .pm, .t, .c and .h files,” Perl developer Sawyer X wrote in an email announcement.

The new version comes with some improvements like ‘here-docs’ can now strip leading whitespace. The original POSIX::tmpnam () command has also been replaced with File::Temp. Moreover, lexical sub-routines that were debuted with the Perl 5.18 are no longer experimental.