=head1 NAME
-perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 1.11 $, $Date: 2002/12/06 07:40:11 $)
+perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl ($Revision: 1.15 $, $Date: 2004/10/11 05:06:29 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
no longer maintained; its last patch (4.036) was in 1992, long ago and
far away. Sure, it's stable, but so is anything that's dead; in fact,
perl4 had been called a dead, flea-bitten camel carcass. The most
-recent production release is 5.8.0 (although 5.005_03 and 5.6.1 are
+recent production release is 5.8.2 (although 5.005_03 and 5.6.2 are
still supported). The most cutting-edge development release is 5.9.
Further references to the Perl language in this document refer to the
production release unless otherwise specified. There may be one or
See L<perlhist> for a history of Perl revisions.
+=head2 What is Ponie?
+
+At The O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention in 2003, Artur
+Bergman, Fotango, and The Perl Foundation announced a project to
+run perl5 on the Parrot virtual machine named Ponie. Ponie stands for
+Perl On New Internal Engine. The Perl 5.10 language implementation
+will be used for Ponie, and there will be no language level
+differences between perl5 and ponie. Ponie is not a complete rewrite
+of perl5.
+
+For more details, see http://www.poniecode.org/
+
=head2 What is perl6?
At The Second O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention, Larry Wall
set of tasks. These languages have their own newsgroups in which you
can learn about (but hopefully not argue about) them.
-Some comparison documents can be found at http://language.perl.com/versus/
+Some comparison documents can be found at http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/
if you really can't stop yourself.
=head2 Can I do [task] in Perl?
(Well, OK, maybe it's not quite that distinct, but you get the idea.)
If you want support and a reasonable guarantee that what you're
developing will continue to work in the future, then you have to run
-the supported version. As of August 2002 that means running either
-5.8.0 (released in July 2002), or one of the older releases like
-5.6.1 (released in April 2001) or 5.005_03 (released in March 1999),
+the supported version. As of December 2003 that means running either
+5.8.2 (released in November 2003), or one of the older releases like
+5.6.2 (also released in November 2003; a maintenance release to let perl
+5.6 compile on newer systems as 5.6.1 was released in April 2001) or
+5.005_03 (released in March 1999),
although 5.004_05 isn't that bad if you B<absolutely> need such an old
version (released in April 1999) for stability reasons.
Anything older than 5.004_05 shouldn't be used.