The Perl project has announced the upcoming release of Perl 7. Sawyer X announced that Perl has a new plan moving forward.
Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults. You won’t have to enable most of the things you are already doing because they are enabled for you. The major version jump sets the boundary between how we have been doing things and what we can do in the future.
The target for a user release of Perl 7.0 within the next year, with some release candidates along the way.
The CPAN has almost 200,000 modules. The maintained modules that people are using should still work, and for the rest there will be a compatibility mode.
Perl 7 code will still be v5.32 code (mostly) in syntax and behavior though. Last year, Perl creator Larry Wall approved the renaming of Perl 6 as Raku. Skipping a 6th major version of a language is not unprecedented. PHP making the jump from 5th to 7th in 2015.
