Perl 5.38 Released with New Experimental Syntax for Defining Object Classes

Perl 5.38 was released this week "after being in development for more than one year," reports Phoronix. "Perl 5.38 brings a new experimental syntax for defining object classes where per-instance data is stored in 'field' variables that behave like lexicals." "Maybe, just maybe, the new features introduced into the language in this newest version will attract much sought new talent," writes the site I Programmer, noting the argument that Perl is installed by default everywhere - and has the "fun factor... The class keyword is part of the plan to bring effective OOP to the Perl core while still keeping Perl being Perl." The Perl docs warn that "This remains a new and experimental feature, and is very much still under development. It will be the subject of much further addition, refinement and alteration in future releases." But "Since Perl 5, support for objects revolved around the concept of blessing references with a package name," notes updated documentation, which points out this new class syntax "isn't a bless wrapper, but a completely new system built right into the perl interpreter."The class keyword declares a new package which is intended to be a class... classes automatically get a constructor named new... Just like with other references, when object reference count reaches zero it will automatically be destroyed. Phoronx notes that Perl 5.38 also brings a new PERL_RAND_SEED environment variable "for controlling seed behavior for random number generation," along with some new APIs. And I Programmer notes that Perl 5.38 also adds upport for Unicode 15.0, adding 4, 489 characters, for a total of 149,186 characters. Other additions include enhanced regular expressions, plus defined-or and logical-or assignment default expressions in signatures.

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