Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language, currently under development. The vision for Perl 6 is more than simply a rewrite of Perl 5. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to execute bytecode for interpreted languages, primarily for Perl 6. The hello world program in Perl 6 will be

say "Hello world"

though, of course, There Is More Than One Way To Do It.

Perl 6 is making many huge changes from Perl 5. It is not expected to be backwards-compatable, though there will be a compatability mode. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, is outlining these changes in a series of long essays, the so-called apocalypses.

Pugs is an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell that will be used for bootstrapping. The final version will be written in Perl 6 itself, possibly by translating the Pugs source code to Perl 6. After that, Perl 6 will be self-hosted. Much of the implementation of Perl will then be exposed, making it possible to, for example, extend the parser. Another difference with parsing is that Perl 6 will be parsed ahead of time, unlike Perl 5, which is parsed at runtime.

External links

• Perl Development: Perl 6