perl 2.0 (no announcement message available)

perl 2.0 (no announcement message available)

Some of the enhancements from Perl1 included:

    * New regexp routines derived from Henry Spencer's.
          o Support for /(foo|bar)/.
          o Support for /(foo)*/ and /(foo)+/.
          o \s for whitespace, \S for non-, \d for digit, \D nondigit
    * Local variables in blocks, subroutines and evals.
    * Recursive subroutine calls are now supported.
    * Array values may now be interpolated into lists: unlink 'foo', 'bar', @trashcan, 'tmp';
    * File globbing.
    * Use of <> in array contexts returns the whole file or glob list.
    * New iterator for normal arrays, foreach, that allows both read and write.
    * Ability to open pipe to a forked off script for secure pipes in setuid scripts.
    * File inclusion via do 'foo.pl';
    * More file tests, including -t to see if, for instance, stdin is a terminal. File tests now behave in a more correct manner. You can do file tests on filehandles as well as filenames. The special filetests -T and -B test a file to see if it's text or binary.
    * An eof can now be used on each file of the <> input for such purposes as resetting the line numbers or appending to each file of an inplace edit.
    * Assignments can now function as lvalues, so you can say things like ($HOST = $host) =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/; ($obj = $src) =~ s/\.c$/.o/;
    * You can now do certain file operations with a variable which holds the name of a filehandle, e.g. open(++$incl,$includefilename); $foo = <$incl>;
    * Warnings are now available (with -w) on use of uninitialized variables and on identifiers that are mentioned only once, and on reference to various undefined things.
    * There is now a wait operator.
    * There is now a sort operator.
    * The manual is now not lying when it says that perl is generally faster than sed. I hope.