Louis_Wu's Journal: Which version of Perl to upgrade to?

My Powerbook G4 (800 MHz, 1 Gb RAM, 60 Gb drive) came last week, and one of the first things I did was go to the command line and start looking at the unix underneath. I ran perl -v, and found out that my version has 5.6.0 - not 5.6.1. OK, so I upgrade. But which version to upgrade to, and should I keep the current install available in some way?

Here's the hard part, I would upgrade to 5.6.1 automatically, but 5.8 just came out. However, 5.8 has been reported to be slow. No info on how slow, AFAIK. And I can't find any advice specific to Mac OS X (10.2, specifically), like whether MacPerl is still a good idea, what with unix and perl underneath. Not to mention that I'm learning perl, so I don't have much experience to fall back on. So I'm searching the perl sites, and the mac sites for info on versions. And I'm looking for Mac OS X specific info about perl. And I can't find any. And I'm getting frustrated. And I'm using horrible grammar. :)

I hope that someone at tonight's SPUG meeting will be able to shed some light on my dark predicament. All I need is a pointer, a place to start looking, somewhere I can get info. Heck, I'd like to find some info on what the consequence of not upgrading are. Is there a security flaw in 5.6.0 which was corrected in 5.6.1?

It seems that I have much to learn of "the perl".

The only version of Perl worth upgrading to

[Starship Trooper]

Ruby 1.6.7 [ruby-lang.org] is what you want.

Re:The only version of Perl worth upgrading to

[Louis_Wu]

:)

I have thought of other languages - Python, Ruby, even Scheme and Lisp (I like emacs). But I think that perl will work well for me, given my needs. I'm learning 'real' programing now (Fortran and C in college doesn't really count), and I want to automate my website, the church's website, sysadmin tasks, ... and other fun stuff. Much of what lead me to decide on perl was the community support - CPAN is great. Not to mention that programs can look like line noise. :)