Friday, December 17, 2021, marked the thirty-​fourth birth­day of the Perl pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and coin­ci­den­tal­ly this year saw the release of ver­sion 5.34. There are plen­ty of Perl devel­op­ers out there who haven’t kept up with recent (and not-​so-​recent) improve­ments to the lan­guage and its ecosys­tem, so I thought I might list a batch. (You may have seen some of these before in May’s post ​“Perl can do that now!”)

The feature pragma

Perl v5.10 was released in December 2007, and with it came feature, a way of enabling new syn­tax with­out break­ing back­ward com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. You can enable indi­vid­ual fea­tures by name (e.g., use feature qw(say fc); for the say and fc key­words), or by using a fea­ture bun­dle based on the Perl ver­sion that intro­duced them. For exam­ple, the following:

use feature ':5.34';

…gives you the equiv­a­lent of:

use feature qw(bareword_filehandles bitwise current_sub evalbytes fc indirect multidimensional postderef_qq say state switch unicode_eval unicode_strings);

Boy, that’s a mouth­ful. Feature bun­dles are good. The cor­re­spond­ing bun­dle also gets implic­it­ly loaded if you spec­i­fy a min­i­mum required Perl ver­sion, e.g., with use v5.32;. If you use v5.12; or high­er, strict mode is enabled for free. So just say:

use v5.34;

And last­ly, one-​liners can use the -E switch instead of -e to enable all fea­tures for that ver­sion of Perl, so you can say the fol­low­ing on the com­mand line:

perl -E 'say "Hello world!"'

Instead of:

perl -e 'print "Hello world!\n"'

Which is great when you’re try­ing to save some typing.

The experimental pragma

Sometimes new Perl fea­tures need to be dri­ven a cou­ple of releas­es around the block before their behav­ior set­tles. Those exper­i­ments are doc­u­ment­ed in the per­l­ex­per­i­ment page, and usu­al­ly, you need both a use feature (see above) and no warnings state­ment to safe­ly enable them. Or you can sim­ply pass a list to use experimental of the fea­tures you want, e.g.:

use experimental qw(isa postderef signatures);

Ever-​expanding warnings categories

March 2000 saw the release of Perl 5.6, and with it, the expan­sion of the -w command-​line switch to a sys­tem of fine-​grained con­trols for warn­ing against ​“dubi­ous con­structs” that can be turned on and off depend­ing on the lex­i­cal scope. What start­ed as 26 main and 20 sub­cat­e­gories has expand­ed into 31 main and 43 sub­cat­e­gories, includ­ing warn­ings for the afore­men­tioned exper­i­men­tal features.

As the rel­e­vant Perl::Critic pol­i­cy says, ​“Using warn­ings, and pay­ing atten­tion to what they say, is prob­a­bly the sin­gle most effec­tive way to improve the qual­i­ty of your code.” If you must vio­late warn­ings (per­haps because you’re reha­bil­i­tat­ing some lega­cy code), you can iso­late such vio­la­tions to a small scope and indi­vid­ual cat­e­gories. Check out the stric­tures mod­ule on CPAN if you’d like to go fur­ther and make a safe sub­set of these cat­e­gories fatal dur­ing development.

Document other recently-​introduced syntax with Syntax::Construct

Not every new bit of Perl syn­tax is enabled with a feature guard. For the rest, there’s E. Choroba’s Syntax::Construct mod­ule on CPAN. Rather than hav­ing to remem­ber which ver­sion of Perl intro­duced what, Syntax::Construct lets you declare only what you use and pro­vides a help­ful error mes­sage if some­one tries to run your code on an old­er unsup­port­ed ver­sion. Between it and the feature prag­ma, you can pre­vent many head-​scratching moments and give your users a chance to either upgrade or workaround.

Make built-​in functions throw exceptions with autodie

Many of Perl’s built-​in func­tions only return false on fail­ure, requir­ing the devel­op­er to check every time whether a file can be opened or a system com­mand exe­cut­ed. The lex­i­cal autodie prag­ma replaces them with ver­sions that raise an excep­tion with an object that can be inter­ro­gat­ed for fur­ther details. No mat­ter how many func­tions or meth­ods deep a prob­lem occurs, you can choose to catch it and respond appro­pri­ate­ly. This leads us to…

try/​catch exception handling and Feature::Compat::Try

This year’s Perl v5.34 release intro­duced exper­i­men­tal try/​catch syn­tax for excep­tion han­dling that should look more famil­iar to users of oth­er lan­guages while han­dling the issues sur­round­ing using block eval and test­ing of the spe­cial [email protected] vari­able. If you need to remain com­pat­i­ble with old­er ver­sions of Perl (back to v5.14), just use the Feature::Compat::Try mod­ule from CPAN to auto­mat­i­cal­ly select either v5.34’s native try/​catch or a sub­set of the func­tion­al­i­ty pro­vid­ed by Syntax::Keyword::Try.

Pluggable keywords

The above­men­tioned Syntax::Keyword::Try was made pos­si­ble by the intro­duc­tion of a plug­gable key­word mech­a­nism in 2010’s Perl v5.12. So was the Future::AsyncAwait asyn­chro­nous pro­gram­ming library and the Object::Pad test­bed for new object-​oriented Perl syn­tax. If you’re handy with C and Perl’s XS glue lan­guage, check out Paul ​“LeoNerd” Evans’ XS::Parse::Keyword mod­ule to get a leg up on devel­op­ing your own syn­tax module.

Define packages with versions and blocks

Perl v5.12 also helped reduce clut­ter by enabling a package name­space dec­la­ra­tion to also include a ver­sion num­ber, instead of requir­ing a sep­a­rate our $VERSION = ...; v5.14 fur­ther refined packages to be spec­i­fied in code blocks, so a name­space dec­la­ra­tion can be the same as a lex­i­cal scope. Putting the two togeth­er gives you:

package Local::NewHotness v1.2.3 {
    ...
}

Instead of:

{
    package Local::OldAndBusted;
    use version 0.77; our $VERSION = version->declare("v1.2.3");
    ...
}

I know which I’d rather do. (Though you may want to also use Syntax::Construct qw(package-version package-block); to help along with old­er instal­la­tions as described above.)

The // defined-​or operator

This is an easy win from Perl v5.10:

defined $foo ? $foo : $bar  # replace this
$foo // $bar                # with this

And:

$foo = $bar unless defined $foo  # replace this
$foo //= $bar                    # with this

Perfect for assign­ing defaults to variables.

state variables only initialize once

Speaking of vari­ables, ever want one to keep its old val­ue the next time a scope is entered, like in a sub? Declare it with state instead of my. Before Perl v5.10, you need­ed to use a clo­sure instead.

Save some typing with say

Perl v5.10’s bumper crop of enhance­ments also includ­ed the say func­tion, which han­dles the com­mon use case of printing a string or list of strings with a new­line. It’s less noise in your code and saves you four char­ac­ters. What’s not to love?

Note unimplemented code with ...

The ... ellip­sis state­ment (col­lo­qui­al­ly ​“yada-​yada”) gives you an easy place­hold­er for yet-​to-​be-​implemented code. It pars­es OK but will throw an excep­tion if exe­cut­ed. Hopefully, your test cov­er­age (or at least sta­t­ic analy­sis) will catch it before your users do.

Loop and enumerate arrays with each, keys, and values

The each, keys, and values func­tions have always been able to oper­ate on hash­es. Perl v5.12 and above make them work on arrays, too. The lat­ter two are main­ly for con­sis­ten­cy, but you can use each to iter­ate over an array’s indices and val­ues at the same time:

while (my ($index, $value) = each @array) {
    ...
}

This can be prob­lem­at­ic in non-​trivial loops, but I’ve found it help­ful in quick scripts and one-liners.

delete local hash (and array) entries

Ever need­ed to delete an entry from a hash (e.g, an envi­ron­ment vari­able from %ENV or a sig­nal han­dler from %SIG) just inside a block? Perl v5.12 lets you do that with delete local.

Paired hash slices

Jumping for­ward to 2014’s Perl v5.20, the new %foo{'bar', 'baz'} syn­tax enables you to slice a sub­set of a hash with its keys and val­ues intact. Very help­ful for cherry-​picking or aggre­gat­ing many hash­es into one. For example:

my %args = (
    verbose => 1,
    name    => 'Mark',
    extra   => 'pizza',
);
# don't frob the pizza
$my_object->frob( %args{ qw(verbose name) };

Paired array slices

Not to be left out, you can also slice arrays in the same way, in this case return­ing indices and values:

my @letters = 'a' .. 'z';
my @subset_kv = %letters[16, 5, 18, 12];
# @subset_kv is now (16, 'p', 5, 'e', 18, 'r', 12, 'l')

More readable dereferencing

Perl v5.20 intro­duced and v5.24 de-​experimentalized a more read­able post­fix deref­er­enc­ing syn­tax for nav­i­gat­ing nest­ed data struc­tures. Instead of using {braces} or smoosh­ing sig­ils to the left of iden­ti­fiers, you can use a post­fixed sigil-and-star:

push @$array_ref,    1, 2, 3;  # noisy
push @{$array_ref},  1, 2, 3;  # a little easier
push $array_ref->@*, 1, 2, 3;  # read from left to right

So much of web devel­op­ment is sling­ing around and pick­ing apart com­pli­cat­ed data struc­tures via JSON, so I wel­come any­thing like this to reduce the cog­ni­tive load.

when as a statement modifier

Starting in Perl v5.12, you can use the exper­i­men­tal switch fea­ture​’s when key­word as a post­fix mod­i­fi­er. For example:

for ($foo) {
    $a =  1 when /^abc/;
    $a = 42 when /^dna/;
    ...
}

But I don’t rec­om­mend when, given, or given​’s smart­match oper­a­tions as they were ret­conned as exper­i­ments in 2013’s Perl v5.18 and have remained so due to their tricky behav­ior. I wrote about some alter­na­tives using sta­ble syn­tax back in February.

Simple class inheritance with use parent

Sometimes in old­er object-​oriented Perl code, you’ll see use base as a prag­ma to estab­lish inher­i­tance from anoth­er class. Older still is the direct manip­u­la­tion of the package’s spe­cial @ISA array. In most cas­es, both should be avoid­ed in favor of use parent, which was added to core in Perl v5.10.1.

Mind you, if you’re fol­low­ing the Perl object-​oriented tutorial’s advice and have select­ed an OO sys­tem from CPAN, use its sub­class­ing mech­a­nism if it has one. Moose, Moo, and Class::Accessor’s ​“antlers” mode all pro­vide an extends func­tion; Object::Pad pro­vides an :isa attribute on its class key­word.

Test for class membership with the isa operator

As an alter­na­tive to the isa() method pro­vid­ed to all Perl objects, Perl v5.32 intro­duced the exper­i­men­tal isa infix oper­a­tor:

$my_object->isa('Local::MyClass')
# or
$my_object isa Local::MyClass

The lat­ter can take either a bare­word class name or string expres­sion, but more impor­tant­ly, it’s safer as it also returns false if the left argu­ment is unde­fined or isn’t a blessed object ref­er­ence. The old­er isa() method will throw an excep­tion in the for­mer case and might return true if called as a class method when $my_object is actu­al­ly a string of a class name that’s the same as or inher­its from isa()​’s argu­ment.

Lexical subroutines

Introduced in Perl v5.18 and de-​experimentalized in 2017’s Perl v5.26, you can now pre­cede sub dec­la­ra­tions with my, state, or our. One use of the first two is tru­ly pri­vate func­tions and meth­ods, as described in this 2018 Dave Jacoby blog and as part of Neil Bowers’ 2014 sur­vey of pri­vate func­tion techniques.

Subroutine signatures

I’ve writ­ten and pre­sent­ed exten­sive­ly about sig­na­tures and alter­na­tives over the past year, so I won’t repeat that here. I’ll just add that the Perl 5 Porters devel­op­ment mail­ing list has been mak­ing a con­cert­ed effort over the past month to hash out the remain­ing issues towards ren­der­ing this fea­ture non-​experimental. The pop­u­lar Mojolicious real-​time web frame­work also pro­vides a short­cut for enabling sig­na­tures and uses them exten­sive­ly in examples.

Indented here-​documents with <<~

Perl has had shell-​style ​“here-​document” syn­tax for embed­ding multi-​line strings of quot­ed text for a long time. Starting with Perl v5.26, you can pre­cede the delim­it­ing string with a ~ char­ac­ter and Perl will both allow the end­ing delim­iter to be indent­ed as well as strip inden­ta­tion from the embed­ded text. This allows for much more read­able embed­ded code such as runs of HTML and SQL. For example:

if ($do_query) {
    my $rows_deleted = $dbh->do(<<~'END_SQL', undef, 42);
      DELETE FROM table
      WHERE status = ?
      END_SQL
    say "$rows_deleted rows were deleted."; 
}

More readable chained comparisons

When I learned math in school, my teach­ers and text­books would often describe mul­ti­ple com­par­isons and inequal­i­ties as a sin­gle expres­sion. Unfortunately, when it came time to learn pro­gram­ming every com­put­er lan­guage I saw required them to be bro­ken up with a series of and (or &&) oper­a­tors. With Perl v5.32, this is no more:

if ( $x < $y && $y <= $z ) { ... }  # old way
if ( $x < $y <= $z )       { ... }  # new way

It’s more con­cise, less noisy, and more like what reg­u­lar math looks like.

Self-​documenting named regular expression captures

Perl’s expres­sive reg­u­lar expres­sion match­ing and text-​processing prowess are leg­endary, although overuse and poor use of read­abil­i­ty enhance­ments often turn peo­ple away from them (and Perl in gen­er­al). We often use reg­ex­ps for extract­ing data from a matched pat­tern. For example:

if ( /Time: (..):(..):(..)/ ) {  # parse out values
    say "$1 hours, $2 minutes, $3 seconds";
}

Named cap­ture groups, intro­duced in Perl v5.10, make both the pat­tern more obvi­ous and retrieval of its data less cryptic:

if ( /Time: (?<hours>..):(?<minutes>..):(?<seconds>..)/ ) {
    say "$+{hours} hours, $+{minutes} minutes, $+{seconds} seconds";
}

More readable regexp character classes

The /x reg­u­lar expres­sion mod­i­fi­er already enables bet­ter read­abil­i­ty by telling the pars­er to ignore most white­space, allow­ing you to break up com­pli­cat­ed pat­terns into spaced-​out groups and mul­ti­ple lines with code com­ments. With Perl v5.26 you can spec­i­fy /xx to also ignore spaces and tabs inside [brack­et­ed] char­ac­ter class­es, turn­ing this:

/[d-eg-i3-7]/
/[[email protected]"#$%^&*()=?<>']/

…into this:

/ [d-e g-i 3-7]/xx
/[ ! @ " # $ % ^ & * () = ? <> ' ]/xx

Set default regexp flags with the re pragma

Beginning with Perl v5.14, writ­ing use re '/xms'; (or any com­bi­na­tion of reg­u­lar expres­sion mod­i­fi­er flags) will turn on those flags until the end of that lex­i­cal scope, sav­ing you the trou­ble of remem­ber­ing them every time.

Non-​destructive substitution with s///r and tr///r

The s/// sub­sti­tu­tion and tr/// translit­er­a­tion oper­a­tors typ­i­cal­ly change their input direct­ly, often in con­junc­tion with the =~ bind­ing oper­a­tor:

s/foo/bar/;  # changes the first foo to bar in $_
$baz =~ s/foo/bar/;  # the same but in $baz

But what if you want to leave the orig­i­nal untouched, such as when pro­cess­ing an array of strings with a map? With Perl v5.14 and above, add the /r flag, which makes the sub­sti­tu­tion on a copy and returns the result:

my @changed = map { s/foo/bar/r } @original;

Unicode case-​folding with fc for better string comparisons

Unicode and char­ac­ter encod­ing in gen­er­al are com­pli­cat­ed beasts. Perl has han­dled Unicode since v5.6 and has kept pace with fix­es and sup­port for updat­ed stan­dards in the inter­ven­ing decades. If you need to test if two strings are equal regard­less of case, use the fc func­tion intro­duced in Perl v5.16.

Safer processing of file arguments with <<>>

The <> null file­han­dle or ​“dia­mond oper­a­tor” is often used in while loops to process input per line com­ing either from stan­dard input (e.g., piped from anoth­er pro­gram) or from a list of files on the com­mand line. Unfortunately, it uses a form of Perl’s open func­tion that inter­prets spe­cial char­ac­ters such as pipes (|) that would allow it to inse­cure­ly run exter­nal com­mands. Using the <<>> ​“dou­ble dia­mond” oper­a­tor intro­duced in Perl v5.22 forces open to treat all command-​line argu­ments as file names only. For old­er Perls, the per­lop doc­u­men­ta­tion rec­om­mends the ARGV::readonly CPAN mod­ule.

Safer loading of Perl libraries and modules from @INC

Perl v5.26 removed the abil­i­ty for all pro­grams to load mod­ules by default from the cur­rent direc­to­ry, clos­ing a secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty orig­i­nal­ly iden­ti­fied and fixed as CVE-​2016 – 1238 in pre­vi­ous ver­sions’ includ­ed scripts. If your code relied on this unsafe behav­ior, the v5.26 release notes include steps on how to adapt.

HTTP::Tiny simple HTTP/1.1 client included

To boot­strap access to CPAN on the web in the pos­si­ble absence of exter­nal tools like curl or wget, Perl v5.14 began includ­ing the HTTP::Tiny mod­ule. You can also use it in your pro­grams if you need a sim­ple web client with no dependencies.

Test2: The next generation of Perl testing frameworks

Forked and refac­tored from the ven­er­a­ble Test::Builder (the basis for the Test::More library that many are famil­iar with), Test2 was includ­ed in the core mod­ule library begin­ning with Perl v5.26. I’ve exper­i­ment­ed recent­ly with using the Test2::Suite CPAN library instead of Test::More and it looks pret­ty good. I’m also intrigued by Test2::Harness’ sup­port for thread­ing, fork­ing, and pre­load­ing mod­ules to reduce test run times.

Task::Kensho: Where to start for recommended Perl modules

This last item may not be includ­ed when you install Perl, but it’s where I turn for a col­lec­tion of well-​regarded CPAN mod­ules for accom­plish­ing a wide vari­ety of com­mon tasks span­ning from asyn­chro­nous pro­gram­ming to XML. Use it as a start­ing point or inter­ac­tive­ly select the mix of libraries appro­pri­ate to your project.

---

And there you have it: a selec­tion of 34 fea­tures, enhance­ments, and improve­ments for the first 34 years of Perl. What’s your favorite? Did I miss any­thing? Let me know in the comments.