ActiveState - ActivePerl Features

Features

  • ActivePerl

    ActivePerl is the industry-standard Perl distribution, available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. Developers worldwide rely on ActivePerl's completeness and ease-of-use, while corporate users protect their infrastructure and stay competitive with quality-assured ActivePerl business solutions.

Current releases: ActivePerl 5.10.0, ActivePerl 5.8.8.822

ActivePerl is maintained on two tracks to support users who have moved to Perl 5.10, as well as those still using Perl 5.8.

  • Complete ActivePerl Package

    • Perl
      Binary of core Perl distribution
    • Perl Package Manager
      ActiveState's Perl extension installer and manager; allows for easy installation and management of modules and extensions
    • Installers
      A variety of installers are available for quick installation of ActivePerl:
      • Windows: Microsoft Windows (MSI) and ActiveState installer packages
      • Mac OS X: Disk image containing the installer package
      • Solaris: Sun and ActiveState installer packages
      • Linux: Redhat, Debian and ActiveState installer packages
      • HP-UX: ActiveState installer packages
      • AIX: ActiveState installer packages
    • Complete online documentation

  • ActivePerl 5.10.0

    Latest release: ActivePerl 5.10.0

    View the release notes.

    ActivePerl 5.10 Highlights

    • Switch statement and smart-match operator
    • Defined-or operator
    • Many improvements to regular expressions
      • engine is no longer recursive: no more stack overflows
      • recursive patterns
      • named capture groups
      • possessive quantifiers
      • backtracking control verbs
      • relative backreferences
    • new say() function
    • lexical $_ variable
    • _ prototype
    • UNITCHECK blocks
    • state variables
    • stacked filetest operators
    • byte-order modifiers for pack() and unpack()
    • Additional core modules
    • Many bug fixes
    • Extended documentation

  • ActivePerl 5.8.8.822

    Latest release: ActivePerl 5.8.8.822, based on Perl 5.8.8

    New in ActivePerl 5.8.8.822
    • Several hundred updates and bug fixes from the core Perl repository
    • All bundled modules have been updated to their latest released versions

    For a complete list of changes, see the release notes.

    ActivePerl 5.8 Highlights

    • Perl 5.8.8
      This series is based on core Perl 5.8.8. Significant changes that have occurred in 5.8 development are documented in perldelta.
    • Modules
      • The Win32 module now includes the Win32::IsAdminUser() function that checks if the current interpreter runs with Administrator privileges
      • Time::HiRes now provides high resolution on Windows
    • Windows 2003
      Support for Windows Server 2003
    • Large file access support
      • File manipulation facilities within perl can cope with files larger than 2GB or 4GB
      • Supported on all platforms
    • PPM
      PPM4 is now included as the default ppm utility
    • Unicode support

    ActivePerl 8xx series builds are not binary-compatible with the older 6xx and 5xx series builds. In particular, do not attempt to use extensions or PPM packages built for the 6xx and 5xx series builds with ActivePerl 8xx series builds and vice versa.