Today represents exactly twenty years since the very first release of the Perl programming language! On 18th December 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1.0. Twenty years on there has been another release of Perl: Perl 5.10. Five years in development, Perl 5.10 makes some significant advances on the Perl 5.8 series both in terms of performance and features, while maintaining backwards compatibility with Perl 5.8.

The regex engine, always a strength of Perl, has seen a whole raft of improvements. Some of these include performance enhancements, and others are new features; if is now, for example, much easier to write recursive regexes for matching nested structures. You can also name captures rather than just referring to them by number, which will bring readability enhancements.

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