Perl 5 version history

Perl is a open-source programming language whose first version, 1.0, was released in 1987. The following table contains the Perl 5 version history, showing its release versions. Not all versions are covered yet.

Table

Color	Meaning
Green	Current Release
Red	Legacy Release

Version number	Release Date	Links	Changes
5.26.0	May 30, 2017	Full release notes	For security reasons, the current directory (".") is no longer included by default at the end of the module search path (@INC) Lexical subroutines are no longer experimental Indented Here-documents New regular expression modifiers and capture groups Unicode 9.0 is now supported Perl can now do default collation in UTF-8 locales on platforms that support it
5.24.0	May 8, 2016	Full release notes	Unicode 8.0 is now supported. New line break boundary in regular expressions Extended Bracketed Character Classes work in UTF-8 locales More explicit definitions for integer shifting Reordered precision arguments for printf and sprintf More fields provided to sigaction callback
5.22.0	June 1, 2015	Full release notes	Unicode 7.0 is now supported. The historical modules CGI.pm and Module::Build were removed from the core distribution. The double diamond operator Disambiguated bitwise operators (as an experimental feature) Variable aliasing (as an experimental feature)
5.20.0	May 27, 2014	Full release notes	Subroutine signatures (as an experimental feature) Postfix dereferencing (as an experimental feature) Key/value slice syntax
5.18.0	May 18, 2013	Full release notes	regular expression character set operations (as an experimental feature) lexical subroutines (as an experimental feature)
5.16.0	May 20, 2012	Full release notes	__SUB__ for currently-executing subroutine encoding-disambiguated eval
5.14.0	May 14, 2011	Full release notes	Unicode 6.0 is supported Unicode semantics applied to all strings Non-destructive substitution (s///r) Re-entrant regular expressions Automagical dereference by built-ins (later removed)
5.003_1	July 31, 1996	Full release notes
5.003	June 25, 1996	Full release notes	Security fixes Bug fixes
5.002_1	March 25, 1996	Full release notes	EMBED namespace changes are now used by default Fixed several bugs in the core Added two new magic variables: $^E and $^O A mechanism was added to allow listing of locally applied patches in the perl -v output Miscellaneous minor corrections and updates were made to the documentation Extensive updates made to the OS/2 and VMS ports Other miscellaneous changes and bug fixes
5.002	February 29, 1996	Full release notes	Added a new feature: Prototypes Extensive upgrades to nearly all of Perl's modules Massive changes to both the configure and build systems Bug fixes
5.001	March 13, 1995	Full release notes	Added two new hooks: $SIG{__WARN__} and $SIG{__DIE__} Added closures Now counts imported routines as "defined" for redef warnings Bug fixes
5.000	October 17, 1994	Full release notes	Near complete rewrite of the interpreter Added Objects Added References Added lexical (my) variables Added modules which allow extending the language without modifying the interpreter