ActivePerl-5.12.4.1205- 32 bit

ActivePerl-5.12.4.1205-(32 bit)

What is Active Perl ?.
ActivePerl is a distribution of Perl from ActiveState (formerly part of Sophos) for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. A few main editions are available, including: standard (free), enterprise and OEM. It includes a version of thePerl package manager (PPM) for installing packages from CPAN, etc.

Features:

Unicode improvements

Perl 5.12 now bundles Unicode 5.2. Perl now supports all Unicode properties for developers doing globalization work in multiple languages. The implementation has been improved to provide access to every Unicode character property, including the loose matching rules for property names, and definition of all Unicode-defined synonyms for property names and values. The "feature" pragma now supports the new "unicode_strings" feature:

use feature "unicode_strings";

This will turn on Unicode semantics for all case changing operations on strings, regardless of how they are currently encoded internally.

Y2038 compliance

The built-in date and time function now all work correctly past the year 2038 even when Perl is compiled with only 32-bit support. With previous versions of Perl for 32-bit Unix systems, it could only represent dates up to the year 2038, after which it wraps around back to 1970. It is especially important for financial services organizations that use Perl for applications such as mortgage and insurance contracts that run for 30 years or longer. This has been updated within the internal functions of 32-bit Perl 5.12.

qr overloading

It is now possible to overload how objects are turned into regular expressions when they appear on the right hand side of the =~ operator, or when they are interpolated into a regexp.

Pluggable keywords

The experimental keyword plugin mechanism allows extensions to cleanly hook into the Perl parser to define new kinds of keyword-headed expressions and compound statements. The syntax following the keyword is defined entirely by the extension. This feature facilitates the development of domain specific languages (DSLs) within Perl by allowing a completely non-Perl sub-language to be parsed inline, with the correct ops cleanly generated. The word "experimental" signifies that this feature may be changed significantly, or even be removed completely, in a future release of Perl.

Experimental \N regexp escape

The new \N regex escape works like the inversion of \n, matching any character that is not a newline, and (unlike the '.' meta-character) is not affected by the "single line" regexp modifies /s.