note doom Really, that's an excellent summary, much more readable than the perl5 delta. <P> I hadn't realized that unicode handling had been sped up a bit: that sounds like one of the more practical advantages. I know at least one place that's still running on 5.6 perl because they saw a 30% slowdown in their attempt at upgrading to perl 5.8 (they didn't know about "use bytes", but cut them some slack, that's an easy thing to miss). <P> My personal favorite new feature would be the improvements to the regular expressions: it's now possible to do recursive regexps in a much neater way than the experimental features in 5.8 (no, I don't actually have a <i>use</i> for this, but I still think it's really neat...). <P> 654042 654086