Larry Wall's fifth State of the Onion speech, summarized at
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/07/25/onion.html, spends a lot of time
on Perl6. There's some interesting stuff:

- the 'sub' keyword on closures will not be required, so they'll look
  a bit more like Ruby blocks. (In fact, Perl will actually be shorter
  than Ruby here, as it won't need the 'proc' method to objectify the
  block.

      $a = { printf "Hi\n" };

  vs

      a = proc { printf "Hi\n" }

- a favorite for discussion in this group. Parameters to closures will
  be identified with a unique flag character, currently thought to be
  '^'. If you see $^a, you're looking at a closure parameter.

- the Perl6 'case' statement will go something like.

      given $x {
      when 1:
         ..
      when 2:
         ..
      }

- modules will support versioning and author information as part of
  their naming.

- Perl will have a parser written in Perl

and a lot more. Follow the link for details (and have a look at
apocalypse one and two while you're there).


Dave