The Perl Foundation have announced version 5.8 of Larry Wall's popular scripting language, Perl, which includes improved Unicode support.

The release manager, Jarkko Hietaniemi, said: "Personally, I'm most excited about the enhanced Unicode support because that gives us both better backward compatibility with legacy data and an unprecedented opportunity to promote Perl in Asian and other markets that use non-Latin character sets."

The improved Unicode and character encoding facilities include support for Unicode 3.2.0, Unicode regular expressions and support for CJK encodings.

The Perl Foundation see Perl as a key tool for processing XML, "Because the XML 1.0 specification requires that all XML processors understand Unicode, Perl's improved Unicode support also makes it a natural choice for dealing with the data formats of the future."

More information:

• The Perl Foundation
• Perl 5.8 changes list
• Perl Foundation press release
• Perl 5.8 release announcement