ActiveState announced the release of ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1001, the complete, ready-to-install Perl distribution for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and AIX. Today also marks the 20th Anniversary of Perl, introduced on December 18, 1987, by Larry Wall.

Millions of developers worldwide rely on ActivePerl. Complete and ready-to-install, the free ActivePerl distribution includes core Perl, popular modules, the Perl Package Manager (PPM), and complete documentation. The ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1001 is available now.

"We have been looking forward to this release of ActivePerl 5.10.0 for some time, and with the 20th Anniversary of Perl, the timing couldn't be better", says Jan Dubois, Senior Perl Developer at ActiveState "There are so many new features like the new switch statement and the regexp enhancement, and Beta feedback from the ActiveState Perl community has been really positive".

An exciting new feature of ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1001 is the new smart-matching operator, which compares two expressions with each other. This provides much more concise syntax for many matching operations. It also helps writing polymorphic functions working on many different argument types.

Also included in this release is the new switch statement that will smart-match a single expression repeatedly against a list of other expression until one matches. The switch statement allows the programmer to write complicated decision tree logic in a straight forward manner.

ActivePerl 5.10 is available now for free download at www.ActiveState.com/store/activeperl. For a full description of the new features, visit www.ActiveState.com/activeperl.