This article originally appeared in the August 4, 2008 issue of journal Government Computer News. Perl creator Larry Wall proclaimed during his yearly "State of the Onion" speech at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Conference that version 6 of Perl will constitute the world's first truly extensible programming language, enabling power users to enhance Perl with instructions, syntax, expressions, operators, and other features to fulfill their own requirements. "Perl 6 has no core, no keywords, no built-in operators," Wall said. "Everything that looks like an operator is actually defined by some grammatical rule or by a macro or by something that is added in." Perl 6's customization ability will be largely concealed from those using the language to perform basic functions, while more traditional enhancements will be offered in the standard edition to make programming less difficult. Wall and Perl developer Damian Conway presented some late additions to the language's feature set, including a naming scheme of new modules that will offer a placeholder to specify the module's version number, which will facilitate the concurrent operation of multiple module versions. Future versions of Perl 6 will be backward-compatible, at least to version 6, while the generation of regular expression statements has been streamlined through additional shortcuts. A friendlier set of error messages and a method for dividing work into parallel so they may be performed at the same time by multicore processors were also highlighted. (excerpt from ACM TechNews August 4, 2008).