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Emacs comes with two different major modes to edit Perl code: perl-mode and cperl-mode.

perl-mode is somewhat stuck with the Perl syntax of 5.14, has less features, but a cleaner implementation. cperl-mode is up to date with Perl 5.38 and has deeper understanding of Perl syntax, but a somewhat arcane implementation, most of it written in the previous century.

With all due respect to TIMTOWTDI, maintaining two major modes turns out to be not enough fun in the long run, and last week Stefan Kangas opened a wishlist item to Making perl-mode.el obsolete.

The mail thread shows that some people prefer perl-mode because it is less "colorful" and intrusive than cperl-mode. Therefore, the idea is to enable cperl-mode to (optionally) look like and behave like perl-mode. That way, perl-mode.el can be obsoleted without making those users uncomfortable: perl-mode would continue to exist as a custom theme of cperl-mode.

Users of perl-mode are now encouraged to try cperl-mode, and to report bugs against cperl-mode where they prefer the behavior of perl-mode. This has already started. The "current" cperl-mode.el is available from the repository: cperl-mode.el and is supposed to work with Emacs 26 and newer.

Keep the reports going!

This article also appears on PerlMonks.