But this kind of version skip has some precedents. At least the Winamp "we messed up 3 so badly that we're going to skip a version" 5, comes to my mind.

I'll begin with the standard disclaimer that I'm a bit out of touch with the Perl community (but that won't stop me from commenting). Technically, this has been done before with the abandonment of ECMAScript 4 in favor of skipping from ECMAScript 3 to ECMAScript 5.

Is perl 6 messed up? I haven't had the time to look at it, but it doesn't seem to.

It would have to get substantially less vapor-y to even qualify as "messed up".

I didn't want to imply that. It was only the reason for winamp version skipping.

I think that it could be explained away in that Perl 6 was an experiment with enough major changes that it never took hold, and that Perl 7 was moving the language forward rather than waiting for Perl 6 to gain widespread adoption.

However once (if) Perl 6 does come out and take hold I still think this would cause confusion.

Explaining it is also a solution to the 'problem' they are trying to solve here, namely that 5.x seems 'dead' and 6.x seems 'alive'. A little explanation that the 5.x branch will continue to exist seems a lot easier (and less confusing).

What really needs to happen is that Perl 6 needs to be scrapped or renamed to something else. At this point there are so many major changes, that it can't really be called Perl anymore.

It certainly can't be any worse than all the name changes Delphi has gone through over the years.

Anybody have any recent experience with Delphi?

"With Delphi XE3... you write an application once and compile natively for both Windows and Mac – including 64-bit Windows and Windows 8, Mac OS X Mountain Lion and earlier Windows and Mac versions from a single codebase. " http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/mac-osx-developme...

If they go with Perl 7, what will they call Perl 6 when it needs a new version?

Perl 8, of course.