Is Perl 6 backward-compatible with Perl 5?
No. Perl 5 has been a popular and successful language and continues to be as Perl 6 develops. However, there are fundamental issues that need to be addressed in the syntax of the language, and staying backwards-compatible with Perl 5 syntax would have greatly restricted the improvements that were possible. Additionally, the Perl 5 interpreter has grown over the years and become difficult to maintain and add to. Therefore a ground-up design and implementation was required. There are a lot of things that are good about Perl 5, and a lot of the things that are good about it have been retained. Perl 6 is still very much Perl: it’s still great for solving the problems you may have used Perl 5 to solve as well as for other problems that Perl 5 was not so well suited to.
