C++0x learns some tricks from Perl

Perl 6 has been in the making for some time, but so has also the long awaited upgrade of C++, aka C++0x (Wikipedia). Now the Working Committee for C++0x has released their 1310 pages draft, i.e. the proposal for the new C++ standard (Download the .pdf here).

The list of proposed changes to the core language and its libraries is extensive, but some of the changes are particularly interesting for us Perl developers: C++0x is about to embrace some old-time favorite features from Perl! Assuming the proposed changes are voted into the new standard, C++ developers will in a few years be able to take advantage of these cool features:

1. The for_each keyword becomes part of the core language, to allow easy iteration over a function, of all elements of a sequence (see page 855). OK, not as cool as Perl's iteration over all elements of a list, but still quite useful.
2. The Perl workhorse associative arrays, better known as hashes, become part of the C++ standard library (see page 794). The proposal goes further than Perl 5's hashes, by defining 4 different hash types. The 'unordered set' hash type looks an awfully lot like a Perl list.
3. Regular expressions get their own, standardized library (see pages 1060-1095), where the well-known Perl functions s/// and m// find their equivalents in regex_replace, regex_search and regex_match .

The 1300 pages draft is a brick, but when the votes have been counted and the C++ compilers have been upgraded in 2-3 years time, C++ will be a more powerful language.