They should skip "Perl 6" and go directly to "Perl 7", like Windows that skip "Windows 9" to avoid confussion.

I remember the "skipping version 9" in windows was due to many developers using "startsWith(os.version(), "9")" (pseudocode obviously) to detect windows 95/99 and therefore they avoid using version 9 in order to remain compatible, but I might remember wrong.

Yes, it is a totaly different type of confussion. More cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning

Unfortunately, "Perl 7" was a "thing" in the discussions before the name change. IMO, going to "Perl 32" makes more sense, as it actually reflects the current version numbering scheme. Or refer to the year: Perl 2020.

"Perl 32? But I have a 64 bit processor!"

If Oracle had "bought" Perl they'd probably renamed it to Perl 32 by now and sued everyone else for using sygils.

The current numbering scheme uses odd minor version numbers for development versions and even for stable, just like Linux used to, until Linus got fed up with 2.6 after 8 years. Now it gets a bump whenever the minor version sticks too much.

https://askubuntu.com/a/843247

PHP did the same thing, skipping from 5 directly to 7 because PHP 6 ended up being a dead-end. It was pretty painless (at least as far as I could see).

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That is not actually the same thing.

PHP 6 was thrown away never to be seen from again, because it was seen as bad.

Perl 6 was renamed because both Perl 5 and Perl 6 are significantly different active languages.

If Perl went to 7 it could indicate to some that 6 was bad in the same way. That is it would trade one confusion for another.

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If Perl truly wants to go beyond 5, it should make a major step.

Either by going to the subversion (32), or the year (2020).