When developing Perl 5.6, the decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects; after 5.005_63, the next version became 5.5.640, with plans for development versions to have odd numbers and stable versions to have even numbers.
在开发Perl 5.6的时候，开发组决定把版本名称作成类似其它开源项目的；在5.005_63版之后，下一个版本变成了5.5.640，计划是开发版本用奇数，稳定版本用偶数。