PERL585DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL585DELTA(1)
NAME
perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the 5.8.5 release.
Incompatible Changes
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
Core Enhancements
Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the intersection of two Unicode
character classes. You can also now refer to user-defined character classes from within other user
defined character classes.
Modules and Pragmata
Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now be anomaly free - it
will always print out line number information.
CGI upgraded to version 3.05
charnames now avoids clobbering $_
Digest upgraded to version 1.08
Encode upgraded to version 2.01
FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
libnet upgraded to version 1.19
Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
Safe now works properly with Carp
Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial auto-quoting of command
arguments can now be disabled.
Test upgraded to version 1.25
Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
Utility Changes
Perl's debugger
The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last command
from a saved command history.
h2ph
h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions -- basically, the inline
functions that look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the
newest versions of the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote h2ph's documentation, you
may need to dicker with the files produced.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
Selected Bug Fixes
The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example, in code such as
@a = sort ($b, @a)
the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give spurious warnings.
This has been fixed.
Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16 scripts of either endi-anness. endianness.
anness.
Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often cause warnings at
interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed.
Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with "substr" have been fixed.
Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it did not have permis-sion permission
sion to open it would return immediately, leading to unexpected truncation of the list of
results. This has been fixed, to be consistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour.
Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused by a poor hashing
algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now been fixed.
The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level thread creation had
failed. threads->create() now returns "undef" in if thread creation fails instead of crashing
perl.
New or Changed Diagnostics
Perl -V has several improvements
correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets or other characters
that used to confuse it.
arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.
a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';' terminator, allowing embedding of queries
into shell commands.
a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to any name.
When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line suggesting that the
user use the "-S" flag:
$ perl5.8.5 missing.pl
Can't open perl script "missing.pl": No such file or directory.
Use -S to search $PATH for it.
Changed Internals
The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are now built at build time
from the supplied Unicode consortium data files, instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the
compressed Perl source tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the layout of files inside
lib/unicore has changed.
Known Problems
The regression test t/uni/class.t is now performing considerably more tests, and can take several
minutes to run even on a fast machine.
Platform Specific Problems
This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
Reporting Bugs
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the
comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org There may also be
information at http://www.perl.org the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release.
Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the
output of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.
You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/
SEE ALSO
The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
perl v5.8.8 2006-01-07 PERL585DELTA(1)
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