PERL585DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL585DELTA(1) #
PERL585DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL585DELTA(1)
NNAAMMEE #
perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
DDEESSCCRRIIPPTTIIOONN #
This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the
5.8.5 release.
IInnccoommppaattiibbllee CChhaannggeess There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
CCoorree EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss 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.
MMoodduulleess aanndd PPrraaggmmaattaa • 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 $_
• Digest upgraded to version 1.08
• Encode upgraded to version 2.01
• FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
• libnet upgraded to version 1.19
• Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
• Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
• Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
• Safe now works properly with Carp
• Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
• Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial
auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled.
• Test upgraded to version 1.25
• Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
• Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
• Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
• Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
UUttiilliittyy CChhaannggeess PPeerrll’’ss ddeebbuuggggeerr The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last command from a saved command history.
hh22pphh _h_2_p_h is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions – basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote _h_2_p_h’s documentation, _y_o_u _m_a_y _n_e_e_d _t_o _d_i_c_k_e_r _w_i_t_h _t_h_e _f_i_l_e_s _p_r_o_d_u_c_e_d.
IInnssttaallllaattiioonn aanndd CCoonnffiigguurraattiioonn IImmpprroovveemmeennttss Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
SSeelleecctteedd BBuugg FFiixxeess • The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example, in code such as
@a = sort ($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 endianness.
• 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 permission 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->ccrreeaattee(()) now returns
"undef" in if thread creation fails instead of crashing perl.
NNeeww oorr CChhaannggeedd DDiiaaggnnoossttiiccss • 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.
CChhaannggeedd IInntteerrnnaallss 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.
KKnnoowwnn PPrroobblleemmss The regression test _t_/_u_n_i_/_c_l_a_s_s_._t is now performing considerably more tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.
PPllaattffoorrmm SSppeecciiffiicc PPrroobblleemmss This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
RReeppoorrttiinngg BBuuggss 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 ppeerrllbbuugg 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/
SSEEEE AALLSSOO #
The _C_h_a_n_g_e_s file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The _I_N_S_T_A_L_L file for how to build Perl.
The _R_E_A_D_M_E file for general stuff.
The _A_r_t_i_s_t_i_c and _C_o_p_y_i_n_g files for copyright information.
perl v5.36.3 2006-03-28 PERL585DELTA(1)