PERL585DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL585DELTA(1)NAMEperl585delta - 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 $_
+ Digest upgraded to version 1.08
+ Encode upgraded to version 2.01
+ FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
+ libnet upgraded to version 1.19
+ Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
+ Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
+ Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
+ Safe now works properly with Carp
+ Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
+ Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its his-
torical partial auto-quoting of command arguments can
now be disabled.
+ Test upgraded to version 1.25
+ Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
+ Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
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+ Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
+ Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
Utility Changes
Perl's debugger
The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restart-
ing and rerunning all bar the last command from a saved com-
mand history.
h2ph
h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C
inline functions -- basically, the inline functions that
look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal with
some of the headers of the newest versions of the glibc. The
standard warning still applies; to quote h2ph's documenta-
tion, you may need to dicker with the files produced.
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
Selected Bug Fixes
+ The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a
bug. For example, in code such as
@a = sort ($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 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 trunca-
tion 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
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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 crea-
tion 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 sup-
plied Unicode consortium data files, instead of being
shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source tar-
ball 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 consid-
erably 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
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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.
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