perl585delta(1)

1PERL585DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL585DELTA(1)
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NAME

6       perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the
10       5.8.5 release.
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Incompatible Changes

13       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
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Core Enhancements

16       Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on
17       the intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now
18       refer to user-defined character classes from within other user defined
19       character classes.
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Modules and Pragmata

22       ·   Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting
23           should now be anomaly free - it will always print out line number
24           information.
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26       ·   CGI upgraded to version 3.05
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28       ·   charnames now avoids clobbering $_
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30       ·   Digest upgraded to version 1.08
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32       ·   Encode upgraded to version 2.01
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34       ·   FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
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36       ·   libnet upgraded to version 1.19
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38       ·   Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
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40       ·   Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
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42       ·   Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
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44       ·   Safe now works properly with Carp
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46       ·   Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
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48       ·   Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical par‐
49           tial auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled.
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51       ·   Test upgraded to version 1.25
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53       ·   Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
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55       ·   Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
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57       ·   Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
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59       ·   Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
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Utility Changes

62       Perl's debugger
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64       The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and
65       rerunning all bar the last command from a saved command history.
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67       h2ph
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69       h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions
70       -- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has
71       been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions
72       of the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote h2ph's docu‐
73       mentation, you may need to dicker with the files produced.
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Installation and Configuration Improvements

76       Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
77

Selected Bug Fixes

79       ·   The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For
80           example, in code such as
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82               @a = sort ($b, @a)
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84           the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
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86       ·   The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4
87           could give spurious warnings. This has been fixed.
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89       ·   Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless)
90           UTF-16 scripts of either endianness.
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92       ·   Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and
93           would often cause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The
94           known bug is now fixed.
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96       ·   Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with
97           "substr" have been fixed.
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99       ·   Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory
100           that it did not have permission to open it would return immedi‐
101           ately, leading to unexpected truncation of the list of results.
102           This has been fixed, to be consistent with Unix shells' globbing
103           behaviour.
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105       ·   Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This
106           was caused by a poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning rou‐
107           tines, which has now been fixed.
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109       ·   The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if
110           OS-level thread creation had failed. threads->create() now returns
111           "undef" in if thread creation fails instead of crashing perl.
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New or Changed Diagnostics

114       ·   Perl -V has several improvements
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116           ·   correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code
117               snippets or other characters that used to confuse it.
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119           ·   arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines
120               of output.
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122           ·   a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator,
123               allowing embedding of queries into shell commands.
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125           ·   a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response,
126               allowing mapping to any name.
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128       ·   When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a sec‐
129           ond line suggesting that the user use the "-S" flag:
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131               $ perl5.8.5 missing.pl
132               Can't open perl script "missing.pl": No such file or directory.
133               Use -S to search $PATH for it.
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Changed Internals

136       The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine
137       are now built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data
138       files, instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed
139       Perl source tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the lay‐
140       out of files inside lib/unicore has changed.
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Known Problems

143       The regression test t/uni/class.t is now performing considerably more
144       tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.
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Platform Specific Problems

147       This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
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Reporting Bugs

150       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
151       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
152       database at http://bugs.perl.org.  There may also be information at
153       http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
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155       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug pro‐
156       gram included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
157       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
158       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
159       the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
160       http://bugs.perl.org/
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