perl586delta(1)

1PERL586DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL586DELTA(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       perl586delta - what is new for perl v5.8.6
7

DESCRIPTION

9       This document describes differences between the 5.8.5 release and the
10       5.8.6 release.
11

Incompatible Changes

13       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.5.
14

Core Enhancements

16       The perl interpreter is now more tolerant of UTF-16-encoded scripts.
17
18       On Win32, Perl can now use non-IFS compatible LSPs, which allows Perl
19       to work in conjunction with firewalls such as McAfee Guardian. For full
20       details see the file README.win32, particularly if you're running
21       Win95.
22

Modules and Pragmata

24       •   With the "base" pragma, an intermediate class with no fields used
25           to messes up private fields in the base class. This has been fixed.
26
27       •   Cwd upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new PathTools
28           distribution)
29
30       •   Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.03
31
32       •   File::Spec upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new PathTools
33           distribution)
34
35       •   Encode upgraded to version 2.08
36
37       •   ExtUtils::MakeMaker remains at version 6.17, as later stable
38           releases currently available on CPAN have some issues with core
39           modules on some core platforms.
40
41       •   I18N::LangTags upgraded to version 0.35
42
43       •   Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.73
44
45       •   Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.13
46
47       •   MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.05
48
49       •   POSIX::sigprocmask function can now retrieve the current signal
50           mask without also setting it.
51
52       •   Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.65
53

Utility Changes

55       Perl has a new -dt command-line flag, which enables threads support in
56       the debugger.
57

Performance Enhancements

59       "reverse sort ..." is now optimized to sort in reverse, avoiding the
60       generation of a temporary intermediate list.
61
62       "for (reverse @foo)" now iterates in reverse, avoiding the generation
63       of a temporary reversed list.
64

Selected Bug Fixes

66       The regexp engine is now more robust when given invalid utf8 input, as
67       is sometimes generated by buggy XS modules.
68
69       "foreach" on threads::shared array used to be able to crash Perl. This
70       bug has now been fixed.
71
72       A regexp in "STDOUT"'s destructor used to coredump, because the regexp
73       pad was already freed. This has been fixed.
74
75       "goto &" is now more robust - bugs in deep recursion and chained "goto
76       &" have been fixed.
77
78       Using "delete" on an array no longer leaks memory. A "pop" of an item
79       from a shared array reference no longer causes a leak.
80
81       "eval_sv()" failing a taint test could corrupt the stack - this has
82       been fixed.
83
84       On platforms with 64 bit pointers numeric comparison operators used to
85       erroneously compare the addresses of references that are overloaded,
86       rather than using the overloaded values. This has been fixed.
87
88       "read" into a UTF8-encoded buffer with an offset off the end of the
89       buffer no longer mis-calculates buffer lengths.
90
91       Although Perl has promised since version 5.8 that "sort()" would be
92       stable, the two cases "sort {$b cmp $a}" and "sort {$b <=> $a}" could
93       produce non-stable sorts.   This is corrected in perl5.8.6.
94
95       Localising $^D no longer generates a diagnostic message about valid -D
96       flags.
97

New or Changed Diagnostics

99       For -t and -T,
100          Too late for "-T" option has been changed to the more informative
101          "-T" is on the #! line, it must also be used on the command line
102

Changed Internals

104       From now on all applications embedding perl will behave as if perl were
105       compiled with -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV.  See "Environment access" in the
106       INSTALL file for details.
107
108       Most "C" source files now have comments at the top explaining their
109       purpose, which should help anyone wishing to get an overview of the
110       implementation.
111

New Tests

113       There are significantly more tests for the "B" suite of modules.
114

Reporting Bugs

116       If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
117       recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
118       database at http://bugs.perl.org.  There may also be information at
119       http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
120
121       If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
122       program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
123       tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
124       of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
125       the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
126       http://bugs.perl.org/
127