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

74       Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
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Selected Bug Fixes

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

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

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

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

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

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