NAME¶
perl585delta - 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 $_
- •
- Digest upgraded to version 1.08
- •
- Encode upgraded to version 2.01
- •
- FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
- •
- libnet upgraded to version 1.19
- •
- Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
- •
- Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
- •
- Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
- •
- Safe now works properly with Carp
- •
- Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
- •
- Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its
historical partial auto-quoting of command arguments can now be
disabled.
- •
- Test upgraded to version 1.25
- •
- Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
- •
- Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
- •
- Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
- •
- Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
Utility Changes¶
Perl's debugger¶
The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all
bar the last command from a saved command history.
h2ph¶
h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions
-- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has been
introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of the
glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote
h2ph's
documentation,
you may need to dicker with the files produced.
Installation and Configuration Improvements¶
Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
Selected Bug Fixes¶
- •
- The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a
bug. For example, in code such as
@a = sort ($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 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->
create() now returns "undef" in if thread creation 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 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.
Known Problems¶
The regression test
t/uni/class.t is now performing considerably more
tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.
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 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.