perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
This document describes differences between the 5.8.4
release and the 5.8.5 release.
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
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.
o Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message
reporting should now be anomaly free - it will always
print out line number information.
o CGI upgraded to version 3.05
o charnames now avoids clobbering $_
o Digest upgraded to version 1.08
o Encode upgraded to version 2.01
o FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
o libnet upgraded to version 1.19
o Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
o Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
o Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
o Safe now works properly with Carp
o Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
o Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its
historical partial auto-quoting of command arguments
can now be disabled.
o Test upgraded to version 1.25
o Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
o Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
o Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
o Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
Perl's debugger
The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by
restarting and rerunning all bar the last command from a
saved command history.
h2ph
h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C
inline functions -- basically, the inline functions that
look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal
with some of the headers of the newest versions of the
glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote h2ph's
documentation, you may need to dicker with the files pro-
duced.
Installation and Configuration Improvements [Toc] [Back] Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
o The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had
a bug. For example, in code such as
@a = sort ($b, @a)
the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
o The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced
in 5.8.4 could give spurious warnings. This has
been fixed.
o Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked
and (BOMless) UTF-16 scripts of either endianness.
o 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.
o Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode
strings with "substr" have been fixed.
o 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.
o 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.
o The internals of the ithreads implementation were not
checking if OS-level thread creation had failed.
threads->create() now returns "undef" in if thead creation
fails instead of crashing perl.
New or Changed Diagnostics [Toc] [Back] o Perl -V has several improvements
o correctly outputs local patch names that contain
embedded code snippets or other characters that
used to confuse it.
o arguments to -V that look like regexps will give
multiple lines of output.
o a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'
terminator, allowing embedding of queries into
shell commands.
o a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the
response, allowing mapping to any name.
o 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.
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.
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.
Platform Specific Problems [Toc] [Back] This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
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 [email protected] to be analysed by the Perl
porting team. You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs
at http://bugs.perl.org/
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.
perl v5.8.5 2002-11-06 4 [ Back ] | 