man pages section 1: User Commands

Exit Print View

Updated: July 2014
 
 

perl585delta (1)

Name

perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5

Synopsis

Please see following description for synopsis

Description




Perl Programmers Reference Guide                  PERL585DELTA(1)



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
     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



perl v5.12.5         Last change: 2012-09-11                    1






Perl Programmers Reference Guide                  PERL585DELTA(1)



     o   Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40

     o   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
     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



perl v5.12.5         Last change: 2012-09-11                    2






Perl Programmers Reference Guide                  PERL585DELTA(1)



         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 thread
         creation fails instead of crashing perl.

New or Changed Diagnostics
     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.

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.

Platform Specific Problems
     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.



perl v5.12.5         Last change: 2012-09-11                    3






Perl Programmers Reference Guide                  PERL585DELTA(1)



     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/


ATTRIBUTES
     See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following
     attributes:

     +---------------+------------------+
     |ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE  |
     +---------------+------------------+
     |Availability   | runtime/perl-512 |
     +---------------+------------------+
     |Stability      | Uncommitted      |
     +---------------+------------------+
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.



NOTES
     This software was built from source available at
     https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland.  The original
     community source was downloaded from
     http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.5.tar.bz2

     Further information about this software can be found on the
     open source community website at http://www.perl.org/.













perl v5.12.5         Last change: 2012-09-11                    4