mingw/html/pod/perl585delta.html

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  13 <big><strong><span class="block">&nbsp;perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5</span></strong></big>
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  17 <p><a name="__index__"></a></p>
  18 <!-- INDEX BEGIN -->
  19
  20 <ul>
  21
  22         <li><a href="#name">NAME</a></li>
  23         <li><a href="#description">DESCRIPTION</a></li>
  24         <li><a href="#incompatible_changes">Incompatible Changes</a></li>
  25         <li><a href="#core_enhancements">Core Enhancements</a></li>
  26         <li><a href="#modules_and_pragmata">Modules and Pragmata</a></li>
  27         <li><a href="#utility_changes">Utility Changes</a></li>
  28         <ul>
  29
  30                 <li><a href="#perl_s_debugger">Perl's debugger</a></li>
  31                 <li><a href="#h2ph">h2ph</a></li>
  32         </ul>
  33
  34         <li><a href="#installation_and_configuration_improvements">Installation and Configuration Improvements</a></li>
  35         <li><a href="#selected_bug_fixes">Selected Bug Fixes</a></li>
  36         <li><a href="#new_or_changed_diagnostics">New or Changed Diagnostics</a></li>
  37         <li><a href="#changed_internals">Changed Internals</a></li>
  38         <li><a href="#known_problems">Known Problems</a></li>
  39         <li><a href="#platform_specific_problems">Platform Specific Problems</a></li>
  40         <li><a href="#reporting_bugs">Reporting Bugs</a></li>
  41         <li><a href="#see_also">SEE ALSO</a></li>
  42 </ul>
  43 <!-- INDEX END -->
  44
  45 <hr />
  46 <p>
  47 </p>
  48 <h1><a name="name">NAME</a></h1>
  49 <p>perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5</p>
  50 <p>
  51 </p>
  52 <hr />
  53 <h1><a name="description">DESCRIPTION</a></h1>
  54 <p>This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and
  55 the 5.8.5 release.</p>
  56 <p>
  57 </p>
  58 <hr />
  59 <h1><a name="incompatible_changes">Incompatible Changes</a></h1>
  60 <p>There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.</p>
  61 <p>
  62 </p>
  63 <hr />
  64 <h1><a name="core_enhancements">Core Enhancements</a></h1>
  65 <p>Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the
  66 intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer to
  67 user-defined character classes from within other user defined character
  68 classes.</p>
  69 <p>
  70 </p>
  71 <hr />
  72 <h1><a name="modules_and_pragmata">Modules and Pragmata</a></h1>
  73 <ul>
  74 <li>
  75 <p>Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now
  76 be anomaly free - it will always print out line number information.</p>
  77 </li>
  78 <li>
  79 <p>CGI upgraded to version 3.05</p>
  80 </li>
  81 <li>
  82 <p>charnames now avoids clobbering $_</p>
  83 </li>
  84 <li>
  85 <p>Digest upgraded to version 1.08</p>
  86 </li>
  87 <li>
  88 <p>Encode upgraded to version 2.01</p>
  89 </li>
  90 <li>
  91 <p>FileCache upgraded to version 1.04</p>
  92 </li>
  93 <li>
  94 <p>libnet upgraded to version 1.19</p>
  95 </li>
  96 <li>
  97 <p>Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28</p>
  98 </li>
  99 <li>
 100 <p>Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13</p>
 101 </li>
 102 <li>
 103 <p>Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57</p>
 104 </li>
 105 <li>
 106 <p>Safe now works properly with Carp</p>
 107 </li>
 108 <li>
 109 <p>Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14</p>
 110 </li>
 111 <li>
 112 <p>Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial
 113 auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled.</p>
 114 </li>
 115 <li>
 116 <p>Test upgraded to version 1.25</p>
 117 </li>
 118 <li>
 119 <p>Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42</p>
 120 </li>
 121 <li>
 122 <p>Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10</p>
 123 </li>
 124 <li>
 125 <p>Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40</p>
 126 </li>
 127 <li>
 128 <p>Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30</p>
 129 </li>
 130 </ul>
 131 <p>
 132 </p>
 133 <hr />
 134 <h1><a name="utility_changes">Utility Changes</a></h1>
 135 <p>
 136 </p>
 137 <h2><a name="perl_s_debugger">Perl's debugger</a></h2>
 138 <p>The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning
 139 all bar the last command from a saved command history.</p>
 140 <p>
 141 </p>
 142 <h2><a name="h2ph">h2ph</a></h2>
 143 <p><em>h2ph</em> is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions
 144 -- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has
 145 been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of
 146 the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote <em>h2ph</em>'s
 147 documentation, <em>you may need to dicker with the files produced</em>.</p>
 148 <p>
 149 </p>
 150 <hr />
 151 <h1><a name="installation_and_configuration_improvements">Installation and Configuration Improvements</a></h1>
 152 <p>Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.</p>
 153 <p>
 154 </p>
 155 <hr />
 156 <h1><a name="selected_bug_fixes">Selected Bug Fixes</a></h1>
 157 <ul>
 158 <li>
 159 <p>The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example,
 160 in code such as</p>
 161 <pre>
 162     @a = sort ($b, @a)</pre>
 163 <p>the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.</p>
 164 </li>
 165 <li>
 166 <p>The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give
 167 spurious warnings. This has been fixed.</p>
 168 </li>
 169 <li>
 170 <p>Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16
 171 scripts of either endianness.</p>
 172 </li>
 173 <li>
 174 <p>Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often
 175 cause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed.</p>
 176 </li>
 177 <li>
 178 <p>Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlvar.html#item_substr"><code>substr</code></a> have
 179 been fixed.</p>
 180 </li>
 181 <li>
 182 <p>Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it
 183 did not have permission to open it would return immediately, leading to
 184 unexpected truncation of the list of results. This has been fixed, to be
 185 consistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour.</p>
 186 </li>
 187 <li>
 188 <p>Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused
 189 by a poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now
 190 been fixed.</p>
 191 </li>
 192 <li>
 193 <p>The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level
 194 thread creation had failed. threads-&gt;<code>create()</code> now returns <a href="file://C|\msysgit\mingw\html/pod/perlfunc.html#item_undef"><code>undef</code></a> in if
 195 thread creation fails instead of crashing perl.</p>
 196 </li>
 197 </ul>
 198 <p>
 199 </p>
 200 <hr />
 201 <h1><a name="new_or_changed_diagnostics">New or Changed Diagnostics</a></h1>
 202 <ul>
 203 <li>
 204 <p>Perl -V has several improvements</p>
 205 <ul>
 206 <li>
 207 <p>correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets
 208 or other characters that used to confuse it.</p>
 209 </li>
 210 <li>
 211 <p>arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.</p>
 212 </li>
 213 <li>
 214 <p>a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator, allowing
 215 embedding of queries into shell commands.</p>
 216 </li>
 217 <li>
 218 <p>a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to
 219 any name.</p>
 220 </li>
 221 </ul>
 222 <li>
 223 <p>When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line
 224 suggesting that the user use the <code>-S</code> flag:</p>
 225 <pre>
 226     $ perl5.8.5 missing.pl
 227     Can't open perl script &quot;missing.pl&quot;: No such file or directory.
 228     Use -S to search $PATH for it.</pre>
 229 </li>
 230 </ul>
 231 <p>
 232 </p>
 233 <hr />
 234 <h1><a name="changed_internals">Changed Internals</a></h1>
 235 <p>The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are
 236 now built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files,
 237 instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source
 238 tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the layout of files inside
 239 lib/unicore has changed.</p>
 240 <p>
 241 </p>
 242 <hr />
 243 <h1><a name="known_problems">Known Problems</a></h1>
 244 <p>The regression test <em>t/uni/class.t</em> is now performing considerably more
 245 tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.</p>
 246 <p>
 247 </p>
 248 <hr />
 249 <h1><a name="platform_specific_problems">Platform Specific Problems</a></h1>
 250 <p>This release is known not to build on Windows 95.</p>
 251 <p>
 252 </p>
 253 <hr />
 254 <h1><a name="reporting_bugs">Reporting Bugs</a></h1>
 255 <p>If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
 256 recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl
 257 bug database at <a href="http://bugs.perl.org.">http://bugs.perl.org.</a>  There may also be
 258 information at <a href="http://www.perl.org,">http://www.perl.org,</a> the Perl Home Page.</p>
 259 <p>If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the <strong>perlbug</strong>
 260 program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down
 261 to a tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the
 262 output of <code>perl -V</code>, will be sent off to <a href="mailto:perlbug@perl.org">perlbug@perl.org</a> to be
 263 analysed by the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search
 264 the Perl 5 bugs at <a href="http://bugs.perl.org/">http://bugs.perl.org/</a></p>
 265 <p>
 266 </p>
 267 <hr />
 268 <h1><a name="see_also">SEE ALSO</a></h1>
 269 <p>The <em>Changes</em> file for exhaustive details on what changed.</p>
 270 <p>The <em>INSTALL</em> file for how to build Perl.</p>
 271 <p>The <em>README</em> file for general stuff.</p>
 272 <p>The <em>Artistic</em> and <em>Copying</em> files for copyright information.</p>
 273 <table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
 274 <tr><td class="block" style="background-color: #cccccc" valign="middle">
 275 <big><strong><span class="block">&nbsp;perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5</span></strong></big>
 276 </td></tr>
 277 </table>
 278
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