


PERL585DELTA(1)  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

       o   Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40



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       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 thread cloning routines, which has
           now been fixed.




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       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.  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



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PERL585DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL585DELTA(1)


       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.










































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