


PERL595DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL595DELTA(1)


NAME
       perl595delta - what is new for perl v5.9.5

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.9.4 and
       the 5.9.5 development releases. See perl590delta,
       perl591delta, perl592delta, perl593delta and perl594delta
       for the differences between 5.8.0 and 5.9.4.

Incompatible Changes
   Tainting and printf
       When perl is run under taint mode, "printf()" and
       "sprintf()" will now reject any tainted format argument.
       (Rafael Garcia-Suarez)

   undef and signal handlers
       Undefining or deleting a signal handler via "undef
       $SIG{FOO}" is now equivalent to setting it to 'DEFAULT'.
       (Rafael)

   strictures and array/hash dereferencing in defined()
       "defined @$foo" and "defined %$bar" are now subject to
       "strict 'refs'" (that is, $foo and $bar shall be proper
       references there.)  (Nicholas Clark)

       (However, "defined(@foo)" and "defined(%bar)" are
       discouraged constructs anyway.)

   "(?p{})" has been removed
       The regular expression construct "(?p{})", which was
       deprecated in perl 5.8, has been removed. Use "(??{})"
       instead. (Rafael)

   Pseudo-hashes have been removed
       Support for pseudo-hashes has been removed from Perl 5.9.
       (The "fields" pragma remains here, but uses an alternate
       implementation.)

   Removal of the bytecode compiler and of perlcc
       "perlcc", the byteloader and the supporting modules (B::C,
       B::CC, B::Bytecode, etc.) are no longer distributed with
       the perl sources. Those experimental tools have never
       worked reliably, and, due to the lack of volunteers to
       keep them in line with the perl interpreter developments,
       it was decided to remove them instead of shipping a broken
       version of those.  The last version of those modules can
       be found with perl 5.9.4.

       However the B compiler framework stays supported in the
       perl core, as with the more useful modules it has
       permitted (among others, B::Deparse and B::Concise).

   Removal of the JPL
       The JPL (Java-Perl Linguo) has been removed from the perl



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       sources tarball.

   Recursive inheritance detected earlier
       Perl will now immediately throw an exception if you modify
       any package's @ISA in such a way that it would cause
       recursive inheritance.

       Previously, the exception would not occur until Perl
       attempted to make use of the recursive inheritance while
       resolving a method or doing a "$foo->isa($bar)" lookup.

Core Enhancements
   Regular expressions
       Recursive Patterns
           It is now possible to write recursive patterns without
           using the "(??{})" construct. This new way is more
           efficient, and in many cases easier to read.

           Each capturing parenthesis can now be treated as an
           independent pattern that can be entered by using the
           "(?PARNO)" syntax ("PARNO" standing for "parenthesis
           number"). For example, the following pattern will
           match nested balanced angle brackets:

               /
                ^                      # start of line
                (                      # start capture buffer 1
                   <                   #   match an opening angle bracket
                   (?:                 #   match one of:
                       (?>             #     don't backtrack over the inside of this group
                           [^<>]+      #       one or more non angle brackets
                       )               #     end non backtracking group
                   |                   #     ... or ...
                       (?1)            #     recurse to bracket 1 and try it again
                   )*                  #   0 or more times.
                   >                   #   match a closing angle bracket
                )                      # end capture buffer one
                $                      # end of line
               /x

           Note, users experienced with PCRE will find that the
           Perl implementation of this feature differs from the
           PCRE one in that it is possible to backtrack into a
           recursed pattern, whereas in PCRE the recursion is
           atomic or "possessive" in nature. (Yves Orton)

       Named Capture Buffers
           It is now possible to name capturing parenthesis in a
           pattern and refer to the captured contents by name.
           The naming syntax is "(?<NAME>....)".  It's possible
           to backreference to a named buffer with the "\k<NAME>"
           syntax. In code, the new magical hashes "%+" and "%-"
           can be used to access the contents of the capture
           buffers.



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           Thus, to replace all doubled chars, one could write

               s/(?<letter>.)\k<letter>/$+{letter}/g

           Only buffers with defined contents will be "visible"
           in the "%+" hash, so it's possible to do something
           like

               foreach my $name (keys %+) {
                   print "content of buffer '$name' is $+{$name}\n";
               }

           The "%-" hash is a bit more complete, since it will
           contain array refs holding values from all capture
           buffers similarly named, if there should be many of
           them.

           "%+" and "%-" are implemented as tied hashes through
           the new module "Tie::Hash::NamedCapture".

           Users exposed to the .NET regex engine will find that
           the perl implementation differs in that the numerical
           ordering of the buffers is sequential, and not
           "unnamed first, then named". Thus in the pattern

              /(A)(?<B>B)(C)(?<D>D)/

           $1 will be 'A', $2 will be 'B', $3 will be 'C' and $4
           will be 'D' and not $1 is 'A', $2 is 'C' and $3 is 'B'
           and $4 is 'D' that a .NET programmer would expect.
           This is considered a feature. :-) (Yves Orton)

       Possessive Quantifiers
           Perl now supports the "possessive quantifier" syntax
           of the "atomic match" pattern. Basically a possessive
           quantifier matches as much as it can and never gives
           any back. Thus it can be used to control backtracking.
           The syntax is similar to non-greedy matching, except
           instead of using a '?' as the modifier the '+' is
           used. Thus "?+", "*+", "++", "{min,max}+" are now
           legal quantifiers. (Yves Orton)

       Backtracking control verbs
           The regex engine now supports a number of special-
           purpose backtrack control verbs: (*THEN), (*PRUNE),
           (*MARK), (*SKIP), (*COMMIT), (*FAIL) and (*ACCEPT).
           See perlre for their descriptions. (Yves Orton)

       Relative backreferences
           A new syntax "\g{N}" or "\gN" where "N" is a decimal
           integer allows a safer form of back-reference notation
           as well as allowing relative backreferences. This
           should make it easier to generate and embed patterns
           that contain backreferences. See "Capture buffers" in



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           perlre. (Yves Orton)

       "\K" escape
           The functionality of Jeff Pinyan's module Regexp::Keep
           has been added to the core. You can now use in regular
           expressions the special escape "\K" as a way to do
           something like floating length positive lookbehind. It
           is also useful in substitutions like:

             s/(foo)bar/$1/g

           that can now be converted to

             s/foo\Kbar//g

           which is much more efficient. (Yves Orton)

       Vertical and horizontal whitespace, and linebreak
           Regular expressions now recognize the "\v" and "\h"
           escapes, that match vertical and horizontal
           whitespace, respectively. "\V" and "\H" logically
           match their complements.

           "\R" matches a generic linebreak, that is, vertical
           whitespace, plus the multi-character sequence
           "\x0D\x0A".

   The "_" prototype
       A new prototype character has been added. "_" is
       equivalent to "$" (it denotes a scalar), but defaults to
       $_ if the corresponding argument isn't supplied. Due to
       the optional nature of the argument, you can only use it
       at the end of a prototype, or before a semicolon.

       This has a small incompatible consequence: the prototype()
       function has been adjusted to return "_" for some built-
       ins in appropriate cases (for example,
       "prototype('CORE::rmdir')"). (Rafael)

   UNITCHECK blocks
       "UNITCHECK", a new special code block has been introduced,
       in addition to "BEGIN", "CHECK", "INIT" and "END".

       "CHECK" and "INIT" blocks, while useful for some
       specialized purposes, are always executed at the
       transition between the compilation and the execution of
       the main program, and thus are useless whenever code is
       loaded at runtime. On the other hand, "UNITCHECK" blocks
       are executed just after the unit which defined them has
       been compiled. See perlmod for more information. (Alex
       Gough)

   readpipe() is now overridable
       The built-in function readpipe() is now overridable.



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       Overriding it permits also to override its operator
       counterpart, "qx//" (a.k.a. "``").  Moreover, it now
       defaults to $_ if no argument is provided. (Rafael)

   default argument for readline()
       readline() now defaults to *ARGV if no argument is
       provided. (Rafael)

   UCD 5.0.0
       The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in
       Perl 5.9 has been updated to version 5.0.0.

   Smart match
       The smart match operator ("~~") is now available by
       default (you don't need to enable it with "use feature"
       any longer). (Michael G Schwern)

   Implicit loading of "feature"
       The "feature" pragma is now implicitly loaded when you
       require a minimal perl version (with the "use VERSION"
       construct) greater than, or equal to, 5.9.5.

Modules and Pragmas
   New Pragma, "mro"
       A new pragma, "mro" (for Method Resolution Order) has been
       added. It permits to switch, on a per-class basis, the
       algorithm that perl uses to find inherited methods in case
       of a multiple inheritance hierarchy. The default MRO
       hasn't changed (DFS, for Depth First Search). Another MRO
       is available: the C3 algorithm. See mro for more
       information.  (Brandon Black)

       Note that, due to changes in the implementation of class
       hierarchy search, code that used to undef the *ISA glob
       will most probably break. Anyway, undef'ing *ISA had the
       side-effect of removing the magic on the @ISA array and
       should not have been done in the first place.

   bignum, bigint, bigrat
       The three numeric pragmas "bignum", "bigint" and "bigrat"
       are now lexically scoped. (Tels)

   Math::BigInt/Math::BigFloat
       Many bugs have been fixed; noteworthy are comparisons with
       NaN, which no longer warn about undef values.

       The following things are new:

       config()
           The config() method now also supports the calling-
           style "config('lib')" in addition to
           "config()->{'lib'}".





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       import()
           Upon import, using "lib => 'Foo'" now warns if the
           low-level library cannot be found. To suppress the
           warning, you can use "try => 'Foo'" instead. To
           convert the warning into a die, use "only => 'Foo'"
           instead.

       roundmode common
           A rounding mode of "common" is now supported.

       Also, support for the following methods has been added:

       bpi(), bcos(), bsin(), batan(), batan2()
       bmuladd()
       bexp(), bnok()
       from_hex(), from_oct(), and from_bin()
       as_oct()

       In addition, the default math-backend (Calc (Perl) and
       FastCalc (XS)) now support storing numbers in parts with 9
       digits instead of 7 on Perls with either 64bit integer or
       long double support. This means math operations scale
       better and are thus faster for really big numbers.

   New Core Modules
       o   "Locale::Maketext::Simple", needed by CPANPLUS, is a
           simple wrapper around "Locale::Maketext::Lexicon".
           Note that "Locale::Maketext::Lexicon" isn't included
           in the perl core; the behaviour of
           "Locale::Maketext::Simple" gracefully degrades when
           the later isn't present.

       o   "Params::Check" implements a generic input
           parsing/checking mechanism. It is used by CPANPLUS.

       o   "Term::UI" simplifies the task to ask questions at a
           terminal prompt.

       o   "Object::Accessor" provides an interface to create
           per-object accessors.

       o   "Module::Pluggable" is a simple framework to create
           modules that accept pluggable sub-modules.

       o   "Module::Load::Conditional" provides simple ways to
           query and possibly load installed modules.

       o   "Time::Piece" provides an object oriented interface to
           time functions, overriding the built-ins localtime()
           and gmtime().

       o   "IPC::Cmd" helps to find and run external commands,
           possibly interactively.




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       o   "File::Fetch" provide a simple generic file fetching
           mechanism.

       o   "Log::Message" and "Log::Message::Simple" are used by
           the log facility of "CPANPLUS".

       o   "Archive::Extract" is a generic archive extraction
           mechanism for .tar (plain, gziped or bzipped) or .zip
           files.

       o   "CPANPLUS" provides an API and a command-line tool to
           access the CPAN mirrors.

   Module changes
       "assertions"
           The "assertions" pragma, its submodules
           "assertions::activate" and "assertions::compat" and
           the -A command-line switch have been removed.  The
           interface was not judged mature enough for inclusion
           in a stable release.

       "base"
           The "base" pragma now warns if a class tries to
           inherit from itself.  (Curtis "Ovid" Poe)

       "strict" and "warnings"
           "strict" and "warnings" will now complain loudly if
           they are loaded via incorrect casing (as in "use
           Strict;"). (Johan Vromans)

       "warnings"
           The "warnings" pragma doesn't load "Carp" anymore.
           That means that code that used "Carp" routines without
           having loaded it at compile time might need to be
           adjusted; typically, the following (faulty) code won't
           work anymore, and will require parentheses to be added
           after the function name:

               use warnings;
               require Carp;
               Carp::confess "argh";

       "less"
           "less" now does something useful (or at least it tries
           to). In fact, it has been turned into a lexical
           pragma. So, in your modules, you can now test whether
           your users have requested to use less CPU, or less
           memory, less magic, or maybe even less fat. See less
           for more. (Joshua ben Jore)

       "Attribute::Handlers"
           "Attribute::Handlers" can now report the caller's file
           and line number.  (David Feldman)




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       "B::Lint"
           "B::Lint" is now based on "Module::Pluggable", and so
           can be extended with plugins. (Joshua ben Jore)

       "B" It's now possible to access the lexical pragma hints
           ("%^H") by using the method B::COP::hints_hash(). It
           returns a "B::RHE" object, which in turn can be used
           to get a hash reference via the method B::RHE::HASH().
           (Joshua ben Jore)

       "Thread"
           As the old 5005thread threading model has been
           removed, in favor of the ithreads scheme, the "Thread"
           module is now a compatibility wrapper, to be used in
           old code only. It has been removed from the default
           list of dynamic extensions.

Utility Changes
   "cpanp"
       "cpanp", the CPANPLUS shell, has been added.
       ("cpanp-run-perl", an helper for CPANPLUS operation, has
       been added too, but isn't intended for direct use).

   "cpan2dist"
       "cpan2dist" is a new utility, that comes with CPANPLUS.
       It's a tool to create distributions (or packages) from
       CPAN modules.

   "pod2html"
       The output of "pod2html" has been enhanced to be more
       customizable via CSS. Some formatting problems were also
       corrected. (Jari Aalto)

Documentation
   New manpage, perlunifaq
       A new manual page, perlunifaq (the Perl Unicode FAQ), has
       been added (Juerd Waalboer).

Installation and Configuration Improvements
   C++ compatibility
       Efforts have been made to make perl and the core XS
       modules compilable with various C++ compilers (although
       the situation is not perfect with some of the compilers on
       some of the platforms tested.)

   Visual C++
       Perl now can be compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005.

   Static build on Win32
       It's now possible to build a "perl-static.exe" that
       doesn't depend on "perl59.dll" on Win32. See the Win32
       makefiles for details.  (Vadim Konovalov)





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   win32 builds
       All win32 builds (MS-Win, WinCE) have been merged and
       cleaned up.

   "d_pseudofork" and "d_printf_format_null"
       A new configuration variable, available as
       $Config{d_pseudofork} in the Config module, has been
       added, to distinguish real fork() support from fake
       pseudofork used on Windows platforms.

       A new configuration variable, "d_printf_format_null", has
       been added, to see if printf-like formats are allowed to
       be NULL.

   Help
       "Configure -h" has been extended with the most used
       option.

       Much less 'Whoa there' messages.

   64bit systems
       Better detection of 64bit(only) systems, and setting all
       the (library) paths accordingly.

   Ports
       Perl has been reported to work on MidnightBSD.

       Support for Cray XT4 Catamount/Qk has been added.

       Vendor patches have been merged for RedHat and GenToo.

Selected Bug Fixes
       PerlIO::scalar will now prevent writing to read-only
       scalars. Moreover, seek() is now supported with
       PerlIO::scalar-based filehandles, the underlying string
       being zero-filled as needed. (Rafael, Jarkko Hietaniemi)

       study() never worked for UTF-8 strings, but could lead to
       false results.  It's now a no-op on UTF-8 data. (Yves
       Orton)

       The signals SIGILL, SIGBUS and SIGSEGV are now always
       delivered in an "unsafe" manner (contrary to other
       signals, that are deferred until the perl interpreter
       reaches a reasonably stable state; see "Deferred Signals
       (Safe Signals)" in perlipc). (Rafael)

       When a module or a file is loaded through an @INC-hook,
       and when this hook has set a filename entry in %INC,
       __FILE__ is now set for this module accordingly to the
       contents of that %INC entry. (Rafael)

       The "-w" and "-t" switches can now be used together
       without messing up what categories of warnings are



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       activated or not. (Rafael)

       Duping a filehandle which has the ":utf8" PerlIO layer set
       will now properly carry that layer on the duped
       filehandle. (Rafael)

       Localizing an hash element whose key was given as a
       variable didn't work correctly if the variable was changed
       while the local() was in effect (as in "local $h{$x};
       ++$x"). (Bo Lindbergh)

New or Changed Diagnostics
   Deprecations
       Two deprecation warnings have been added: (Rafael)

           Opening dirhandle %s also as a file
           Opening filehandle %s also as a directory

Changed Internals
       The anonymous hash and array constructors now take 1 op in
       the optree instead of 3, now that pp_anonhash and
       pp_anonlist return a reference to an hash/array when the
       op is flagged with OPf_SPECIAL (Nicholas Clark).

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://rt.perl.org/rt3/ .  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.

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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