


PERL586DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL586DELTA(1)


NAME
       perl586delta - what is new for perl v5.8.6

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.8.5
       release and the 5.8.6 release.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.5.

Core Enhancements
       The perl interpreter is now more tolerant of
       UTF-16-encoded scripts.

       On Win32, Perl can now use non-IFS compatible LSPs, which
       allows Perl to work in conjunction with firewalls such as
       McAfee Guardian. For full details see the file
       README.win32, particularly if you're running Win95.

Modules and Pragmata
       o   With the "base" pragma, an intermediate class with no
           fields used to messes up private fields in the base
           class. This has been fixed.

       o   Cwd upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new
           PathTools distribution)

       o   Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.03

       o   File::Spec upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the
           new PathTools distribution)

       o   Encode upgraded to version 2.08

       o   ExtUtils::MakeMaker remains at version 6.17, as later
           stable releases currently available on CPAN have some
           issues with core modules on some core platforms.

       o   I18N::LangTags upgraded to version 0.35

       o   Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.73

       o   Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.13

       o   MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.05

       o   POSIX::sigprocmask function can now retrieve the
           current signal mask without also setting it.

       o   Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.65

Utility Changes
       Perl has a new -dt command-line flag, which enables
       threads support in the debugger.



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PERL586DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL586DELTA(1)


Performance Enhancements
       "reverse sort ..." is now optimized to sort in reverse,
       avoiding the generation of a temporary intermediate list.

       "for (reverse @foo)" now iterates in reverse, avoiding the
       generation of a temporary reversed list.

Selected Bug Fixes
       The regexp engine is now more robust when given invalid
       utf8 input, as is sometimes generated by buggy XS modules.

       "foreach" on threads::shared array used to be able to
       crash Perl. This bug has now been fixed.

       A regexp in "STDOUT"'s destructor used to coredump,
       because the regexp pad was already freed. This has been
       fixed.

       "goto &" is now more robust - bugs in deep recursion and
       chained "goto &" have been fixed.

       Using "delete" on an array no longer leaks memory. A "pop"
       of an item from a shared array reference no longer causes
       a leak.

       "eval_sv()" failing a taint test could corrupt the stack -
       this has been fixed.

       On platforms with 64 bit pointers numeric comparison
       operators used to erroneously compare the addresses of
       references that are overloaded, rather than using the
       overloaded values. This has been fixed.

       "read" into a UTF8-encoded buffer with an offset off the
       end of the buffer no longer mis-calculates buffer lengths.

       Although Perl has promised since version 5.8 that "sort()"
       would be stable, the two cases "sort {$b cmp $a}" and
       "sort {$b <=> $a}" could produce non-stable sorts.   This
       is corrected in perl5.8.6.

       Localising $^D no longer generates a diagnostic message
       about valid -D flags.

New or Changed Diagnostics
       For -t and -T,
          Too late for "-T" option has been changed to the more
       informative
          "-T" is on the #! line, it must also be used on the
       command line

Changed Internals
       From now on all applications embedding perl will behave as
       if perl were compiled with -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV.  See



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PERL586DELTA(1)  Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL586DELTA(1)


       "Environment access" in the INSTALL file for details.

       Most "C" source files now have comments at the top
       explaining their purpose, which should help anyone wishing
       to get an overview of the implementation.

New Tests
       There are significantly more tests for the "B" suite of
       modules.

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
       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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