History-ChangesWhat is new for perl v5.8.5Daftar Isi NAMEperl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5 DESCRIPTIONThis document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release andthe 5.8.5 release. Incompatible ChangesThere are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4. Core EnhancementsPerl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on theintersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer touser-defined character classes from within other user defined characterclasses. Modules and PragmataCarp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should nowbe anomaly free - it will always print out line number information. CGI upgraded to version 3.05 charnames now avoids clobbering $_ Digest upgraded to version 1.08 Encode upgraded to version 2.01 FileCache upgraded to version 1.04 libnet upgraded to version 1.19 Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28 Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13 Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57 Safe now works properly with Carp Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14 Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partialauto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled. Test upgraded to version 1.25 Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42 Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10 Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40 Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
Utility ChangesPerl's debuggerThe debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunningall bar the last command from a saved command history. h2phh2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions-- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This hasbeen introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions ofthe glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote h2ph'sdocumentation, you may need to dicker with the files produced. Installation and Configuration ImprovementsPerl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS. Selected Bug FixesThe in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example,in code such as - @a = sort ($b, @a)
the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed. The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could givespurious warnings. This has been fixed. Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16scripts of either endianness. Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would oftencause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed. Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with substr havebeen fixed. Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that itdid not have permission to open it would return immediately, leading tounexpected truncation of the list of results. This has been fixed, to beconsistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour. Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was causedby a poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has nowbeen fixed. The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-levelthread creation had failed. threads->create() now returns undef in ifthread creation fails instead of crashing perl.
New or Changed DiagnosticsPerl -V has several improvements correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippetsor other characters that used to confuse it. arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output. a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';' terminator, allowingembedding of queries into shell commands. a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping toany name.
When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second linesuggesting 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 InternalsThe Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine arenow built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files,instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl sourcetarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the layout of files insidelib/unicore has changed. Known ProblemsThe regression test t/uni/class.t is now performing considerably moretests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine. Platform Specific ProblemsThis release is known not to build on Windows 95. Reporting BugsIf you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articlesrecently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perlbug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also beinformation at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page. If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbugprogram included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug downto a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with theoutput of perl -V , will be sent off to [email protected] to beanalysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and searchthe Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/ SEE ALSOThe 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. |