If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.6.1, first readthe perl58delta, which describes differences between 5.6.0 and5.8.0, and the perl581delta and perl582delta, which describe differencesbetween 5.8.0, 5.8.1 and 5.8.2

Incompatible Changes

There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.2.

Core Enhancements

A SCALAR method is now available for tied hashes. This is called whena tied hash is used in scalar context, such as

 if (%tied_hash) {
 ...
  }

The old behaviour was that %tied_hash would return whatever would have beenreturned for that hash before the hash was tied (so usually 0). The newbehaviour in the absence of a SCALAR method is to return TRUE if in themiddle of an each iteration, and otherwise call FIRSTKEY to check if thehash is empty (making sure that a subsequent each will also begin bycalling FIRSTKEY). Please see SCALAR in perltie for the full details andcaveats.

Modules and Pragmata

CGI
Cwd
Digest
Digest::MD5
Encode
File::Spec
FindBin
A function again is provided to resolve problems where modules in differentdirectories wish to use FindBin.
List::Util
You can now weaken references to read only values.
Math::BigInt
PodParser
Pod::Perldoc
POSIX
Unicode::Collate
Unicode::Normalize
Test::Harness
threads::shared
cond_wait has a new two argument form. cond_timedwait has been added.

Utility Changes

find2perl now assumes -print as a default action. Previously, itneeded to be specified explicitly.

A new utility, prove, makes it easy to run an individual regression testat the command line. prove is part of Test::Harness, which users of earlierPerl versions can install from CPAN.

New Documentation

The documentation has been revised in places to produce more standard manpages.

The documentation for the special code blocks (BEGIN, CHECK, INIT, END)has been improved.

Installation and Configuration Improvements

Perl now builds on OpenVMS I64

Selected Bug Fixes

Using substr() on a UTF8 string could cause subsequent accesses on thatstring to return garbage. This was due to incorrect UTF8 offsets beingcached, and is now fixed.

join() could return garbage when the same join() statement was used toprocess 8 bit data having earlier processed UTF8 data, due to the flagson that statement's temporary workspace not being reset correctly. Thisis now fixed.

$a .. $b will now work as expected when either $a or $b is undef

Using Unicode keys with tied hashes should now work correctly.

Reading $^E now preserves $!. Previously, the C code implementing $^Edid not preserve errno, so reading $^E could cause errno and therefore$! to change unexpectedly.

Reentrant functions will (once more) work with C++. 5.8.2 introduced a bugfixwhich accidentally broke the compilation of Perl extensions written in C++

New or Changed Diagnostics

The fatal error "DESTROY created new reference to dead object" is nowdocumented in perldiag.

Changed Internals

The hash code has been refactored to reduce source duplication. Theexternal interface is unchanged, and aside from the bug fixes describedabove, there should be no change in behaviour.

hv_clear_placeholders is now part of the perl API

Some C macros have been tidied. In particular macros which create temporarylocal variables now name these variables more defensively, which shouldavoid bugs where names clash.

<signal.h> is now always included.

Configuration and Building

Configure now invokes callbacks regardless of the value of the variablethey are called for. Previously callbacks were only invoked in thecase $variable $define) branch. This change should only affect platformmaintainers writing configuration hints files.

Platform Specific Problems

The regression test ext/threads/shared/t/wait.t fails on early RedHat 9and HP-UX 10.20 due to bugs in their threading implementations.RedHat users should see https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2003-136.htmland consider upgrading their glibc.

Known Problems

Detached threads aren't supported on Windows yet, as they may lead to memory access violation problems.

There is a known race condition opening scripts in suidperl. suidperlis neither built nor installed by default, and has been deprecated sinceperl 5.8.0. You are advised to replace use of suidperl with tools suchas sudo ( http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/ )

We have a backlog of unresolved bugs. Dealing with bugs and bug reportsis unglamorous work; not something ideally suited to volunteer labour,but that is all that we have.

The perl5 development team are implementing changes to help address thisproblem, which should go live in early 2004.

Future Directions

Code freeze for the next maintenance release (5.8.4) is on March 31st 2004,with release expected by mid April. Similarly 5.8.5's freeze will be atthe end of June, with release by mid July.

Obituary

Iain 'Spoon' Truskett, Perl hacker, author of perlreref andcontributor to CPAN, died suddenly on 29th December 2003, aged 24.He will be missed.

Reporting Bugs

If 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/

What is new for perl v5.8.3

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