extra code in pp_concat, Take 2
[p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git] / pod / perl585delta.pod
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07e9b5fe 1=head1 NAME
2
3perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
4
5=head1 DESCRIPTION
6
7This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and
8the 5.8.5 release.
9
10=head1 Incompatible Changes
11
12There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
13
14=head1 Core Enhancements
15
16Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the
17intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer to
18user-defined character classes from within other user defined character
19classes.
20
21=head1 Modules and Pragmata
22
23=over 4
24
25=item *
26
27Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now
28be anomaly free - it will always print out line number information.
29
30=item *
31
32CGI upgraded to version 3.05
33
34=item *
35
36charnames now avoids clobbering $_
37
38=item *
39
40Digest upgraded to version 1.08
41
42=item *
43
44Encode upgraded to version 2.01
45
46=item *
47
48FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
49
50=item *
51
52libnet upgraded to version 1.19
53
54=item *
55
56Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
57
58=item *
59
60Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
61
62=item *
63
64Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
65
66=item *
67
68Safe now works properly with Carp
69
70=item *
71
72Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
73
74=item *
75
76Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial
77auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled.
78
79=item *
80
81Test upgraded to version 1.25
82
83=item *
84
85Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
86
87=item *
88
89Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
90
91=item *
92
93Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
94
95=item *
96
97Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
98
99=back
100
101=head1 Utility Changes
102
103=head2 Perl's debugger
104
105The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning
106all bar the last command from a saved command history.
107
108=head2 h2ph
109
110F<h2ph> is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions
111-- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has
112been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of
113the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote F<h2ph>'s
114documentation, I<you may need to dicker with the files produced>.
115
116=head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements
117
118Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
119
120=head1 Selected Bug Fixes
121
122=over 4
123
124=item *
125
126The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example,
127in code such as
128
129 @a = sort ($b, @a)
130
131the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
132
133=item *
134
135The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give
136spurious warnings. This has been fixed.
137
138=item *
139
140Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16
141scripts of either endianness.
142
143=item *
144
145Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often
146cause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed.
147
148=item *
149
150Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with C<substr> have
151been fixed.
152
153=item *
154
155Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it
156did not have permission to open it would return immediately, leading to
157unexpected truncation of the list of results. This has been fixed, to be
158consistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour.
159
160=item *
161
162Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused
163by a poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now
164been fixed.
165
166=item *
167
168The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level
169thread creation had failed. threads->create() now returns C<undef> in if
170thread creation fails instead of crashing perl.
171
172=back
173
174=head1 New or Changed Diagnostics
175
176=over 4
177
178=item *
179
180Perl -V has several improvements
181
182=over 4
183
184=item *
185
186correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets
187or other characters that used to confuse it.
188
189=item *
190
191arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.
192
193=item *
194
195a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';' terminator, allowing
196embedding of queries into shell commands.
197
198=item *
199
200a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to
201any name.
202
203=back
204
205=item *
206
207When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line
208suggesting that the user use the C<-S> flag:
209
210 $ perl5.8.5 missing.pl
211 Can't open perl script "missing.pl": No such file or directory.
212 Use -S to search $PATH for it.
213
214=back
215
216=head1 Changed Internals
217
218The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are
219now built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files,
220instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source
221tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the layout of files inside
222lib/unicore has changed.
223
224=head1 Known Problems
225
226The regression test F<t/uni/class.t> is now performing considerably more
227tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.
228
229=head1 Platform Specific Problems
230
231This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
232
233=head1 Reporting Bugs
234
235If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
236recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl
237bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be
238information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.
239
240If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<perlbug>
241program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down
242to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the
243output of C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
244analysed by the Perl porting team. You can browse and search
245the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/
246
247=head1 SEE ALSO
248
249The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed.
250
251The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.
252
253The F<README> file for general stuff.
254
255The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.
256
257=cut