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=head1 NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.9.4

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.9.3 and the 5.9.4
developement releases. See L<perl590delta>, L<perl591delta>, L<perl592delta>
and L<perl593delta> for the differences between 5.8.0 and 5.9.3.

=head1 Incompatible Changes

=head2 chdir FOO

A bareword argument to chdir is now recognized as a file handle.
Earlier releases interpreted the bareword as a directory name.

=head2 Handling of pmc files

TODO XXX explain what are pmc files

.pmc files are always loaded, even if they are older than a matching .pm
file. (This trick is used by Pugs.)

=head2 @- and @+ in patterns

The special arrays C<@-> and C<@+> are no longer interpolated in regular
expressions.

=head2 $AUTOLOAD can now be tainted

If you call a subroutine by a tainted name, and if it defers to an
AUTOLOAD function, then $AUTOLOAD will be (correctly) tainted.

=head1 Core Enhancements

=head2 state() variables

=head2 UNIVERSAL:DOES()

=head1 Modules and Pragmata

C<encoding::warnings> is now a lexical pragma.

C<threads>

=head2 New Core Modules

=over 4

=item *

C<Module::Build> has been added.

=item *

C<Hash::Util::FieldHash> has been added. This module provides support for
I<field hashes>: hashes that maintain an association of a reference with a
value, in a thread-safe garbage-collected way.

=item *

C<Win32API::File> has been added (for Windows builds). This module
provides low-level access to Win32 system API calls for files/dirs.

=back

=head1 Utility Changes

=head1 Documentation

=head2 New manpage, perlpragma

=head2 New manpage, perlreguts

=head2 New manpage, perlunitut

=head1 Performance Enhancements

Constants (Nicholas)

Regular expressions (Yves)

=head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements

=head2 Ports

Perl has been reported to work on DragonFlyBSD.

=head2 Compilation improvements

All F<ppport.h> files in the XS modules bundled with perl are now
autogenerated at build time.

=head2 New probes

The configuration process now detects whether strlcat and strlcpy are
available.  When they are not available, perl's own version is used (from
Russ Allbery's public domain implementation).  Various places in the perl
interpreter now uses them.

=head1 Selected Bug Fixes

=head1 New or Changed Diagnostics

=head1 Changed Internals

Arenas

Mathoms and factorizations (many PP functions are now shared for several ops)

=head1 Known Problems

=head2 Platform Specific Problems

=head1 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 B<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 C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
analysed by the Perl porting team.

=head1 SEE ALSO

The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed.

The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.

The F<README> file for general stuff.

The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.

=cut