3 perldelta - what is new for perl v5.9.4
7 This document describes differences between the 5.9.3 and the 5.9.4
8 developement releases. See L<perl590delta>, L<perl591delta>, L<perl592delta>
9 and L<perl593delta> for the differences between 5.8.0 and 5.9.3.
11 =head1 Incompatible Changes
15 A bareword argument to chdir is now recognized as a file handle.
16 Earlier releases interpreted the bareword as a directory name.
18 =head2 Handling of pmc files
20 TODO XXX explain what are pmc files
22 .pmc files are always loaded, even if they are older than a matching .pm
23 file. (This trick is used by Pugs.)
25 =head2 @- and @+ in patterns
27 The special arrays C<@-> and C<@+> are no longer interpolated in regular
30 =head1 Core Enhancements
32 =head2 state() variables
34 =head2 UNIVERSAL:DOES()
36 =head1 Modules and Pragmata
38 C<encoding::warnings> is now a lexical pragma.
42 =head2 New Core Modules
48 C<Module::Build> has been added.
52 C<Hash::Util::FieldHash> has been added. This module provides support for
53 I<field hashes>: hashes that maintain an association of a reference with a
54 value, in a thread-safe garbage-collected way.
58 C<Win32API::File> has been added (for Windows builds). This module
59 provides low-level access to Win32 system API calls for files/dirs.
63 =head1 Utility Changes
67 =head2 New manpage, perlpragma
69 =head2 New manpage, perlreguts
71 =head2 New manpage, perlunitut
73 =head1 Performance Enhancements
77 Regular expressions (Yves)
79 =head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements
83 Perl has been reported to work on DragonFlyBSD.
85 =head2 Compilation improvements
87 All F<ppport.h> files in the XS modules bundled with perl are now
88 autogenerated at build time.
92 The configuration process now detects whether strlcat and strlcpy are
93 available. When they are not available, perl's own version is used (from
94 Russ Allbery's public domain implementation). Various places in the perl
95 interpreter now uses them.
97 =head1 Selected Bug Fixes
99 =head1 New or Changed Diagnostics
101 =head1 Changed Internals
105 Mathoms and factorizations (many PP functions are now shared for several ops)
107 =head1 Known Problems
109 =head2 Platform Specific Problems
111 =head1 Reporting Bugs
113 If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
114 recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl
115 bug database at http://bugs.perl.org/ . There may also be
116 information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.
118 If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<perlbug>
119 program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down
120 to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the
121 output of C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
122 analysed by the Perl porting team.
126 The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed.
128 The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.
130 The F<README> file for general stuff.
132 The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.