Release 5.005 grandfathered old global symbol names by providing preprocessor
macros for extension source compatibility. As of release 5.006, these
preprocessor definitions are not available by default. You need to explicitly
-compile perl with C<-DPERL_POLLUTE> in order to get these definitions.
+compile perl with C<-DPERL_POLLUTE> to get these definitions. For
+extensions still using the old symbols, this option can be
+specified via MakeMaker:
+
+ perl Makefile.PL POLLUTE=1
=item C<PERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC>
-Enabling the use of Perl's malloc in release 5.005 and earlier caused
+Enabling Perl's malloc in release 5.005 and earlier caused
the namespace of system versions of the malloc family of functions to
-be usurped by the Perl versions of these functions, since they used the
-same names by default.
+be usurped by the Perl versions, since by default they used the
+same names.
Besides causing problems on platforms that do not allow these functions to
be cleanly replaced, this also meant that the system versions could not
be called in programs that used Perl's malloc. Previous versions of Perl
-have allowed this behavior to be suppressed with the HIDEMYMALLOC and
+have allowed this behaviour to be suppressed with the HIDEMYMALLOC and
EMBEDMYMALLOC preprocessor definitions.
As of release 5.006, Perl's malloc family of functions have default names
distinct from the system versions. You need to explicitly compile perl with
-C<-DPERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC> in order to get the older behavior. HIDEMYMALLOC
-and EMBEDMYMALLOC have no effect, since the behavior they enabled is now
+C<-DPERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC> to get the older behaviour. HIDEMYMALLOC
+and EMBEDMYMALLOC have no effect, since the behaviour they enabled is now
the default.
Note that these functions do B<not> constitute Perl's memory allocation API.
=item C<PL_na> and C<dTHR> Issues
The C<PL_na> global is now thread local, so a C<dTHR> declaration is needed
-in the scope in which it appears. XSUBs should handle this automatically,
+in the scope in which the global appears. XSUBs should handle this automatically,
but if you have used C<PL_na> in support functions, you either need to
change the C<PL_na> to a local variable (which is recommended), or put in
a C<dTHR>.
=item C<PATCHLEVEL> is now C<PERL_VERSION>
-The cpp macros C<PERL_REVISION>, C<PERL_VERSION> and C<PERL_SUBVERSION>
+The cpp macros C<PERL_REVISION>, C<PERL_VERSION>, and C<PERL_SUBVERSION>
are now available by default from perl.h, and reflect the base revision,
-patchlevel and subversion respectively. C<PERL_REVISION> had no
+patchlevel, and subversion respectively. C<PERL_REVISION> had no
prior equivalent, while C<PERL_VERSION> and C<PERL_SUBVERSION> were
previously available as C<PATCHLEVEL> and C<SUBVERSION>.
-The new names cause less pollution of the cpp namespace, and reflect what
+The new names cause less pollution of the B<cpp> namespace and reflect what
the numbers have come to stand for in common practice. For compatibility,
-the old names are still supported when patchlevel.h is explicitly
+the old names are still supported when F<patchlevel.h> is explicitly
included (as required before), so there is no source incompatibility
-due to the change.
+from the change.
=back
=head2 Binary Incompatibilities
-This release is not binary compatible with the 5.005 release and its
+This release is not binary compatible with the 5.005 release or its
maintenance versions.
=head1 Core Changes
=head2 Lexically scoped warning categories
You can now control the granularity of warnings emitted by perl at a finer
-level using the C<use warning> pragma. See L<warning> for details.
+level using the C<use warning> pragma. See L<warning> and L<perllexwarn>
+for details.
=head2 Binary numbers supported
Binary numbers are now supported as literals, in s?printf formats, and
C<oct()>:
- $answer = 0b101010;
- printf "The answer is: %b\n", oct("0b101010");
+ $answer = 0b101010;
+ printf "The answer is: %b\n", oct("0b101010");
=head2 syswrite() ease-of-use
or less 64-awareness becomes available. As of 5.005_54 at least
somewhat 64-bit aware platforms are HP-UX 11 or better, Solaris 2.6 or
better, IRIX 6.2 or better. Naturally 64-bit platforms like Digital
-UNIX and UNICOS also have 64-bit support.
+Unix and UNICOS also have 64-bit support.
=head2 Better syntax checks on parenthesized unary operators
Expressions such as:
- print defined(&foo,&bar,&baz);
- print uc("foo","bar","baz");
- undef($foo,&bar);
+ print defined(&foo,&bar,&baz);
+ print uc("foo","bar","baz");
+ undef($foo,&bar);
used to be accidentally allowed in earlier versions, and produced
-unpredictable behavior. Some of them produced ancillary warnings
-when used in this way, while others silently did the wrong thing.
+unpredictable behaviour. Some produced ancillary warnings
+when used in this way; others silently did the wrong thing.
The parenthesized forms of most unary operators that expect a single
-argument will now ensure that they are not called with more than one
-argument, making the above cases syntax errors. Note that the usual
-behavior of:
+argument now ensure that they are not called with more than one
+argument, making the cases shown above syntax errors. The usual
+behaviour of:
- print defined &foo, &bar, &baz;
- print uc "foo", "bar", "baz";
- undef $foo, &bar;
+ print defined &foo, &bar, &baz;
+ print uc "foo", "bar", "baz";
+ undef $foo, &bar;
remains unchanged. See L<perlop>.
+=head2 POSIX character class syntax [: :] supported
+
+For example to match alphabetic characters use /[[:alpha:]]/.
+See L<perlre> for details.
+
=head2 Improved C<qw//> operator
The C<qw//> operator is now evaluated at compile time into a true list
instead of being replaced with a run time call to C<split()>. This
-removes the confusing behavior of C<qw//> in scalar context stemming from
-the older implementation, which inherited the behavior from split().
+removes the confusing misbehaviour of C<qw//> in scalar context, which
+had inherited that behaviour from split().
Thus:
=head2 pack() format modifier '!' supported
-The new format type modifer '!' is useful for packing and unpacking
+The new format type modifier '!' is useful for packing and unpacking
native shorts, ints, and longs. See L<perlfunc/"pack">.
=head2 $^X variables may now have names longer than one character
error. Now variable names that begin with a control character may be
arbitrarily long. However, for compatibility reasons, these variables
I<must> be written with explicit braces, as C<${^XY}> for example.
-C<${^XYZ}> is synonymous with ${"\cXYZ"}. Variable names with more
+C<${^XYZ}> is synonymous with ${"\cXYZ"}. Variable names with more
than one control character, such as C<${^XY^Z}>, are illegal.
-The old syntax has not changed. As before, the `^X' may either be a
-literal control-X character or the two character sequence `caret' plus
-`X'. When the braces are omitted, the variable name stops after the
+The old syntax has not changed. As before, `^X' may be either a
+literal control-X character or the two-character sequence `caret' plus
+`X'. When braces are omitted, the variable name stops after the
control character. Thus C<"$^XYZ"> continues to be synonymous with
C<$^X . "YZ"> as before.
As before, lexical variables may not have names beginning with control
characters. As before, variables whose names begin with a control
-character are always forced to be in package `main'. These variables
-are all reserved for future extensions, except the ones that begin
-with C<^_>, which may be used by user programs and will not acquire a
-special meaning in any future version of Perl.
+character are always forced to be in package `main'. All such variables
+are reserved for future extensions, except those that begin with
+C<^_>, which may be used by user programs and is guaranteed not to
+acquire special meaning in any future version of Perl.
=head1 Significant bug fixes
=head2 E<lt>HANDLEE<gt> on empty files
With C<$/> set to C<undef>, slurping an empty file returns a string of
-zero length (instead of C<undef>, as it used to) for the first time the
-HANDLE is read. Subsequent reads yield C<undef>.
+zero length (instead of C<undef>, as it used to) the first time the
+HANDLE is read. Further reads yield C<undef>.
This means that the following will append "foo" to an empty file (it used
-to not do anything before):
+to do nothing):
perl -0777 -pi -e 's/^/foo/' empty_file
-Note that the behavior of:
+The behaviour of:
perl -pi -e 's/^/foo/' empty_file
Lexical lookups for variables appearing in C<eval '...'> within
functions that were themselves called within an C<eval '...'> were
-searching the wrong place for lexicals. They now correctly terminate
-the lexical search at the subroutine call boundary.
+searching the wrong place for lexicals. The lexical search now
+correctly ends at the subroutine's block boundary.
Parsing of here documents used to be flawed when they appeared as
the replacement expression in C<eval 's/.../.../e'>. This has
been fixed.
+=head2 Automatic flushing of output buffers
+
+fork(), exec(), system(), qx//, and pipe open()s now flush buffers
+of all files opened for output when the operation
+was attempted. This mostly eliminates confusing
+buffering mishaps suffered by users unaware of how Perl internally
+handles I/O.
+
+=head2 Better diagnostics on meaningless filehandle operations
+
+Constructs such as C<open(E<lt>FHE<gt>)> and C<close(E<lt>FHE<gt>)>
+are compile time errors. Attempting to read from filehandles that
+were opened only for writing will now produce warnings (just as
+writing to read-only filehandles does).
+
=head1 Supported Platforms
=over 4
GNU/Hurd is now supported.
+=item *
+
+Rhapsody is now supported.
+
+=item *
+
+EPOC is is now supported (on Psion 5).
+
=back
=head1 New tests
=item op/io_const
IO constants (SEEK_*, _IO*).
-
+
=item op/io_dir
Directory-related IO methods (new, read, close, rewind, tied delete).
=item Benchmark
-You can now run tests for I<x> seconds instead of guessing the right
-number of tests to run.
+You can now run tests for I<n> seconds instead of guessing the right
+number of tests to run: e.g. timethese(-5, ...) will run each
+code for at least 5 CPU seconds. Zero as the "number of repetitions"
+means "for at least 3 CPU seconds". The output format has also
+changed. For example:
+
+use Benchmark;$x=3;timethese(-5,{a=>sub{$x*$x},b=>sub{$x**2}})
+
+will now output something like this:
+
+Benchmark: running a, b, each for at least 5 CPU seconds...
+ a: 5 wallclock secs ( 5.77 usr + 0.00 sys = 5.77 CPU) @ 200551.91/s (n=1156516)
+ b: 4 wallclock secs ( 5.00 usr + 0.02 sys = 5.02 CPU) @ 159605.18/s (n=800686)
+
+New features: "each for at least N CPU seconds...", "wallclock secs",
+and the "@ operations/CPU second (n=operations)".
+
+=item Devel::Peek
+
+The Devel::Peek module provides access to the internal representation
+of Perl variables and data. It is a data debugging tool for the XS programmer.
=item Fcntl
More Fcntl constants added: F_SETLK64, F_SETLKW64, O_LARGEFILE for
-large (more than 4G) file access (the 64-bit support is not yet
+large (more than 4G) file access (64-bit support is not yet
working, though, so no need to get overly excited), Free/Net/OpenBSD
locking behaviour flags F_FLOCK, F_POSIX, Linux F_SHLCK, and
O_ACCMODE: the mask of O_RDONLY, O_WRONLY, and O_RDWR.
+=item File::Spec
+
+New methods have been added to the File::Spec module: devnull() returns
+the name of the null device (/dev/null on Unix) and tmpdir() the name of
+the temp directory (normally /tmp on Unix). There are now also methods
+to convert between absolute and relative filenames: abs2rel() and
+rel2abs(). For compatibility with operating systems that specify volume
+names in file paths, the splitpath(), splitdir(), and catdir() methods
+have been added.
+
+=item File::Spec::Functions
+
+The new File::Spec::Functions modules provides a function interface
+to the File::Spec module. Allows shorthand
+
+ $fullname = catfile($dir1, $dir2, $file);
+
+instead of
+
+ $fullname = File::Spec->catfile($dir1, $dir2, $file);
+
+=item Math::BigInt
+
+The logical operations C<E<lt>E<lt>>, C<E<gt>E<gt>>, C<&>, C<|>,
+and C<~> are now supported on bigints.
+
=item Math::Complex
-The accessors methods Re, Im, arg, abs, rho, theta, methods can
-($z->Re()) now also act as mutators ($z->Re(3)).
+The accessor methods Re, Im, arg, abs, rho, and theta can now also
+act as mutators (accessor $z->Re(), mutator $z->Re(3)).
=item Math::Trig
-A little bit of radial trigonometry (cylindrical and spherical) added,
-for example the great circle distance.
+A little bit of radial trigonometry (cylindrical and spherical),
+radial coordinate conversions, and the great circle distance were added.
+
+=item SDBM_File
+
+An EXISTS method has been added to this module (and sdbm_exists() has
+been added to the underlying sdbm library), so one can now call exists
+on an SDBM_File tied hash and get the correct result, rather than a
+runtime error.
=item Time::Local
The timelocal() and timegm() functions used to silently return bogus
results when the date exceeded the machine's integer range. They
-consistently croak() if the date falls in an unsupported range.
+now consistently croak() if the date falls in an unsupported range.
+
+=item Win32
+
+The error return value in list context has been changed for all functions
+that return a list of values. Previously these functions returned a list
+with a single element C<undef> if an error occurred. Now these functions
+return the empty list in these situations. This applies to the following
+functions:
+
+ Win32::FsType
+ Win32::GetOSVersion
+
+The remaining functions are unchanged and continue to return C<undef> on
+error even in list context.
+
+The Win32::SetLastError(ERROR) function has been added as a complement
+to the Win32::GetLastError() function.
+
+The new Win32::GetFullPathName(FILENAME) returns the full absolute
+pathname for FILENAME in scalar context. In list context it returns
+a two-element list containing the fully qualified directory name and
+the filename.
+
+=item DBM Filters
+
+A new feature called "DBM Filters" has been added to all the
+DBM modules--DB_File, GDBM_File, NDBM_File, ODBM_File, and SDBM_File.
+DBM Filters add four new methods to each DBM module:
+
+ filter_store_key
+ filter_store_value
+ filter_fetch_key
+ filter_fetch_value
+
+These can be used to filter key-value pairs before the pairs are
+written to the database or just after they are read from the database.
+See L<perldbmfilter> for further information.
=back
=head2 Pragmata
-C<use utf8;>, to enable UTF-8 and Unicode support.
+C<use utf8> to enable UTF-8 and Unicode support.
+
+C<use caller 'encoding'> allows modules to inherit pragmatic attributes
+from the caller's context. C<encoding> is currently the only supported
+attribute.
Lexical warnings pragma, C<use warning;>, to control optional warnings.
-C<use filetest;>, to control the behaviour of filetests (C<-r> C<-w> ...).
+C<use filetest> to control the behaviour of filetests (C<-r> C<-w> ...).
Currently only one subpragma implemented, "use filetest 'access';",
-that enables the use of access(2) or equivalent to check the
+that enables the use of access(2) or equivalent to check
permissions instead of using stat(2) as usual. This matters
-in filesystems where there are ACLs (access control lists), the
-stat(2) might lie, while access(2) knows better.
+in filesystems where there are ACLs (access control lists): the
+stat(2) might lie, but access(2) knows better.
=head1 Utility Changes
A tutorial that introduces the essentials of references.
+=item perltootc.pod
+
+A tutorial on managing class data for object modules.
+
=back
=head1 New Diagnostics
by Perl. This combination appears in an interpolated variable or a
C<'>-delimited regular expression.
-=item Unrecognized escape \\%c passed through
+=item Filehandle %s opened only for output
-(W) You used a backslash-character combination which is not recognized
-by Perl.
+(W) You tried to read from a filehandle opened only for writing. If you
+intended it to be a read-write filehandle, you needed to open it with
+"+E<lt>" or "+E<gt>" or "+E<gt>E<gt>" instead of with "E<lt>" or nothing. If
+you intended only to read from the file, use "E<lt>". See
+L<perlfunc/open>.
=item Missing command in piped open
(W) You used the C<open(FH, "| command")> or C<open(FH, "command |")>
construction, but the command was missing or blank.
+=item Unrecognized escape \\%c passed through
+
+(W) You used a backslash-character combination which is not recognized
+by Perl.
+
+=item defined(@array) is deprecated
+
+(D) defined() is not usually useful on arrays because it checks for an
+undefined I<scalar> value. If you want to see if the array is empty,
+just use C<if (@array) { # not empty }> for example.
+
+=item defined(%hash) is deprecated
+
+(D) defined() is not usually useful on hashes because it checks for an
+undefined I<scalar> value. If you want to see if the hash is empty,
+just use C<if (%hash) { # not empty }> for example.
+
=head1 Obsolete Diagnostics
Todo.
=head1 Configuration Changes
+=head2 installusrbinperl
+
You can use "Configure -Uinstallusrbinperl" which causes installperl
to skip installing perl also as /usr/bin/perl. This is useful if you
prefer not to modify /usr/bin for some reason or another but harmful
because many scripts assume to find Perl in /usr/bin/perl.
-=head1 Configuration Changes
+=head2 SOCKS support
-You can use "Configure -Uinstallusrbinperl" which causes installperl
-to skip installing perl also as /usr/bin/perl. This is useful if you
-prefer not to modify /usr/bin for some reason or another but harmful
-because many scripts assume to find Perl in /usr/bin/perl.
+You can use "Configure -Dusesocks" which causes Perl to probe
+for the SOCKS proxy protocol library, http://www.socks.nec.com/
=head1 BUGS
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the headers of
-recently posted articles in the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup.
+articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup.
There may also be information at http://www.perl.com/perl/, the Perl
Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<perlbug>
-program included with your release. Make sure you trim your bug down
+program included with your release. Make 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 <F<perlbug@perl.com>> to be
+output of C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.com to be
analysed by the Perl porting team.
=head1 SEE ALSO
projects / p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git / blobdiff