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PERLDELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLDELTA(1)

NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.6

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.8.5 release and the 5.8.6 release. IInnccoommppaattiibbllee CChhaannggeess There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.5. CCoorree EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss

The perl interpreter is now more tolerant of UTF-16-encoded scripts.

On Win32, Perl can now use non-IFS compatible LSPs, which allows Perl

to work in conjunction with firewalls such as McAfee Guardian. For full details see the file README.win32, particularly if you're running Win95. MMoodduulleess aanndd PPrraaggmmaattaa +o With the "base" pragma, an intermediate class with no fields used to messes up private fields in the base class. This has been fixed.

+o Cwd upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new PathTools distri-

bution) +o Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.03 +o File::Spec upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new PathTools distribution) +o Encode upgraded to version 2.08 +o ExtUtils::MakeMaker remains at version 6.17, as later stable releases currently available on CPAN have some issues with core modules on some core platforms. +o I18N::LangTags upgraded to version 0.35 +o Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.73 +o Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.13 +o MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.05 +o POSIX::sigprocmask function can now retrieve the current signal mask without also setting it. +o Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.65 UUttiilliittyy CChhaannggeess

Perl has a new -dt command-line flag, which enables threads support in

the debugger. PPeerrffoorrmmaannccee EEnnhhaanncceemmeennttss "reverse sort ..." is now optimized to sort in reverse, avoiding the generation of a temporary intermediate list. "for (reverse @foo)" now iterates in reverse, avoiding the generation of a temporary reversed list. SSeelleecctteedd BBuugg FFiixxeess The regexp engine is now more robust when given invalid utf8 input, as is sometimes generated by buggy XS modules. "foreach" on threads::shared array used to be able to crash Perl. This bug has now been fixed. A regexp in "STDOUT"'s destructor used to coredump, because the regexp pad was already freed. This has been fixed.

"goto &" is now more robust - bugs in deep recursion and chained "goto

&" have been fixed. Using "delete" on an array no longer leaks memory. A "pop" of an item from a shared array reference no longer causes a leak.

"evalsv()" failing a taint test could corrupt the stack - this has

been fixed. On platforms with 64 bit pointers numeric comparison operators used to erroneously compare the addresses of references that are overloaded, rather than using the overloaded values. This has been fixed.

"read" into a UTF8-encoded buffer with an offset off the end of the

buffer no longer mis-calculates buffer lengths.

Although Perl has promised since version 5.8 that "sort()" would be

stable, the two cases "sort {$b cmp $a}" and "

"-T" is on the #! line, it must also be used on the command line

CChhaannggeedd IInntteerrnnaallss From now on all applications embedding perl will behave as if perl were

compiled with -DPERLUSESAFEPUTENV. See "Environment access" in the

INSTALL file for details. Most "C" source files now have comments at the top explaining their purpose, which should help anyone wishing to get an overview of the implementation. NNeeww TTeessttss There are significantly more tests for the "B" suite of modules. RReeppoorrttiinngg BBuuggss 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 ppeerrllbbuugg pro-

gram 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 "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by

the Perl porting team. You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/