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