| perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5 |
perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the 5.8.5 release.
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer to user-defined character classes from within other user defined character classes.
The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last command from a saved command history.
h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions -- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote h2ph's documentation, you may need to dicker with the files produced.
Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
@a = sort ($b, @a)
the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give spurious warnings. This has been fixed. Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16 scripts of either endianness. Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often cause warnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed. Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings withsubstr have
been fixed.
Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it
did not have permission to open it would return immediately, leading to
unexpected truncation of the list of results. This has been fixed, to be
consistent with Unix shells' globbing behaviour.
Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused
by a poor hashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now
been fixed.
The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level
thread creation had failed. threads->create() now returns undef in if
thread creation fails instead of crashing perl.
-S flag:
$ perl5.8.5 missing.pl
Can't open perl script "missing.pl": No such file or directory.
Use -S to search $PATH for it.
The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are now built at build time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files, instead of being shipped prebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is that the layout of files inside lib/unicore has changed.
The regression test t/uni/class.t is now performing considerably more tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.
This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
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 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 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/
The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
| perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5 |