perl573delta - what's new for perl v5.7.3
This document describes differences between the 5.7.2 release and the 5.7.3 release.
(To view the differences between the 5.6.0 release and the 5.7.0 release, see the perl570delta manpage. To view the differences between the 5.7.0 release and the 5.7.1 release, see the perl571delta manpage. To view the differences between the 5.7.1 release and the 5.7.2 release, see the perl572delta manpage.)
This is just a selected list of some of the more notable changes. The numbers refer to the Perl repository change numbers; see Changes58 (or Changes in Perl 5.8.1). In addition to these changes, lots of work took place in integrating threads, PerlIO, and Unicode; general code cleanup; and last but not least porting to non-UNIX lands such as Win32, VMS, Cygwin, DJGPP, VOS, MacOS Classic, and EBCDIC.
add LC_MESSAGES to POSIX :locale_h export tag
add DEL to [:cntrl:]
make h2ph understand constants like 1234L and 5678LL
Win32: fix bugs in handling of the virtualized environment
fix a bug in the security taint checking of open()
make perl fork() safe even on platforms that don't have pthread_atfork()
make switching optimization and debugging levels during Perl builds easier via the OPTIMIZE environment variable
make split()'s unused captures to be undef, not ''
Search::Dict: allow transforming lines before comparing
allow installing extra modules or bundles when building Perl
add -Wall in cflags when compiling with gcc to weed out dubious C practices
pluggable optimizer
WinCE: integrate the port
Win32: 4-arg select was broken
introduce the perlivp utility for verifying the Perl installation (IVP = Installation Verification Procedure)
rename lib/unicode to lib/unicore to avoid case-insensitivity problems with lib/Unicode
remove Time::Piece
document that use utf8 is not the right way most of the time
allow building perl with -DUSE_UTF8_SCRIPTS which makes UTF-8 the default script encoding (not the default since that would break all scripts having legacy eight-bit data in them)
division preserving 64-bit integers
document the coderef-in-@INC feature
modulo (%) preserving 64-bit integers
update to Unicode 3.1.1
add the \[$@%&*] prototype support
oct() and hex() in glorious 64 bit
Class::Struct: allow recursive classes
fix unpack U to be the reverse of pack U
VMS: waitpid enhancements
unpack(``Z*Z*'', pack(``Z*Z*'', ..)) was broken
Devel::Peek: display UTF-8 SVs also as \x{...}
Data::Dumper: option to sort hashes
add perlpodspec
threadsafe DynaLoader, re, Opcode, File::Glob, and B
support BeOS better
read-only hashes (user-level interface is Hash::Util)
add Devel::PPPort
add the sort pragma
VMS: fix perl -P
add perlpacktut
SUPER-UX: add hints file
Win32: non-blocking waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)
introduce the -t option for gentler taint checking
add the if pragma
implement IV/UV/NV/long double un/packing with j/J/F/D
document the new taint behaviour of exec LIST and system LIST
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.com/, 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.
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.
Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>, with many contributions from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting feedback and patches.
Send omissions or corrections to <perlbug@perl.org>.