PERL586DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL586DELTA(1)
perl586delta - what is new for perl v5.8.6
This document describes differences between the 5.8.5
release and the 5.8.6 release.
There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.5.
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.
+ With the "base" pragma, an intermediate class with no
fields used to messes up private fields in the base
class. This has been fixed.
+ Cwd upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new Path-
Tools distribution)
+ Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.03
+ File::Spec upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new
PathTools distribution)
+ Encode upgraded to version 2.08
+ 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.
+ I18N::LangTags upgraded to version 0.35
+ Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.73
+ Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.13
+ MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.05
+ POSIX::sigprocmask function can now retrieve the current
signal mask without also setting it.
+ Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.65
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PERL586DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL586DELTA(1)
Perl has a new -dt command-line flag, which enables threads
support in the debugger.
"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.
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.
"eval_sv()" failing a taint test could corrupt the stack -
this has been fixed.
On platforms with 64 bit pointers numeric comparison opera-
tors 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 $a}" and "sort
{$b <=> $a}" could produce non-stable sorts. This is
corrected in perl5.8.6.
Localising $^D no longer generates a diagnostic message
about valid -D flags.
For -t and -T,
Too late for "-T" option has been changed to the more
informative
"-T" is on the #! line, it must also be used on the
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PERL586DELTA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL586DELTA(1)
command line
From now on all applications embedding perl will behave as
if perl were compiled with -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV. See
"Environment access" in the INSTALL file for details.
Most "C" source files now have comments at the top explain-
ing their purpose, which should help anyone wishing to get
an overview of the implementation.
There are significantly more tests for the "B" suite of
modules.
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the
articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc news-
group 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.
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