perl573delta - what's new for perl v5.7.3
This document describes differences between the 5.7.2 release and the
(To view the differences between the 5.6.0 release and the 5.7.0
release, see L<perl570delta>. To view the differences between the
5.7.0 release and the 5.7.1 release, see L<perl571delta>. To view
the differences between the 5.7.1 release and the 5.7.2 release,
This is just a selected list of some of the more notable changes.
The numbers refer to the Perl repository change numbers; see
L<Changes58> (or L<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,
add LC_MESSAGES to POSIX :locale_h export tag
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
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
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
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
threadsafe DynaLoader, re, Opcode, File::Glob, and B
read-only hashes (user-level interface is Hash::Util)
Win32: non-blocking waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)
introduce the -t option for gentler taint checking
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 B<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 C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
analysed by the Perl porting team.
The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed.
The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.
The F<README> file for general stuff.
The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.
Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi <F<jhi@iki.fi>>, with many contributions
from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting feedback and patches.
Send omissions or corrections to <F<perlbug@perl.org>>.