PERL573DELTA

Section: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (1)
Updated: 2007-12-18
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NAME

perl573delta - what's new for perl v5.7.3

DESCRIPTION

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 perl570delta. To view the differences between the 5.7.0 release and the 5.7.1 release, see perl571delta. To view the differences between the 5.7.1 release and the 5.7.2 release, see perl572delta.)

Changes

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.

11362: add LC_MESSAGES to POSIX :locale_h export tag
11371: add DEL to [:cntrl:]
11375: make h2ph understand constants like 1234L and 5678LL
11405: Win32: fix bugs in handling of the virtualized environment
11410: fix a bug in the security taint checking of open()
11423: make perl fork() safe even on platforms that don't have pthread_atfork()
11459: make switching optimization and debugging levels during Perl builds easier via the OPTIMIZE environment variable
11475: make split()'s unused captures to be undef, not ''
11485: Search::Dict: allow transforming lines before comparing
11490: allow installing extra modules or bundles when building Perl
11516: add -Wall in cflags when compiling with gcc to weed out dubious C practices
11541: pluggable optimizer
11549: WinCE: integrate the port
11589: Win32: 4-arg select was broken
11594: introduce the perlivp utility for verifying the Perl installation (IVP = Installation Verification Procedure)
11623: rename lib/unicode to lib/unicore to avoid case-insensitivity problems with lib/Unicode
111631: remove Time::Piece
11643: document that use utf8 is not the right way most of the time
11656: 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)
11725: division preserving 64-bit integers
11743: document the coderef-in-@INC feature
11794: modulo (%) preserving 64-bit integers
11825: update to Unicode 3.1.1
11865: add the \[$@%&*] prototype support
11874: oct() and hex() in glorious 64 bit
11877: Class::Struct: allow recursive classes
11993: fix unpack U to be the reverse of pack U
12056: VMS: waitpid enhancements
12180: unpack(``Z*Z*'', pack(``Z*Z*'', ..)) was broken
12243: Devel::Peek: display UTF-8 SVs also as \x{...}
12288: Data::Dumper: option to sort hashes
12542: add perlpodspec
12652: threadsafe DynaLoader, re, Opcode, File::Glob, and B
12756: support BeOS better
12874: read-only hashes (user-level interface is Hash::Util)
13162: add Devel::PPPort
13179: add the sort pragma
13326: VMS: fix perl -P
13358: add perlpacktut
13452: SUPER-UX: add hints file
13575: Win32: non-blocking waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)
13684: introduce the -t option for gentler taint checking
14694: add the if pragma
14832: implement IV/UV/NV/long double un/packing with j/J/F/D
14854: document the new taint behaviour of exec LIST and system LIST

Reporting Bugs

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.

HISTORY

Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>, with many contributions from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting feedback and patches.