man > PERL585DELTA(1)

PERL585DELTA(1)                   Perl Programmers Reference Guide                   PERL585DELTA(1)

NAME
       perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the 5.8.5 release.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.

Core Enhancements
       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.

Modules and Pragmata
       •   Carp  improved  to  work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now be anomaly
           free - it will always print out line number information.

       •   CGI upgraded to version 3.05

       •   charnames now avoids clobbering $_

       •   Digest upgraded to version 1.08

       •   Encode upgraded to version 2.01

       •   FileCache upgraded to version 1.04

       •   libnet upgraded to version 1.19

       •   Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28

       •   Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13

       •   Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57

       •   Safe now works properly with Carp

       •   Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14

       •   Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its  historical  partial  auto-quoting  of
           command arguments can now be disabled.

       •   Test upgraded to version 1.25

       •   Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42

       •   Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10

       •   Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40

       •   Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30

Utility Changes
   Perl's debugger
       The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last
       command from a saved command history.

   h2ph
       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.

Installation and Configuration Improvements
       Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.

Selected Bug Fixes
       •   The  in-place  sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example, in code such
           as

               @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 with "substr" 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.

New or Changed Diagnostics
       •   Perl -V has several improvements

           •   correctly outputs local patch names that contain  embedded  code  snippets  or  other
               characters that used to confuse it.

           •   arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.

           •   a  trailing  colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator, allowing embedding of
               queries into shell commands.

           •   a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response,  allowing  mapping  to  any
               name.

       •   When  perl  fails  to  find the specified script, it now outputs a second line suggesting
           that the user use the "-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.

Changed Internals
       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.

Known Problems
       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.

Platform Specific Problems
       This release is known not to build on Windows 95.

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.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 AT perl.org to be analysed by
       the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/

SEE ALSO
       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.

perl v5.38.2                                 2026-06-12                              PERL585DELTA(1)