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            "text": "# perl585delta (man)\n\n## NAME\n\nperl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5\n\n## DESCRIPTION\n\nThis document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the 5.8.5 release.\n\n## Sections\n\n- **NAME**\n- **DESCRIPTION** (13 subsections)\n- **SEE ALSO**\n\nUse structuredContent.sections for detailed options, examples, and full documentation.\n"
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        "summary": "perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5",
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            {
                "name": "NAME",
                "lines": 2,
                "subsections": []
            },
            {
                "name": "DESCRIPTION",
                "lines": 2,
                "subsections": [
                    {
                        "name": "Incompatible Changes",
                        "lines": 2
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Core Enhancements",
                        "lines": 4
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Modules and Pragmata",
                        "lines": 38
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Utility Changes",
                        "lines": 1
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Perl's debugger",
                        "lines": 3
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "h2ph",
                        "lines": 5
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Installation and Configuration Improvements",
                        "lines": 2
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Selected Bug Fixes",
                        "lines": 31
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "New or Changed Diagnostics",
                        "lines": 20
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Changed Internals",
                        "lines": 5
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Known Problems",
                        "lines": 3
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Platform Specific Problems",
                        "lines": 2
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Reporting Bugs",
                        "lines": 9
                    }
                ]
            },
            {
                "name": "SEE ALSO",
                "lines": 11,
                "subsections": []
            }
        ],
        "sections": {
            "NAME": {
                "content": "perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5\n",
                "subsections": []
            },
            "DESCRIPTION": {
                "content": "This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and the 5.8.5 release.\n",
                "subsections": [
                    {
                        "name": "Incompatible Changes",
                        "content": "There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Core Enhancements",
                        "content": "Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the intersection of two\nUnicode character classes. You can also now refer to user-defined character classes from\nwithin other user defined character classes.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Modules and Pragmata",
                        "content": "•   Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now be anomaly\nfree - it will always print out line number information.\n\n•   CGI upgraded to version 3.05\n\n•   charnames now avoids clobbering $\n\n•   Digest upgraded to version 1.08\n\n•   Encode upgraded to version 2.01\n\n•   FileCache upgraded to version 1.04\n\n•   libnet upgraded to version 1.19\n\n•   Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28\n\n•   Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13\n\n•   Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57\n\n•   Safe now works properly with Carp\n\n•   Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14\n\n•   Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial auto-quoting of\ncommand arguments can now be disabled.\n\n•   Test upgraded to version 1.25\n\n•   Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42\n\n•   Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10\n\n•   Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40\n\n•   Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Utility Changes",
                        "content": ""
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Perl's debugger",
                        "content": "The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last\ncommand from a saved command history.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "h2ph",
                        "content": "h2ph is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions -- basically, the\ninline functions that look like CPP macros. This has been introduced to deal with some of the\nheaders of the newest versions of the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote\nh2ph's documentation, you may need to dicker with the files produced.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Installation and Configuration Improvements",
                        "content": "Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Selected Bug Fixes",
                        "content": "•   The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example, in code such\nas\n\n@a = sort ($b, @a)\n\nthe result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.\n\n•   The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give spurious\nwarnings. This has been fixed.\n\n•   Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16 scripts of\neither endianness.\n\n•   Creating a new thread when weak references exist was buggy, and would often cause\nwarnings at interpreter destruction time. The known bug is now fixed.\n\n•   Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with \"substr\" have been\nfixed.\n\n•   Previously if Perl's file globbing function encountered a directory that it did not have\npermission to open it would return immediately, leading to unexpected truncation of the\nlist of results. This has been fixed, to be consistent with Unix shells' globbing\nbehaviour.\n\n•   Thread creation time could vary wildly between identical runs. This was caused by a poor\nhashing algorithm in the thread cloning routines, which has now been fixed.\n\n•   The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level thread\ncreation had failed. threads->create() now returns \"undef\" in if thread creation fails\ninstead of crashing perl.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "New or Changed Diagnostics",
                        "content": "•   Perl -V has several improvements\n\n•   correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets or other\ncharacters that used to confuse it.\n\n•   arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.\n\n•   a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator, allowing embedding of\nqueries into shell commands.\n\n•   a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to any\nname.\n\n•   When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line suggesting\nthat the user use the \"-S\" flag:\n\n$ perl5.8.5 missing.pl\nCan't open perl script \"missing.pl\": No such file or directory.\nUse -S to search $PATH for it.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Changed Internals",
                        "content": "The Unicode character class files used by the regular expression engine are now built at\nbuild time from the supplied Unicode consortium data files, instead of being shipped\nprebuilt. This makes the compressed Perl source tarball about 200K smaller. A side effect is\nthat the layout of files inside lib/unicore has changed.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Known Problems",
                        "content": "The regression test t/uni/class.t is now performing considerably more tests, and can take\nseveral minutes to run even on a fast machine.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Platform Specific Problems",
                        "content": "This release is known not to build on Windows 95.\n"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "Reporting Bugs",
                        "content": "If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the\ncomp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org.  There may\nalso be information at http://www.perl.org, the Perl Home Page.\n\nIf you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your\nrelease.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report,\nalong with the output of \"perl -V\", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by\nthe Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/\n"
                    }
                ]
            },
            "SEE ALSO": {
                "content": "The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.\n\nThe INSTALL file for how to build Perl.\n\nThe README file for general stuff.\n\nThe Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.\n\n\n\nperl v5.34.0                                 2025-07-25                              PERL585DELTA(1)",
                "subsections": []
            }
        }
    }
}