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database/perl/lib/pods/perl585delta.pod

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+=head1 NAME
+
+perl585delta - what is new for perl v5.8.5
+
+=head1 DESCRIPTION
+
+This document describes differences between the 5.8.4 release and
+the 5.8.5 release.
+
+=head1 Incompatible Changes
+
+There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.4.
+
+=head1 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.
+
+=head1 Modules and Pragmata
+
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+Carp improved to work nicely with Safe. Carp's message reporting should now
+be anomaly free - it will always print out line number information.
+
+=item *
+
+CGI upgraded to version 3.05
+
+=item *
+
+charnames now avoids clobbering $_
+
+=item *
+
+Digest upgraded to version 1.08
+
+=item *
+
+Encode upgraded to version 2.01
+
+=item *
+
+FileCache upgraded to version 1.04
+
+=item *
+
+libnet upgraded to version 1.19
+
+=item *
+
+Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.28
+
+=item *
+
+Pod::Perldoc upgraded to version 3.13
+
+=item *
+
+Pod::LaTeX upgraded to version 0.57
+
+=item *
+
+Safe now works properly with Carp
+
+=item *
+
+Scalar-List-Utils upgraded to version 1.14
+
+=item *
+
+Shell's documentation has been re-written, and its historical partial
+auto-quoting of command arguments can now be disabled.
+
+=item *
+
+Test upgraded to version 1.25
+
+=item *
+
+Test::Harness upgraded to version 2.42
+
+=item *
+
+Time::Local upgraded to version 1.10
+
+=item *
+
+Unicode::Collate upgraded to version 0.40
+
+=item *
+
+Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 0.30
+
+=back
+
+=head1 Utility Changes
+
+=head2 Perl's debugger
+
+The debugger can now emulate stepping backwards, by restarting and rerunning
+all bar the last command from a saved command history.
+
+=head2 h2ph
+
+F<h2ph> is now able to understand a very limited set of C inline functions
+-- basically, the inline functions that look like CPP macros. This has
+been introduced to deal with some of the headers of the newest versions of
+the glibc. The standard warning still applies; to quote F<h2ph>'s
+documentation, I<you may need to dicker with the files produced>.
+
+=head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements
+
+Perl 5.8.5 should build cleanly from source on LynxOS.
+
+=head1 Selected Bug Fixes
+
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+The in-place sort optimisation introduced in 5.8.4 had a bug. For example,
+in code such as
+
+    @a = sort ($b, @a)
+
+the result would omit the value $b. This is now fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+The optimisation for unnecessary assignments introduced in 5.8.4 could give
+spurious warnings. This has been fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+Perl should now correctly detect and read BOM-marked and (BOMless) UTF-16
+scripts of either endianness.
+
+=item *
+
+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.
+
+=item *
+
+Several obscure bugs involving manipulating Unicode strings with C<substr> have
+been fixed.
+
+=item *
+
+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.
+
+=item *
+
+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.
+
+=item *
+
+The internals of the ithreads implementation were not checking if OS-level
+thread creation had failed. threads->create() now returns C<undef> in if
+thread creation fails instead of crashing perl.
+
+=back
+
+=head1 New or Changed Diagnostics
+
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+Perl -V has several improvements
+
+=over 4
+
+=item  *
+
+correctly outputs local patch names that contain embedded code snippets
+or other characters that used to confuse it.
+
+=item * 
+
+arguments to -V that look like regexps will give multiple lines of output.
+
+=item *
+
+a trailing colon suppresses the linefeed and ';'  terminator, allowing
+embedding of queries into shell commands.
+
+=item *
+
+a leading colon removes the 'name=' part of the response, allowing mapping to
+any name.
+
+=back
+
+=item *
+
+When perl fails to find the specified script, it now outputs a second line
+suggesting that the user use the C<-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.
+
+=back
+
+=head1 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.
+
+=head1 Known Problems
+
+The regression test F<t/uni/class.t> is now performing considerably more
+tests, and can take several minutes to run even on a fast machine.
+
+=head1 Platform Specific Problems
+
+This release is known not to build on Windows 95.
+
+=head1 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 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.  You can browse and search
+the Perl 5 bugs at http://bugs.perl.org/
+
+=head1 SEE ALSO
+
+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.
+
+=cut