perl573delta

PERL573DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL573DELTA(1)



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 differ-
       ences 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 prob-
           lems 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 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 pro-
       gram 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.

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.

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

       Send omissions or corrections to <perlbug@perl.org>.



perl v5.8.6                       2004-11-05                   PERL573DELTA(1)