Man1 - perl589delta.1perl

The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has been updated to 5.1.0 from 4.1.0. See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/#NotableChanges for the notable changes.

It is now possible to call stat and the -X filestat operators on directory handles. As both directory and file handles are barewords, there can be ambiguities over which was intended. In these situations the file handle semantics are preferred. Both also treat *FILE{IO} filehandles like *FILE filehandles.

It’s possible to enhance the mechanism of subroutine hooks in @INC by adding a source filter on top of the filehandle opened and returned by the hook. This feature was planned a long time ago, but wasn’t quite working until now. See require in perlfunc for details. (Nicholas Clark)

The constant folding routine is now wrapped in an exception handler, and if folding throws an exception (such as attempting to evaluate 0/0), perl now retains the current optree, rather than aborting the whole program. Without this change, programs would not compile if they had expressions that happened to generate exceptions, even though those expressions were in code that could never be reached at runtime. (Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell)

You can now use no followed by a version number to specify that you want to use a version of perl older than the specified one.

The code that caches calculated UTF-8 byte offsets for character offsets for a string has been re-written. Several bugs have been located and eliminated, and the code now makes better use of the information it has, so should be faster. In particular, it doesn’t scan to the end of a string before calculating an offset within the string, which should speed up some operations on long strings. It is now possible to disable the caching code at run time, to verify that it is not the cause of suspected problems.

There is now Configure support for creating a perl tree that is relocatable at run time. see Relocatable installations.

“${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}”

This variable gives the native status returned by the last pipe close, backtick command, successful call to wait or waitpid, or from the system operator. See perlvar for details. (Contributed by Gisle Aas.)

“${^UTF8CACHE}”

This variable controls the state of the internal UTF-8 offset caching code. 1 for on (the default), 0 for off, -1 to debug the caching code by checking all its results against linear scans, and panicking on any discrepancy.

The built-in function readpipe is now overridable. Overriding it permits also to override its operator counterpart, qx// (also known as ``).

Perl 5.8.9 (and 5.10.0 onwards) now provides a couple of macros to do very basic exception handling in XS modules. You can use these macros if you call code that may croak, but you need to do some cleanup before giving control back to Perl. See Exception Handling in perlguts for more details.

• -Dq suppresses the EXECUTING… message when running under -D
• -Dl logs runops loop entry and exit, and jump level popping.
• -Dv displays the process id as part of the trace output.

Some pure-perl code that the regexp engine was using to retrieve Unicode properties and transliteration mappings has been reimplemented in XS for faster execution. (SADAHIRO Tomoyuki)

The interpreter internals now support a far more memory efficient form of inlineable constants. Storing a reference to a constant value in a symbol table is equivalent to a full typeglob referencing a constant subroutine, but using about 400 bytes less memory. This proxy constant subroutine is automatically upgraded to a real typeglob with subroutine if necessary. The approach taken is analogous to the existing space optimisation for subroutine stub declarations, which are stored as plain scalars in place of the full typeglob.

However, to aid backwards compatibility of existing code, which (wrongly) does not expect anything other than typeglobs in symbol tables, nothing in core uses this feature, other than the regression tests.

Stubs for prototyped subroutines have been stored in symbol tables as plain strings, and stubs for unprototyped subroutines as the number -1, since 5.005, so code which assumes that the core only places typeglobs in symbol tables has been making incorrect assumptions for over 10 years.

• Module::Pluggable is a simple framework to create modules that accept pluggable sub-modules. The bundled version is 3.8
• Module::CoreList is a hash of hashes that is keyed on perl version as indicated in $]. The bundled version is 2.17
• Win32API::File now available in core on Microsoft Windows. The bundled version is 0.1001_01
• Devel::InnerPackage finds all the packages defined by a single file. It is part of the Module::Pluggable distribution. The bundled version is 0.3

• attributes upgraded to version 0.09
• AutoLoader upgraded to version 5.67
• AutoSplit upgraded to 1.06
• autouse upgraded to version 1.06
• B upgraded from 1.09_01 to 1.19
  • provides new pad related abstraction macros B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_LOW, B::NV::COP_SEQ_RANGE_HIGH, B::NV::PARENT_PAD_INDEX, B::NV::PARENT_FAKELEX_FLAGS, which hides the difference in storage in 5.10.0 and later.
  • provides B::sub_generation, which exposes PL_sub_generation
  • provides B::GV::isGV_with_GP, which on pre-5.10 perls always returns true.
  • New type B::HE added with methods VAL, HASH and SVKEY_force
  • The B::GVf_IMPORTED_CV flag is now set correctly when a proxy constant subroutine is imported.
  • bugs fixed in the handling of =PMOP=s.
  • B::BM::PREVIOUS returns now U32, not U16. B::CV::START and B:CV::ROOT return now NULL on an XSUB, B::CV::XSUB and B::CV::XSUBANY return 0 on a non-XSUB.
• B::C upgraded to 1.05
• B::Concise upgraded to 0.76
  • new option -src causes the rendering of each statement (starting with the nextstate OP) to be preceded by the first line of source code that generates it.
  • new option -stash“somepackage”=, =require=s somepackage, and then renders each function defined in its namespace.
  • now has documentation of detailed hint symbols.
• B::Debug upgraded to version 1.05
• B::Deparse upgraded to version 0.87
  • properly deparse print readpipe $x, $y.
  • {}=, etc. correctly [RT #43010]. All bugs in parsing these kinds of syntax are now fixed: perl -MO=Deparse -e “my %h = ”->() perl -MO=Deparse -e ::->() perl -MO=Deparse -e sub :: {} perl -MO=Deparse -e package a; sub a::b::c {} perl -MO=Deparse -e sub the::main::road {}
  • does not deparse $^H{v_string}, which is automatically set by the internals.
• B::Lint upgraded to version 1.11
• B::Terse upgraded to version 1.05
• base upgraded to version 2.13
  • loading a module via base.pm would mask a global $SIG{_ _DIE_ _} in that module.
  • push all classes at once in @ISA
• Benchmark upgraded to version 1.10
• bigint upgraded to 0.23
• bignum upgraded to 0.23
• bigrat upgraded to 0.23
• blib upgraded to 0.04
• Carp upgraded to version 1.10 The argument backtrace code now shows undef as undef, instead of a string undef.
• CGI upgraded to version 3.42
• charnames upgraded to 1.06
• constant upgraded to version 1.17
• CPAN upgraded to version 1.9301
• Cwd upgraded to version 3.29 with some platform specific improvements (including for VMS).
• Data::Dumper upgraded to version 2.121_17
  • Fixes hash iterator current position with the pure Perl version [RT #40668]
  • Performance enhancements, which will be most evident on platforms where repeated calls to C’s realloc() are slow, such as Win32.
• DB_File upgraded to version 1.817
• DB_Filter upgraded to version 0.02
• Devel::DProf upgraded to version 20080331.00
• Devel::Peek upgraded to version 1.04
• Devel::PPPort upgraded to version 3.14
• diagnostics upgraded to version 1.16
• Digest upgraded to version 1.15
• Digest::MD5 upgraded to version 2.37
• DirHandle upgraded to version 1.02
  • now localises $., $@, $!, $^E, and $? before closing the directory handle to suppress leaking any side effects of warnings about it already being closed.
• DynaLoader upgraded to version 1.09 DynaLoader can now dynamically load a loadable object from a file with a non-default file extension.
• Encode upgraded to version 2.26 Encode::Alias includes a fix for encoding 646 on Solaris (better known as ASCII).
• English upgraded to version 1.03
• Errno upgraded to version 1.10
• Exporter upgraded to version 5.63
• ExtUtils::Command upgraded to version 1.15
• ExtUtils::Constant upgraded to version 0.21
• ExtUtils::Embed upgraded to version 1.28
• ExtUtils::Install upgraded to version 1.50_01
• ExtUtils::Installed upgraded to version 1.43
• ExtUtils::MakeMaker upgraded to version 6.48
  • support for INSTALLSITESCRIPT and INSTALLVENDORSCRIPT configuration.
• ExtUtils::Manifest upgraded to version 1.55
• ExtUtils::ParseXS upgraded to version 2.19
• Fatal upgraded to version 1.06
  • allows built-ins in CORE::GLOBAL to be made fatal.
• Fcntl upgraded to version 1.06
• fields upgraded to version 2.12
• File::Basename upgraded to version 2.77
• FileCache upgraded to version 1.07
• File::Compare upgraded to 1.1005
• File::Copy upgraded to 2.13
  • now uses 3-arg open.
• File::DosGlob upgraded to 1.01
• File::Find upgraded to version 1.13
• File::Glob upgraded to version 1.06
  • fixes spurious results with brackets inside braces.
• File::Path upgraded to version 2.07_02
• File::Spec upgraded to version 3.29
  • improved handling of bad arguments.
  • some platform specific improvements (including for VMS and Cygwin), with an optimisation on abs2rel when handling both relative arguments.
• File::stat upgraded to version 1.01
• File::Temp upgraded to version 0.20
• filetest upgraded to version 1.02
• Filter::Util::Call upgraded to version 1.07
• Filter::Simple upgraded to version 0.83
• FindBin upgraded to version 1.49
• GDBM_File upgraded to version 1.09
• Getopt::Long upgraded to version 2.37
• Getopt::Std upgraded to version 1.06
• Hash::Util upgraded to version 0.06
• if upgraded to version 0.05
• IO upgraded to version 1.23 Reduced number of calls to getpeername in IO::Socket
• IPC::Open upgraded to version 1.03
• IPC::Open3 upgraded to version 1.03
• IPC::SysV upgraded to version 2.00
• lib upgraded to version 0.61
  • avoid warning about loading .par files.
• libnet upgraded to version 1.22
• List::Util upgraded to 1.19
• Locale::Maketext upgraded to 1.13
• Math::BigFloat upgraded to version 1.60
• Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.89
• Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.22
  • implements new as_float method.
• Math::Complex upgraded to version 1.54.
• Math::Trig upgraded to version 1.18.
• NDBM_File upgraded to version 1.07
  • improve g++ handling for systems using GDBM compatibility headers.
• Net::Ping upgraded to version 2.35
• NEXT upgraded to version 0.61
  • fix several bugs with NEXT when working with AUTOLOAD, eval block, and within overloaded stringification.
• ODBM_File upgraded to 1.07
• open upgraded to 1.06
• ops upgraded to 1.02
• PerlIO::encoding upgraded to version 0.11
• PerlIO::scalar upgraded to version 0.06
  • [RT #40267] PerlIO::scalar doesn’t respect readonly-ness.
• PerlIO::via upgraded to version 0.05
• Pod::Html upgraded to version 1.09
• Pod::Parser upgraded to version 1.35
• Pod::Usage upgraded to version 1.35
• POSIX upgraded to version 1.15
  • POSIX constants that duplicate those in Fcntl are now imported from Fcntl and re-exported, rather than being duplicated by POSIX
  • POSIX::remove can remove empty directories.
  • POSIX::setlocale safer to call multiple times.
  • POSIX::SigRt added, which provides access to POSIX realtime signal functionality on systems that support it.
• re upgraded to version 0.06_01
• Safe upgraded to version 2.16
• Scalar::Util upgraded to 1.19
• SDBM_File upgraded to version 1.06
• SelfLoader upgraded to version 1.17
• Shell upgraded to version 0.72
• sigtrap upgraded to version 1.04
• Socket upgraded to version 1.81
  • this fixes an optimistic use of gethostbyname
• Storable upgraded to 2.19
• Switch upgraded to version 2.13
• Sys::Syslog upgraded to version 0.27
• Term::ANSIColor upgraded to version 1.12
• Term::Cap upgraded to version 1.12
• Term::ReadLine upgraded to version 1.03
• Test::Builder upgraded to version 0.80
• Test::Harness upgraded version to 2.64
  • this makes it able to handle newlines.
• Test::More upgraded to version 0.80
• Test::Simple upgraded to version 0.80
• Text::Balanced upgraded to version 1.98
• Text::ParseWords upgraded to version 3.27
• Text::Soundex upgraded to version 3.03
• Text::Tabs upgraded to version 2007.1117
• Text::Wrap upgraded to version 2006.1117
• Thread upgraded to version 2.01
• Thread::Semaphore upgraded to version 2.09
• Thread::Queue upgraded to version 2.11
  • added capability to add complex structures (e.g., hash of hashes) to queues.
  • added capability to dequeue multiple items at once.
  • added new methods to inspect and manipulate queues: peek, insert and extract
• Tie::Handle upgraded to version 4.2
• Tie::Hash upgraded to version 1.03
• Tie::Memoize upgraded to version 1.1
  • Tie::Memoize::EXISTS now correctly caches its results.
• Tie::RefHash upgraded to version 1.38
• Tie::Scalar upgraded to version 1.01
• Tie::StdHandle upgraded to version 4.2
• Time::gmtime upgraded to version 1.03
• Time::Local upgraded to version 1.1901
• Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.9715 with various build improvements (including VMS) and minor platform-specific bug fixes (including for HP-UX 11 ia64).
• threads upgraded to 1.71
  • new thread state information methods: is_running, is_detached and is_joinable. list method enhanced to return running or joinable threads.
  • new thread signal method: kill
  • added capability to specify thread stack size.
  • added capability to control thread exiting behavior. Added a new exit method.
• threads::shared upgraded to version 1.27
  • smaller and faster implementation that eliminates one internal structure and the consequent level of indirection.
  • user locks are now stored in a safer manner.
  • new function shared_clone creates a copy of an object leaving shared elements as-is and deep-cloning non-shared elements.
  • added new is_shared method.
• Unicode::Normalize upgraded to version 1.02
• Unicode::UCD upgraded to version 0.25
• warnings upgraded to version 1.05_01
• Win32 upgraded to version 0.38
  • added new function GetCurrentProcessId which returns the regular Windows process identifier of the current process, even when called from within a fork.
• XSLoader upgraded to version 0.10
• XS::APItest and XS::Typemap are for internal use only and hence no longer installed. Many more tests have been added to XS::APItest.

• Andreas Ko\k:.nig contributed two functions to save and load the debugger history.
• NEXT::AUTOLOAD no longer emits warnings under the debugger.
• The debugger should now correctly find tty the device on OS X 10.5 and VMS when the program =fork=s.
• LVALUE subs now work inside the debugger.

Perl 5.8.9 adds a new utility perlthanks, which is a variant of perlbug, but for sending non-bug-reports to the authors and maintainers of Perl. Getting nothing but bug reports can become a bit demoralising - we’ll see if this changes things.

perlbug now checks if you’re reporting about a non-core module and suggests you report it to the CPAN author instead.

• won’t define an empty string as a constant [RT #25366]
• has examples for h2xs -X

• now attempts to deal sensibly with the difference in path implications between "" and <> quoting in #include statements.
• now generates correct code for #if defined A || defined B [RT #39130]

There is now Configure support for creating a relocatable perl tree. If you Configure with -Duserelocatableinc, then the paths in @INC (and everything else in %Config) can be optionally located via the path of the perl executable.

At start time, if any paths in @INC or Config that Configure marked as relocatable (by starting them with ".../"), then they are prefixed the directory of $^X. This allows the relocation can be configured on a per-directory basis, although the default with -Duserelocatableinc is that everything is relocated. The initial install is done to the original configured prefix.

Configure is now better at removing temporary files. Tom Callaway (from RedHat) also contributed patches that complete the set of flags passed to the compiler and the linker, in particular that -fPIC is now enabled on Linux. It will also croak when your /dev/null isn’t a device.

A new configuration variable d_pseudofork has been to Configure, and is available as $Config{d_pseudofork} in the Config module. This distinguishes real fork support from the pseudofork emulation used on Windows platforms.

Config.pod and config.sh are now placed correctly for cross-compilation.

$Config{useshrplib} is now ’true’ rather than ’yes’ when using a shared perl library.

Parallel makes should work properly now, although there may still be problems if make test is instructed to run in parallel.

Many compilation warnings have been cleaned up. A very stubborn compiler warning in S_emulate_eaccess() was killed after six attempts. g++ support has been tuned, especially for FreeBSD.

mkppport has been integrated, and all ppport.h files in the core will now be autogenerated at build time (and removed during cleanup).

installman now works with -Duserelocatableinc and DESTDIR.

installperl no longer installs:

• static library files of statically linked extensions when a shared perl library is being used. (They are not needed. See Windows below).
• SIGNATURE and PAUSE*.pub (CPAN files)
• NOTES and PATCHING (ExtUtils files)
• perlld and ld2 (Cygwin files)

There are improved hints for AIX, Cygwin, DEC/OSF, FreeBSD, HP/UX, Irix 6 Linux, MachTen, NetBSD, OS/390, QNX, SCO, Solaris, SunOS, System V Release 5.x (UnixWare 7, OpenUNIX 8), Ultrix, UMIPS, uts and VOS.

FreeBSD

• Drop -std=c89 and -ansi if using long long as the main integral type, else in FreeBSD 6.2 (and perhaps other releases), system headers do not declare some functions required by perl.

Solaris

• Starting with Solaris 10, we do not want versioned shared libraries, because those often indicate a private use only library. These problems could often be triggered when SUNWbdb (Berkeley DB) was installed. Hence if Solaris 10 is detected set ignore_versioned_solibs=y.

VMS

• Allow IEEE math to be deselected on OpenVMS I64 (but it remains the default).
• Record IEEE usage in config.h
• Help older VMS compilers by using ccflags when building munchconfig.exe.
• Don’t try to build old Thread extension on VMS when -Duseithreads has been chosen.
• Passing a raw string of NaN to nawk causes a core dump - so the string has been changed to NaN
• t/op/stat.t tests will now test hard links on VMS if they are supported.

Windows

• When using a shared perl library installperl no longer installs static library files, import library files and export library files (of statically linked extensions) and empty bootstrap files (of dynamically linked extensions). This fixes a problem building PAR-Packer on Win32 with a debug build of perl.
• Various improvements to the win32 build process, including support for Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition (aka Visual C++ 8.x).
• perl.exe will now have an icon if built with MinGW or Borland.
• Improvements to the perl-static.exe build process.
• Add Win32 makefile option to link all extensions statically.
• The WinCE directory has been merged into the Win32 directory.
• setlocale tests have been re-enabled for Windows XP onwards.

Many many bugs related to the internal Unicode implementation (UTF-8) have been fixed. In particular, long standing bugs related to returning Unicode via tie, overloading or $@ are now gone, some of which were never reported.

unpack will internally convert the string back from UTF-8 on numeric types. This is a compromise between the full consistency now in 5.10, and the current behaviour, which is often used as a feature on string types.

Using :crlf and UTF-16 IO layers together will now work.

Fixed problems with split, Unicode /\s+/ and / \0/.

Fixed bug RT #40641 - encoding of Unicode characters in regular expressions.

Fixed a bug where using certain patterns in a regexp led to a panic. [RT #45337]

Perl no longer segfaults (due to infinite internal recursion) if the locale’s character is not UTF-8 [RT #41442]:

use open :locale; print STDERR “\x{201e}”; # „

Inconsistencies have been fixed in the reference counting PerlIO uses to keep track of Unix file descriptors, and the API used by XS code to manage getting and releasing =FILE *=s

Several bugs have been fixed in Magic, the internal system used to implement features such as tie, tainting and threads sharing.

undef @array on a tied array now correctly calls the CLEAR method.

Some of the bitwise ops were not checking whether their arguments were magical before using them. [RT #24816]

Magic is no longer invoked twice by the expression \&$x

A bug with assigning large numbers and tainting has been resolved. [RT #40708]

A new entry has been added to the MAGIC vtable - svt_local. This is used when copying magic to the new value during local, allowing certain problems with localising shared variables to be resolved.

For the implementation details, see Magic Virtual Tables in perlguts.

Internally, perl object-ness is on the referent, not the reference, even though methods can only be called via a reference. However, the original implementation of overloading stored flags related to overloading on the reference, relying on the flags being copied when the reference was copied, or set at the creation of a new reference. This manifests in a bug - if you rebless an object from a class that has overloading, into one that does not, then any other existing references think that they (still) point to an overloaded object, choose these C code paths, and then throw errors. Analogously, blessing into an overloaded class when other references exist will result in them not using overloading.

The implementation has been fixed for 5.10, but this fix changes the semantics of flag bits, so is not binary compatible, so can’t be applied to 5.8.9. However, 5.8.9 has a work-around that implements the same bug fix. If the referent has multiple references, then all the other references are located and corrected. A full search is avoided whenever possible by scanning lexicals outwards from the current subroutine, and the argument stack.

A certain well known Linux vendor applied incomplete versions of this bug fix to their /usr/bin/perl and then prematurely closed bug reports about performance issues without consulting back upstream. This not being enough, they then proceeded to ignore the necessary fixes to these unreleased changes for 11 months, until massive pressure was applied by their long-suffering paying customers, catalysed by the failings being featured on a prominent blog and Slashdot.

Under 5.8.8 and earlier:

$ perl5.8.8 -e use strict; eval “use foo bar” or die $@ Cant locate foo.pm in @INC (@INC contains: … .) at (eval 1) line 2. BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 2.

Under 5.8.9 and later:

$ perl5.8.9 -e use strict; eval “use foo bar” or die $@ Bareword “bar” not allowed while “strict subs” in use at (eval 1) line 1.

This may cause problems with programs that parse the error message and rely on the buggy behaviour.

• The tokenizer no longer treats =cute (and other words beginning with =cut) as a synonym for =cut.
• Calling CORE::require CORE::require and CORE::do were always parsed as require and do when they were overridden. This is now fixed.
• Stopped memory leak on long /etc/groups entries.
• while (my $x ...) { ...; redo } shouldn’t undef $x. In the presence of my in the conditional of a while(), until(), or for(;;) loop, we now add an extra scope to the body so that redo doesn’t undef the lexical.
• The encoding pragma now correctly ignores anything following an @ character in the LC_ALL and LANG environment variables. [RT # 49646]
• A segfault observed with some gcc 3.3 optimisations is resolved.
• A possible segfault when unpack used in scalar context with () groups is resolved. [RT #50256]
• Resolved issue where $! could be changed by a signal handler interrupting a system call.
• Fixed bug RT #37886, symbolic dereferencing was allowed in the argument of defined even under the influence of use strict refs.
• Fixed bug RT #43207, where lc=/=uc inside sort affected the return value.
• Fixed bug RT #45607, where *{"BONK"} = \&{"BONK"} didn’t work correctly.
• Fixed bug RT #35878, croaking from a XSUB called via goto &xsub corrupts perl internals.
• Fixed bug RT #32539, DynaLoader.o is moved into libperl.so to avoid the need to statically link DynaLoader into the stub perl executable. With this libperl.so provides everything needed to get a functional embedded perl interpreter to run.
• Fix bug RT #36267 so that assigning to a tied hash doesn’t change the underlying hash.
• Fix bug RT #6006, regexp replaces using large replacement variables fail some of the time, i.e. when substitution contains something like ${10} (note the bracket) instead of just $10.
• Fix bug RT #45053, Perl_newCONSTSUB() is now thread safe.

Darwin / MacOS X

• Various improvements to 64 bit builds.
• Mutex protection added in PerlIOStdio_close() to avoid race conditions. Hopefully this fixes failures in the threads tests free.t and blocks.t.
• Added forked terminal support to the debugger, with the ability to update the window title.

OS/2

• A build problem with specifying USE_MULTI and USE_ITHREADS but without USE_IMP_SYS has been fixed.
• OS2::REXX upgraded to version 1.04

Tru64

• Aligned floating point build policies for cc and gcc.

RedHat Linux

• Revisited a patch from 5.6.1 for RH7.2 for Intel’s icc [RT #7916], added an additional check for $Config{gccversion}.

Solaris/i386

• Use -DPTR_IS_LONG when using 64 bit integers

VMS

• Fixed PerlIO::Scalar in-memory file record-style reads.
• pipe shutdown at process exit should now be more robust.
• Bugs in VMS exit handling tickled by Test::Harness 2.64 have been fixed.
• Fix fcntl() locking capability test in configure.com.
• Replaced shrplib=define with useshrplib=true on VMS.

Windows

• File::Find used to fail when the target directory is a bare drive letter and no_chdir is 1 (the default is 0). [RT #41555]
• A build problem with specifying USE_MULTI and USE_ITHREADS but without USE_IMP_SYS has been fixed.
• The process id is no longer truncated to 16 bits on some Windows platforms ( http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=72443 )
• Fixed bug RT #54828 in perlio.c where calling binmode on Win32 and Cygwin may cause a segmentation fault.

• It is now possible to overload eq when using nomethod.
• Various problems using overload with 64 bit integers corrected.
• The reference count of PerlIO file descriptors is now correctly handled.
• On VMS, escaped dots will be preserved when converted to Unix syntax.
• keys %+ no longer throws an ambiguous warning.
• Using #!perl -d could trigger an assertion, which has been fixed.
• Don’t stringify tied code references in @INC when calling require.
• Code references in @INC report the correct file name when _ _FILE_ _ is used.
• Width and precision in sprintf didn’t handle characters above 255 correctly. [RT #40473]
• List slices with indices out of range now work more consistently. [RT #39882]
• A change introduced with perl 5.8.1 broke the parsing of arguments of the form -foo=bar with the -s on the <#!> line. This has been fixed. See http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=43483
• tr/// is now threadsafe. Previously it was storing a swash inside its OP, rather than in a pad.
• pod2html labels anchors more consistently and handles nested definition lists better.
• threads cleanup veto has been extended to include perl_free() and perl_destruct()
• On some systems, changes to $ENV{TZ} would not always be respected by the underlying calls to localtime_r(). Perl now forces the inspection of the environment on these systems.
• The special variable $^R is now more consistently set when executing regexps using the (?{...}) construct. In particular, it will still be set even if backreferences or optional sub-patterns (?:...)? are used.

This new fatal error occurs when the C routine Perl_sv_chop() was passed a position that is not within the scalar’s string buffer. This is caused by buggy XS code, and at this point recovery is not possible.

This new fatal error occurs when the perl process has to abort due to too many pending signals, which is bound to prevent perl from being able to handle further incoming signals safely.

This new fatal error occurs when the ACL version file test operator is used where it is not available on the current platform. Earlier checks mean that it should never be possible to get this.

New error indicating that a tied array has claimed to have a negative number of elements.

Previously the internal error from the SV upgrade code was the less informative Can’t upgrade that kind of scalar. It now reports the current internal type, and the new type requested.

This error, thrown if an invalid argument is provided to exists now correctly includes or a subroutine. [RT #38955]

This error in Fatal previously did not show the name of the builtin in question (now represented by %s above).

This error previously did not state the column.

This can now also be generated by a seek on a file handle using PerlIO::scalar.

HERE in m/%s/ New error, introduced as part of the fix to RT #40641 to handle encoding of Unicode characters in regular expression comments.

A more informative fatal error issued when calling dump on Win32 and Cygwin. (Given that the purpose of dump is to abort with a core dump, and core dumps can’t be produced on these platforms, this is more useful than silently exiting.)

The core code, and XS code in ext that is not dual-lived on CPAN, no longer uses the macros PL_na, NEWSV(), Null(), Nullav, Nullcv, Nullhv, Nullhv etc. Their use is discouraged in new code, particularly PL_na, which is a small performance hit.

readdir(), cwd(), $^X and @INC now use the alternate (short) filename if the long name is outside the current codepage (Jan Dubois).

Updated Modules

• Win32 upgraded to version 0.38. Now has a documented ’WinVista’ response from GetOSName and support for Vista’s privilege elevation in IsAdminUser. Support for Unicode characters in path names. Improved cygwin and Win64 compatibility.
• Win32API updated to 0.1001_01
• killpg() support added to MSWin32 (Jan Dubois).
• File::Spec::Win32 upgraded to version 3.2701

Updated Modules

• OS2::Process upgraded to 1.03 Ilya Zakharevich has added and documented several Window* and Clipbrd* functions.
• OS2::REXX::DLL, OS2::REXX updated to version 1.03

Updated Modules

• DCLsym upgraded to version 1.03
• Stdio upgraded to version 2.4
• VMS::XSSymSet upgraded to 1.1.