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PERL5135DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide	      PERL5135DELTA(1)

NAME
       perl5135delta - what is new for perl v5.13.5

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.13.4 release and the
       5.13.5 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.13.3, first read
       perl5134delta, which describes differences between 5.13.3 and 5.13.4.

Core Enhancements
   Adjacent pairs of nextstate opcodes are now optimized away
       Previously, in code such as

	   use constant DEBUG => 0;

	   sub GAK {
	       warn if DEBUG;
	       print "stuff\n";
	   }

       the ops for "warn if DEBUG;" would be folded to a "null" op
       ("ex-const"), but the "nextstate" op would remain, resulting in a
       runtime op dispatch of "nextstate", "nextstate", ...

       The execution of a sequence of "nextstate" ops is indistinguishable
       from just the last "nextstate" op so the peephole optimizer now
       eliminates the first of a pair of "nextstate" ops, except where the
       first carries a label, since labels must not be eliminated by the
       optimizer and label usage isn't conclusively known at compile time.

   API function to parse statements
       The "parse_fullstmt" function has been added to allow parsing of a
       single complete Perl statement.	See perlapi for details.

   API functions for accessing the runtime hinthash
       A new C API for introspecting the hinthash "%^H" at runtime has been
       added.  See "cop_hints_2hv", "cop_hints_fetchpvn",
       "cop_hints_fetchpvs", "cop_hints_fetchsv", and "hv_copy_hints_hv" in
       perlapi for details.

   C interface to "caller()"
       The "caller_cx" function has been added as an XSUB-writer's equivalent
       of "caller()".  See perlapi for details.

Incompatible Changes
   Magic variables outside the main package
       In previous versions of Perl, magic variables like $!, %SIG, etc. would
       'leak' into other packages.  So %foo::SIG could be used to access
       signals, "${"foo::!"}" (with strict mode off) to access C's "errno",
       etc.

       This was a bug, or an 'unintentional' feature, which caused various ill
       effects, such as signal handlers being wiped when modules were loaded,
       etc.

       This has been fixed (or the feature has been removed, depending on how
       you see it).

   Smart-matching against array slices
       Previously, the following code resulted in a successful match:

	   my @a = qw(a y0 z);
	   my @b = qw(a x0 z);
	   @a[0 .. $#b] ~~ @b;

       This odd behaviour has now been fixed [perl #77468]
       <http://rt.perl.org/rt3//Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77468>.

   C API changes
       The first argument of the C API function "Perl_fetch_cop_label" has
       changed from "struct refcounted he *" to "COP *", to better insulate
       the user from implementation details.

       This API function was marked as "may change", and likely isn't in use
       outside the core.  (Neither an unpacked CPAN, nor Google's codesearch,
       finds any other references to it.)

Deprecations
   Use of qw(...) as parentheses
       Historically the parser fooled itself into thinking that "qw(...)"
       literals were always enclosed in parentheses, and as a result you could
       sometimes omit parentheses around them:

	   for $x qw(a b c) { ... }

       The parser no longer lies to itself in this way.	 Wrap the list literal
       in parentheses, like:

	   for $x (qw(a b c)) { ... }

Performance Enhancements
       ·   Scalars containing regular expressions now only allocate the part
	   of the "SV" body they actually use, saving some space.

       ·   Compiling regular expressions has been made faster for the case
	   where upgrading the regex to utf8 is necessary but that isn't known
	   when the compilation begins.

Modules and Pragmata
   Updated Modules and Pragmata
       "bignum"
	   Upgraded from version 0.23 to 0.25.

       "blib"
	   Upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.06.

       "open"
	   Upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.08.

       "threads-shared"
	   Upgraded from version 1.33_02 to 1.33_03.

       "warnings" and "warnings::register"
	   Upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.11 and from version 1.01 to 1.02
	   respectively.

	   It is now possible to register warning categories other than the
	   names of packages using "warnings::register".  See perllexwarn for
	   more information.

       "B::Debug"
	   Upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.16.

       "CPANPLUS::Dist::Build"
	   Upgraded from version 0.46 to 0.48.

       "Data::Dumper"
	   Upgraded from version 2.126 to 2.128.

	   This fixes a crash when using custom sort functions that might
	   cause the stack to change.

       "Encode"
	   Upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.40.

       "Errno"
	   Upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.13.

	   On some platforms with unusual header files, like Win32/gcc using
	   mingw64 headers, some constants which weren't actually error
	   numbers have been exposed by "Errno".  This has been fixed [perl
	   #77416] <http://rt.perl.org/rt3//Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77416>.

       "ExtUtils::MakeMaker"
	   Upgraded from version 6.5601 to 6.57_05.

       "Filter::Simple"
	   Upgraded from version 0.84 to 0.85.

       "Hash::Util"
	   Upgraded from version 0.08 to 0.09.

       "Math::BigInt"
	   Upgraded from version 1.89_01 to 1.95.

	   This fixes, among other things, incorrect results when computing
	   binomial coefficients [perl #77640]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77640>.

       "Math::BigInt::FastCalc"
	   Upgraded from version 0.19 to 0.22.

       "Math::BigRat"
	   Upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.26.

       "Module::CoreList"
	   Upgraded from version 2.37 to 2.38.

       "PerlIO::scalar"
	   Upgraded from version 0.08 to 0.09.

       "POSIX"
	   Upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.20.

	   It now includes constants for POSIX signal constants.

       "Safe"
	   Upgraded from version 2.27 to 2.28.

	   This fixes a possible infinite loop when looking for coderefs.

       "Test::Simple"
	   Upgraded from version 0.96 to 0.97_01.

       "Tie::Hash"
	   Upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.

	   Calling "Tie::Hash->TIEHASH()" used to loop forever.	 Now it
	   "croak"s.

       "Unicode::Collate"
	   Upgraded from version 0.56 to 0.59.

       "XSLoader"
	   Upgraded from version 0.10 to 0.11.

Documentation
   Changes to Existing Documentation
       perlapi

       ·   Many of the optree construction functions are now documented.

       perlbook

       ·   Expanded to cover many more popular books.

       perlfaq

       ·   perlfaq, perlfaq2, perlfaq4, perlfaq5, perlfaq6, perlfaq8, and
	   perlfaq9 have seen various updates and modernizations.

Diagnostics
       The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output,
       including warnings and fatal error messages.  For the complete list of
       diagnostic messages, see perldiag.

   New Diagnostics
       ·   Parsing code internal error (%s)

	   New fatal error produced when parsing code supplied by an extension
	   violated the parser's API in a detectable way.

       ·   Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated

	   See "Use of qw(...) as parentheses" for details.

   Changes to Existing Diagnostics
       ·   "warn" and "die" now produce 'Wide character' warnings when fed a
	   character outside the byte range if STDERR is a byte-sized handle.

Utility Changes
       h2ph

       ·   The use of a deprecated "goto" construct has been removed [perl
	   #74404] <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=74404>.

Testing
       ·   The new t/lib/universal.t script tests the Internal::* functions
	   and other things in universal.c.

       ·   A rare race condition in t/op/while_readdir.t has been fixed,
	   stopping it from failing randomly when running tests in parallel.

       ·   The new t/op/leaky-magic.t script tests that magic applied to
	   variables in the main packages does not affect other packages.

Platform Support
   Platform-Specific Notes
       VMS
	   ·   Make "PerlIOUnix_open" honour default permissions on VMS.

	       When "perlio" became the default and "unixio" became the
	       default bottom layer, the most common path for creating files
	       from Perl became "PerlIOUnix_open", which has always explicitly
	       used 0666 as the permission mask.

	       To avoid this, 0777 is now passed as the permissions to
	       "open()".  In the VMS CRTL, 0777 has a special meaning over and
	       above intersecting with the current umask; specifically, it
	       allows Unix syscalls to preserve native default permissions.

Internal Changes
       ·   "CALL_FPTR" and "CPERLscope" have been deprecated.

	   Those are left from an old implementation of "MULTIPLICITY" using
	   C++ objects, which was removed in Perl 5.8.	Nowadays these macros
	   do exactly nothing, so they shouldn't be used anymore.

	   For compatibility, they are still defined for external "XS" code.
	   Only extensions defining "PERL_CORE" must be updated now.

       ·   "lex_stuff_pvs()" has been added as a convenience macro wrapping
	   "lex_stuff_pvn()" for literal strings.

       ·   The recursive part of the peephole optimizer is now hookable.

	   In addition to "PL_peepp", for hooking into the toplevel peephole
	   optimizer, a "PL_rpeepp" is now available to hook into the
	   optimizer recursing into side-chains of the optree.

Selected Bug Fixes
       ·   A regression introduced in Perl 5.12.0, making "my $x = 3; $x =
	   length(undef)" result in $x set to 3 has been fixed.	 $x will now
	   be "undef".

       ·   A fatal error in regular expressions when processing UTF-8 data has
	   been fixed [perl #75680]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=75680>.

       ·   An erroneous regular expression engine optimization that caused
	   regex verbs like *COMMIT to sometimes be ignored has been removed.

       ·   The Perl debugger now also works in taint mode [perl #76872]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=76872>.

       ·   Several memory leaks in cloning and freeing threaded Perl
	   interpreters have been fixed [perl #77352]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77352>.

       ·   A possible string corruption when doing regular expression matches
	   on overloaded objects has been fixed [perl #77084]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77084>.

       ·   Magic applied to variables in the main package no longer affects
	   other packages.  See "Magic variables outside the main package"
	   above [perl #76138]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=76138>.

       ·   Opening a glob reference via "open $fh, ">", \*glob" will no longer
	   cause the glob to be corrupted when the filehandle is printed to.
	   This would cause perl to crash whenever the glob's contents were
	   accessed [perl #77492]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77492>.

       ·   The postincrement and postdecrement operators, "++" and "--", used
	   to cause leaks when being used on references.  This has now been
	   fixed.

       ·   A bug when replacing the glob of a loop variable within the loop
	   has been fixed [perl #21469]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=21469>.  This
	   means the following code will no longer crash:

	       for $x (...) {
		   *x = *y;
	       }

       ·   Perl would segfault if the undocumented "Internals" functions that
	   used reference prototypes were called with the "&foo()" syntax,
	   e.g.	 "&Internals::SvREADONLY(undef)" [perl #77776]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77776>.

	   These functions now call "SvROK" on their arguments before
	   dereferencing them with "SvRV", and we test for this case in
	   t/lib/universal.t.

       ·   When assigning a list with duplicated keys to a hash, the
	   assignment used to return garbage and/or freed values:

	       @a = %h = (list with some duplicate keys);

	   This has now been fixed [perl #31865]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=31865>.

       ·   An earlier release of the 5.13 series of Perl changed the semantics
	   of opening a reference to a copy of a glob:

	       my $var = *STDOUT;
	       open my $fh, '>', \$var;

	   This was a mistake, and the previous behaviour from Perl 5.10 and
	   5.12, which is to treat \$var as a scalar reference, has now been
	   restored.

       ·   The regular expression bracketed character class "[\8\9]" was
	   effectively the same as "[89\000]", incorrectly matching a NULL
	   character.  It also gave incorrect warnings that the 8 and 9 were
	   ignored.  Now "[\8\9]" is the same as "[89]" and gives legitimate
	   warnings that "\8" and "\9" are unrecognized escape sequences,
	   passed-through.

       ·   "warn()" and "die()" now respect utf8-encoded scalars [perl #45549]
	   <http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=45549>.

Known Problems
       ·   The upgrade to Encode-2.40 has caused some tests in the libwww-perl
	   distribution on CPAN to fail. (Specifically, base/message-charset.t
	   tests 33-36 in version 5.836 of that distribution now fail.)

       ·   The upgrade to ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.57_05 has caused some tests in
	   the Module-Install distribution on CPAN to fail. (Specifically,
	   02_mymeta.t tests 5 and 21, 18_all_from.t tests 6 and 15,
	   19_authors.t tests 5, 13, 21 and 29, and
	   20_authors_with_special_characters.t tests 6, 15 and 23 in version
	   1.00 of that distribution now fail.)

Acknowledgements
       Perl 5.13.5 represents approximately one month of development since
       Perl 5.13.4 and contains 74558 lines of changes across 549 files from
       45 authors and committers:

       Abigail, Alexander Alekseev, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Ben Morrow, Bram,
       brian d foy, Chas. Owens, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry,
       Curtis Jewell, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsaaker, David Golden, David
       Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian
       Ragwitz, Gisle Aas, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim
       Cromie, Jirka HruXka, Karl Williamson, Michael G. Schwern, Nicholas
       Clark, Paul Johnson, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Piotr Fusik, Rafael
       Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Rob Hoelz,
       Robin Barker, Steffen Mueller, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Todd Rinaldo,
       Tony Cook, Vincent Pit, Yves Orton, Zefram, Zsban Ambrus, var Arnfjoer`
       Bjarmason.

       Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
       modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
       community for helping Perl to flourish.

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://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .  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@perl.org to be analysed by
       the Perl porting team.

       If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
       inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
       send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org.  This points to a closed
       subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
       committers, who be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out
       a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate
       or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported.
       Please only use this address for security issues in the Perl core, not
       for modules independently distributed on CPAN.

SEE ALSO
       The Changes file for an explanation of how to view 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 v5.14.2			  2011-09-26		      PERL5135DELTA(1)
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