perl573delta(1) 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 differences 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 problems 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 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 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 [email protected] to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

HISTORY

Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi <[email protected]>, with many contributions from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting feedback and patches.

Send omissions or corrections to <[email protected]>.