perldelta - what is new for perl v5.14.0
This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and the 5.14.0 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.0, first read perl5120delta, which describes differences between 5.10.0 and 5.12.0.
Some of the bug fixes in this release have been backported to subsequent releases of 5.12.x. Those are indicated with the 5.12.x version in parentheses.
As described in perlpolicy, the release of Perl 5.14.0 marks the official end of support for Perl 5.10. Users of Perl 5.10 or earlier should consider upgrading to a more recent release of Perl.
Perl comes with the Unicode 6.0 data base updated with Corrigendum #8, with one exception noted below. See http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ for details on the new release. Perl does not support any Unicode provisional properties, including the new ones for this release.
Unicode 6.0 has chosen to use the name BELL
for the character at U+1F514,
which is a symbol that looks like a bell, and is used in Japanese cell
phones. This conflicts with the long-standing Perl usage of having
BELL
mean the ASCII BEL
character, U+0007. In Perl 5.14,
\N{BELL}
continues to mean U+0007, but its use generates a
deprecation warning message unless such warnings are turned off. The
new name for U+0007 in Perl is ALERT
, which corresponds nicely
with the existing shorthand sequence for it, "\a"
. \N{BEL}
means U+0007, with no warning given. The character at U+1F514 has no
name in 5.14, but can be referred to by \N{U+1F514}
.
In Perl 5.16, \N{BELL}
will refer to U+1F514; all code
that uses \N{BELL}
should be converted to use \N{ALERT}
,
\N{BEL}
, or "\a"
before upgrading.
use feature 'unicode_strings'
This release provides full functionality for use feature
'unicode_strings'
. Under its scope, all string operations executed and
regular expressions compiled (even if executed outside its scope) have
Unicode semantics. See the 'unicode_strings' feature in feature.
However, see Inverted bracketed character classes and multi-character folds,
below.
This feature avoids most forms of the "Unicode Bug" (see The Unicode Bug in perlunicode for details). If there is any possibility that your code will process Unicode strings, you are strongly encouraged to use this subpragma to avoid nasty surprises.
\N{NAME} and charnames
enhancements\N{NAME} and charnames::vianame
now know about the abbreviated
character names listed by Unicode, such as NBSP, SHY, LRO, ZWJ, etc.; all
customary abbreviations for the C0 and C1 control characters (such as
ACK, BEL, CAN, etc.); and a few new variants of some C1 full names that
are in common usage.
Unicode has several named character sequences, in which particular sequences
of code points are given names. \N{NAME} now recognizes these.
\N{NAME}, charnames::vianame
, and charnames::viacode
now know about every character in Unicode. In earlier releases of
Perl, they didn't know about the Hangul syllables nor several
CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters.
It is now possible to override Perl's abbreviations with your own custom aliases.
You can now create a custom alias of the ordinal of a
character, known by \N{NAME}, charnames::vianame()
, and
charnames::viacode()
. Previously, aliases had to be to official
Unicode character names. This made it impossible to create an alias for
unnamed code points, such as those reserved for private
use.
The new function charnames::string_vianame() is a run-time version
of \N{NAME}}, returning the string of characters whose Unicode
name is its parameter. It can handle Unicode named character
sequences, whereas the pre-existing charnames::vianame() cannot,
as the latter returns a single code point.
See charnames for details on all these changes.
Three new warnings subcategories of "utf8" have been added. These
allow you to turn off some "utf8" warnings, while allowing
other warnings to remain on. The three categories are:
surrogate
when UTF-16 surrogates are encountered;
nonchar
when Unicode non-character code points are encountered;
and non_unicode
when code points above the legal Unicode
maximum of 0x10FFFF are encountered.
With this release, Perl is adopting a model that any unsigned value
can be treated as a code point and encoded internally (as utf8)
without warnings, not just the code points that are legal in Unicode.
However, unless utf8 or the corresponding sub-category (see previous
item) of lexical warnings have been explicitly turned off, outputting
or executing a Unicode-defined operation such as upper-casing
on such a code point generates a warning. Attempting to input these
using strict rules (such as with the :encoding(UTF-8)
layer)
will continue to fail. Prior to this release, handling was
inconsistent and in places, incorrect.
Unicode non-characters, some of which previously were erroneously considered illegal in places by Perl, contrary to the Unicode Standard, are now always legal internally. Inputting or outputting them works the same as with the non-legal Unicode code points, because the Unicode Standard says they are (only) illegal for "open interchange".
The Unicode database files are no longer installed with Perl. This doesn't affect any functionality in Perl and saves significant disk space. If you need these files, you can download them from http://www.unicode.org/Public/zipped/6.0.0/.
(?^...)
construct signifies default modifiersAn ASCII caret "^"
immediately following a "(?"
in a regular
expression now means that the subexpression does not inherit surrounding
modifiers such as /i, but reverts to the Perl defaults. Any modifiers
following the caret override the defaults.
Stringification of regular expressions now uses this notation.
For example, qr/hlagh/i would previously be stringified as
(?i-xsm:hlagh)
, but now it's stringified as (?^i:hlagh)
.
The main purpose of this change is to allow tests that rely on the stringification not to have to change whenever new modifiers are added. See Extended Patterns in perlre.
This change is likely to break code that compares stringified regular
expressions with fixed strings containing ?-xism
.
/d, /l
, /u
, and /a
modifiersFour new regular expression modifiers have been added. These are mutually exclusive: one only can be turned on at a time.
The /l
modifier says to compile the regular expression as if it were
in the scope of use locale
, even if it is not.
The /u
modifier says to compile the regular expression as if it were
in the scope of a use feature 'unicode_strings'
pragma.
The /d (default) modifier is used to override any use locale
and
use feature 'unicode_strings'
pragmas in effect at the time
of compiling the regular expression.
The /a
regular expression modifier restricts \s, \d
and \w
and
the POSIX ([[:posix:]]
) character classes to the ASCII range. Their
complements and \b
and \B
are correspondingly
affected. Otherwise, /a
behaves like the /u
modifier, in that
case-insensitive matching uses Unicode semantics.
If the /a
modifier is repeated, then additionally in case-insensitive
matching, no ASCII character can match a non-ASCII character.
For example,
- "k" =~ /\N{KELVIN SIGN}/ai
- "\xDF" =~ /ss/ai
match but
- "k" =~ /\N{KELVIN SIGN}/aai
- "\xDF" =~ /ss/aai
do not match.
See Modifiers in perlre for more detail.
The substitution (s///) and transliteration
(y///) operators now support an /r
option that
copies the input variable, carries out the substitution on
the copy, and returns the result. The original remains unmodified.
This is particularly useful with map. See perlop for more examples.
It is now safe to use regular expressions within (?{...}) and
(??{...})
code blocks inside regular expressions.
These blocks are still experimental, however, and still have problems with
lexical (my) variables and abnormal exiting.
use re '/flags'
The re
pragma now has the ability to turn on regular expression flags
till the end of the lexical scope:
- use re "/x";
- "foo" =~ / (.+) /; # /x implied
See '/flags' mode in re for details.
There is a new octal escape sequence, "\o"
, in doublequote-like
contexts. This construct allows large octal ordinals beyond the
current max of 0777 to be represented. It also allows you to specify a
character in octal which can safely be concatenated with other regex
snippets and which won't be confused with being a backreference to
a regex capture group. See Capture groups in perlre.
\p{Titlecase}
as a synonym for \p{Title}
This synonym is added for symmetry with the Unicode property names
\p{Uppercase}
and \p{Lowercase}
.
Regular expression debugging output (turned on by use re 'debug'
) now
uses hexadecimal when escaping non-ASCII characters, instead of octal.
delete $+{...}
Custom regular expression engines can now determine the return value of
delete on an entry of %+
or %-
.
Warning: This feature is considered experimental, as the exact behaviour may change in a future version of Perl.
All builtin functions that operate directly on array or hash containers now also accept unblessed hard references to arrays or hashes:
- |----------------------------+---------------------------|
- | Traditional syntax | Terse syntax |
- |----------------------------+---------------------------|
- | push @$arrayref, @stuff | push $arrayref, @stuff |
- | unshift @$arrayref, @stuff | unshift $arrayref, @stuff |
- | pop @$arrayref | pop $arrayref |
- | shift @$arrayref | shift $arrayref |
- | splice @$arrayref, 0, 2 | splice $arrayref, 0, 2 |
- | keys %$hashref | keys $hashref |
- | keys @$arrayref | keys $arrayref |
- | values %$hashref | values $hashref |
- | values @$arrayref | values $arrayref |
- | ($k,$v) = each %$hashref | ($k,$v) = each $hashref |
- | ($k,$v) = each @$arrayref | ($k,$v) = each $arrayref |
- |----------------------------+---------------------------|
This allows these builtin functions to act on long dereferencing chains
or on the return value of subroutines without needing to wrap them in
@{}
or %{}
:
The +
prototype is a special alternative to $
that acts like
\[@%]
when given a literal array or hash variable, but will otherwise
force scalar context on the argument. See Prototypes in perlsub.
package block syntaxA package declaration can now contain a code block, in which case the
declaration is in scope inside that block only. So package Foo { ... }
is precisely equivalent to { package Foo; ... }
. It also works with
a version number in the declaration, as in package Foo 1.2 { ... }
,
which is its most attractive feature. See perlfunc.
Statement labels can now occur before any type of statement or declaration,
such as package.
Multiple statement labels can now appear before a single statement.
Literals may now use either upper case 0X...
or 0B...
prefixes,
in addition to the already supported 0x...
and 0b...
syntax [perl #76296].
C, Ruby, Python, and PHP already support this syntax, and it makes
Perl more internally consistent: a round-trip with eval sprintf
"%#X", 0x10
now returns 16
, just like eval sprintf "%#x", 0x10
.
tie, tied and untie can now be overridden [perl #75902].
To make them more reliable and consistent, several changes have been made
to how die, warn, and $@
behave.
When an exception is thrown inside an eval, the exception is no
longer at risk of being clobbered by destructor code running during unwinding.
Previously, the exception was written into $@
early in the throwing process, and would be overwritten if eval was
used internally in the destructor for an object that had to be freed
while exiting from the outer eval. Now the exception is written
into $@
last thing before exiting the outer eval, so the code
running immediately thereafter can rely on the value in $@
correctly
corresponding to that eval. ($@
is still also set before exiting the
eval, for the sake of destructors that rely on this.)
Likewise, a local $@
inside an eval no longer clobbers any
exception thrown in its scope. Previously, the restoration of $@
upon
unwinding would overwrite any exception being thrown. Now the exception
gets to the eval anyway. So local $@
is safe before a die.
Exceptions thrown from object destructors no longer modify the $@
of the surrounding context. (If the surrounding context was exception
unwinding, this used to be another way to clobber the exception being
thrown.) Previously such an exception was
sometimes emitted as a warning, and then either was
string-appended to the surrounding $@
or completely replaced the
surrounding $@
, depending on whether that exception and the surrounding
$@
were strings or objects. Now, an exception in this situation is
always emitted as a warning, leaving the surrounding $@
untouched.
In addition to object destructors, this also affects any function call
run by XS code using the G_KEEPERR
flag.
Warnings for warn can now be objects in the same way as exceptions
for die. If an object-based warning gets the default handling
of writing to standard error, it is stringified as before with the
filename and line number appended. But a $SIG{__WARN__}
handler now
receives an object-based warning as an object, where previously it
was passed the result of stringifying the object.
$0
sets the legacy process name with prctl() on LinuxOn Linux the legacy process name is now set with prctl(2), in
addition to altering the POSIX name via argv[0]
, as Perl has done
since version 4.000. Now system utilities that read the legacy process
name such as ps, top, and killall recognize the name you set when
assigning to $0
. The string you supply is truncated at 16 bytes;
this limitation is imposed by Linux.
This allows programs that need to have repeatable results not to have to come up with their own seed-generating mechanism. Instead, they can use srand() and stash the return value for future use. One example is a test program with too many combinations to test comprehensively in the time available for each run. It can test a random subset each time and, should there be a failure, log the seed used for that run so this can later be used to produce the same results.
Perl's printf and sprintf operators, and Perl's internal printf replacement
function, now understand the C90 size modifiers "hh" (char
), "z"
(size_t
), and "t" (ptrdiff_t
). Also, when compiled with a C99
compiler, Perl now understands the size modifier "j" (intmax_t
)
(but this is not portable).
So, for example, on any modern machine, sprintf("%hhd", 257)
returns "1".
${^GLOBAL_PHASE}
A new global variable, ${^GLOBAL_PHASE}
, has been added to allow
introspection of the current phase of the Perl interpreter. It's explained in
detail in ${^GLOBAL_PHASE} in perlvar and in
BEGIN, UNITCHECK, CHECK, INIT and END in perlmod.
-d:-foo
calls Devel::foo::unimport
The syntax -d:foo was extended in 5.6.1 to make -d:foo=bar
equivalent to -MDevel::foo=bar, which expands
internally to use Devel::foo 'bar'
.
Perl now allows prefixing the module name with -, with the same
semantics as -M; that is:
-d:-foo
Equivalent to -M-Devel::foo: expands to
no Devel::foo
and calls Devel::foo->unimport()
if that method exists.
-d:-foo=bar
Equivalent to -M-Devel::foo=bar: expands to no Devel::foo 'bar'
,
and calls Devel::foo->unimport("bar")
if that method exists.
This is particularly useful for suppressing the default actions of a
Devel::*
module's import method whilst still loading it for debugging.
When a method call on a filehandle would die because the method cannot
be resolved and IO::File has not been loaded, Perl now loads IO::File
via require and attempts method resolution again:
This also works for globs like STDOUT
, STDERR
, and STDIN
:
- STDOUT->autoflush(1);
Because this on-demand load happens only if method resolution fails, the legacy approach of manually loading an IO::File parent class for partial method support still works as expected:
The Socket
module provides new affordances for IPv6,
including implementations of the Socket::getaddrinfo()
and
Socket::getnameinfo()
functions, along with related constants and a
handful of new functions. See Socket.
The DTrace
probes now include an additional argument, arg3
, which contains
the package the subroutine being entered or left was compiled in.
For example, using the following DTrace script:
and then running:
- $ perl -e 'sub test { }; test'
DTrace
will print:
- main::test
See Internal Changes.
User-Defined Character Properties in perlunicode documented that you can
create custom properties by defining subroutines whose names begin with
"In" or "Is". However, Perl did not actually enforce that naming
restriction, so \p{foo::bar}
could call foo::bar() if it existed. The documented
convention is now enforced.
Also, Perl no longer allows tainted regular expressions to invoke a user-defined property. It simply dies instead [perl #82616].
Perl 5.14.0 is not binary-compatible with any previous stable release.
In addition to the sections that follow, see C API Changes.
Some characters match a sequence of two or three characters in /i
regular expression matching under Unicode rules. One example is
LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
which matches the sequence ss
.
- 'ss' =~ /\A[\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S}]\z/i # Matches
This, however, can lead to very counter-intuitive results, especially
when inverted. Because of this, Perl 5.14 does not use multi-character /i
matching in inverted character classes.
- 'ss' =~ /\A[^\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S}]+\z/i # ???
This should match any sequences of characters that aren't the SHARP S
nor what SHARP S
matches under /i. "s"
isn't SHARP S
, but
Unicode says that "ss"
is what SHARP S
matches under /i. So
which one "wins"? Do you fail the match because the string has ss
or
accept it because it has an s followed by another s?
Earlier releases of Perl did allow this multi-character matching, but due to bugs, it mostly did not work.
In certain circumstances, \400
-\777
in regexes have behaved
differently than they behave in all other doublequote-like contexts.
Since 5.10.1, Perl has issued a deprecation warning when this happens.
Now, these literals behave the same in all doublequote-like contexts,
namely to be equivalent to \x{100}
-\x{1FF}
, with no deprecation
warning.
Use of \400
-\777
in the command-line option -0 retain their
conventional meaning. They slurp whole input files; previously, this
was documented only for -0777.
Because of various ambiguities, you should use the new
\o{...}
construct to represent characters in octal instead.
\p{}
properties are now immune to case-insensitive matchingFor most Unicode properties, it doesn't make sense to have them match
differently under /i case-insensitive matching. Doing so can lead
to unexpected results and potential security holes. For example
- m/\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}+/i
could previously match non-ASCII characters because of the Unicode
matching rules (although there were several bugs with this). Now
matching under /i gives the same results as non-/i matching except
for those few properties where people have come to expect differences,
namely the ones where casing is an integral part of their meaning, such
as m/\p{Uppercase}/i and m/\p{Lowercase}/i, both of which match
the same code points as matched by m/\p{Cased}/i.
Details are in Unicode Properties in perlrecharclass.
User-defined property handlers that need to match differently under /i
must be changed to read the new boolean parameter passed to them, which
is non-zero if case-insensitive matching is in effect and 0 otherwise.
See User-Defined Character Properties in perlunicode.
Specifying a Unicode property in the pattern indicates
that the pattern is meant for matching according to Unicode rules, the way
\N{NAME} does.
Regular expressions compiled under use locale
now retain this when
interpolated into a new regular expression compiled outside a
use locale
, and vice-versa.
Previously, one regular expression interpolated into another inherited the localeness of the surrounding regex, losing whatever state it originally had. This is considered a bug fix, but may trip up code that has come to rely on the incorrect behaviour.
Default regular expression modifiers are now notated using
(?^...)
. Code relying on the old stringification will fail.
This is so that when new modifiers are added, such code won't
have to keep changing each time this happens, because the stringification
will automatically incorporate the new modifiers.
Code that needs to work properly with both old- and new-style regexes can avoid the whole issue by using (for perls since 5.9.5; see re):
If the actual stringification is important or older Perls need to be supported, you can use something like the following:
- # Accept both old and new-style stringification
- my $modifiers = (qr/foobar/ =~ /\Q(?^/) ? "^" : "-xism";
And then use $modifiers
instead of -xism
.
Code blocks in regular expressions ((?{...}) and (??{...})
) previously
did not inherit pragmata (strict, warnings, etc.) if the regular expression
was compiled at run time as happens in cases like these two:
- use re "eval";
- $foo =~ $bar; # when $bar contains (?{...})
- $foo =~ /$bar(?{ $finished = 1 })/;
This bug has now been fixed, but code that relied on the buggy behaviour may need to be fixed to account for the correct behaviour.
In the following:
Earlier versions of Perl incorrectly tied the new local array. This has now been fixed. This fix could however potentially cause a change in behaviour of some code.
defined %Foo::
now always returns true, even when no symbols have yet been
defined in that package.
This is a side-effect of removing a special-case kludge in the tokeniser, added for 5.10.0, to hide side-effects of changes to the internal storage of hashes. The fix drastically reduces hashes' memory overhead.
Calling defined on a stash has been deprecated since 5.6.0, warned on
lexicals since 5.6.0, and warned for stashes and other package
variables since 5.12.0. defined %hash
has always exposed an
implementation detail: emptying a hash by deleting all entries from it does
not make defined %hash
false. Hence defined %hash
is not valid code to
determine whether an arbitrary hash is empty. Instead, use the behaviour
of an empty %hash
always returning false in scalar context.
Stash list assignment %foo:: = ()
used to make the stash temporarily
anonymous while it was being emptied. Consequently, any of its
subroutines referenced elsewhere would become anonymous, showing up as
"(unknown)" in caller. They now retain their package names such that
caller returns the original sub name if there is still a reference
to its typeglob and "foo::__ANON__" otherwise [perl #79208].
If you assign a typeglob to a scalar variable:
- $glob = *foo;
the glob that is copied to $glob
is marked with a special flag
indicating that the glob is just a copy. This allows subsequent
assignments to $glob
to overwrite the glob. The original glob,
however, is immutable.
Some Perl operators did not distinguish between these two types of globs.
This would result in strange behaviour in edge cases: untie $scalar
would not untie the scalar if the last thing assigned to it was a glob
(because it treated it as untie *$scalar
, which unties a handle).
Assignment to a glob slot (such as *$glob = \@some_array
) would simply
assign \@some_array
to $glob
.
To fix this, the *{}
operator (including its *foo
and *$foo
forms)
has been modified to make a new immutable glob if its operand is a glob
copy. This allows operators that make a distinction between globs and
scalars to be modified to treat only immutable globs as globs. (tie,
tied and untie have been left as they are for compatibility's sake,
but will warn. See Deprecations.)
This causes an incompatible change in code that assigns a glob to the
return value of *{}
when that operator was passed a glob copy. Take the
following code, for instance:
- $glob = *foo;
- *$glob = *bar;
The *$glob
on the second line returns a new immutable glob. That new
glob is made an alias to *bar
. Then it is discarded. So the second
assignment has no effect.
See http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77810 for more detail.
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).
local() on scalar variables gives them a new value but keeps all their magic intact. This has proven problematic for the default scalar variable $_, where perlsub recommends that any subroutine that assigns to $_ should first localize it. This would throw an exception if $_ is aliased to a read-only variable, and could in general have various unintentional side-effects.
Therefore, as an exception to the general rule, local($_) will not only assign a new value to $_, but also remove all existing magic from it as well.
Parsing the names of packages and package variables has changed:
multiple adjacent pairs of colons, as in foo::::bar
, are now all
treated as package separators.
Regardless of this change, the exact parsing of package separators has never been guaranteed and is subject to change in future Perl versions.
given
return valuesgiven
blocks now return the last evaluated
expression, or an empty list if the block was exited by break
. Thus you
can now write:
See Return value in perlsyn for details.
Functions declared with the following prototypes now behave correctly as unary functions:
- *
- \$ \% \@ \* \&
- \[...]
- ;$ ;*
- ;\$ ;\% etc.
- ;\[...]
Due to this bug fix [perl #75904], functions
using the (*), (;$)
and (;*)
prototypes
are parsed with higher precedence than before. So
in the following example:
- sub foo(;$);
- foo $a < $b;
the second line is now parsed correctly as foo($a) < $b
, rather than
foo($a < $b)
. This happens when one of these operators is used in
an unparenthesised argument:
- < > <= >= lt gt le ge
- == != <=> eq ne cmp ~~
- &
- | ^
- &&
- || //
- .. ...
- ?:
- = += -= *= etc.
- , =>
Previously, the following code resulted in a successful match:
This odd behaviour has now been fixed [perl #77468].
The unary negation operator, -
, now treats strings that look like numbers
as numbers [perl #57706].
Negative zero (-0.0), when converted to a string, now becomes "0" on all platforms. It used to become "-0" on some, but "0" on others.
If you still need to determine whether a zero is negative, use
sprintf("%g", $zero) =~ /^-/
or the Data::Float module on CPAN.
:=
is now a syntax errorPreviously my $pi := 4
was exactly equivalent to my $pi : = 4
,
with the :
being treated as the start of an attribute list, ending before
the =
. The use of :=
to mean : =
was deprecated in 5.12.0, and is
now a syntax error. This allows future use of :=
as a new token.
Outside the core's tests for it, we find no Perl 5 code on CPAN using this construction, so we believe that this change will have little impact on real-world codebases.
If it is absolutely necessary to have empty attribute lists (for example,
because of a code generator), simply avoid the error by adding a space before
the =
.
Characters outside the Unicode "XIDStart" set are no longer allowed at the beginning of an identifier. This means that certain accents and marks that normally follow an alphabetic character may no longer be the first character of an identifier.
On systems other than Windows that do not have
a fchdir
function, newly-created threads no
longer inherit directory handles from their parent threads. Such programs
would usually have crashed anyway [perl #75154].
close on shared pipesTo avoid deadlocks, the close function no longer waits for the
child process to exit if the underlying file descriptor is still
in use by another thread. It returns true in such cases.
On Windows parent processes would not terminate until all forked
children had terminated first. However, kill("KILL", ...)
is
inherently unstable on pseudo-processes, and kill("TERM", ...)
might not get delivered if the child is blocked in a system call.
To avoid the deadlock and still provide a safe mechanism to terminate the hosting process, Perl now no longer waits for children that have been sent a SIGTERM signal. It is up to the parent process to waitpid() for these children if child-cleanup processing must be allowed to finish. However, it is also then the responsibility of the parent to avoid the deadlock by making sure the child process can't be blocked on I/O.
See perlfork for more information about the fork() emulation on Windows.
Several long-standing typos and naming confusions in Policy_sh.SH have been fixed, standardizing on the variable names used in config.sh.
This will change the behaviour of Policy.sh if you happen to have been accidentally relying on its incorrect behaviour.
Perl scripts used to be read in binary mode on Windows for the benefit
of the ByteLoader module (which is no longer part of core Perl). This
had the side-effect of breaking various operations on the DATA
filehandle,
including seek()/tell(), and even simply reading from DATA
after filehandles
have been flushed by a call to system(), backticks, fork() etc.
The default build options for Windows have been changed to read Perl source code on Windows in text mode now. ByteLoader will (hopefully) be updated on CPAN to automatically handle this situation [perl #28106].
See also Deprecated C APIs.
Omitting the space between a regular expression operator or
its modifiers and the following word is deprecated. For
example, m/foo/sand $bar
is for now still parsed
as m/foo/s and $bar
, but will now issue a warning.
\cXThe backslash-c construct was designed as a way of specifying
non-printable characters, but there were no restrictions (on ASCII
platforms) on what the character following the c
could be. Now,
a deprecation warning is raised if that character isn't an ASCII character.
Also, a deprecation warning is raised for "\c{"
(which is the same
as simply saying ";"
).
"\b{"
and "\B{"
In regular expressions, a literal "{"
immediately following a "\b"
(not in a bracketed character class) or a "\B{"
is now deprecated
to allow for its future use by Perl itself.
Perl bundles a handful of library files that predate Perl 5. This bundling is now deprecated for most of these files, which are now available from CPAN. The affected files now warn when run, if they were installed as part of the core.
This is a mandatory warning, not obeying -X or lexical warning bits. The warning is modelled on that supplied by deprecate.pm for deprecated-in-core .pm libraries. It points to the specific CPAN distribution that contains the .pl libraries. The CPAN versions, of course, do not generate the warning.
$[
Assignment to $[
was deprecated and started to give warnings in
Perl version 5.12.0. This version of Perl (5.14) now also emits a warning
when assigning to $[
in list context. This fixes an oversight in 5.12.0.
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 this:
- for $x (qw(a b c)) { ... }
This is being deprecated because the parentheses in for $i (1,2,3) { ... }
are not part of expression syntax. They are part of the statement
syntax, with the for
statement wanting literal parentheses.
The synthetic parentheses that a qw expression acquired were only
intended to be treated as part of expression syntax.
Note that this does not change the behaviour of cases like:
where parentheses were never required around the expression.
\N{BELL}
This is because Unicode is using that name for a different character. See Unicode Version 6.0 is now supported (mostly) for more explanation.
?PATTERN?
?PATTERN?
(without the initial m) has been deprecated and now produces
a warning. This is to allow future use of ? in new operators.
The match-once functionality is still available as m?PATTERN?.
Calling a tie function (tie, tied, untie) with a scalar argument
acts on a filehandle if the scalar happens to hold a typeglob.
This is a long-standing bug that will be removed in Perl 5.16, as there is currently no way to tie the scalar itself when it holds a typeglob, and no way to untie a scalar that has had a typeglob assigned to it.
Now there is a deprecation warning whenever a tie
function is used on a handle without an explicit *
.
This feature is being deprecated due to its many issues, as documented in User-Defined Case Mappings (for serious hackers only) in perlunicode. This feature will be removed in Perl 5.16. Instead use the CPAN module Unicode::Casing, which provides improved functionality.
The following module will be removed from the core distribution in a future release, and should be installed from CPAN instead. Distributions on CPAN that require this should add it to their prerequisites. The core version of these module now issues a deprecation warning.
If you ship a packaged version of Perl, either alone or as part of a
larger system, then you should carefully consider the repercussions of
core module deprecations. You may want to consider shipping your default
build of Perl with a package for the deprecated module that
installs into vendor
or site
Perl library directories. This will
inhibit the deprecation warnings.
Alternatively, you may want to consider patching lib/deprecate.pm to provide deprecation warnings specific to your packaging system or distribution of Perl, consistent with how your packaging system or distribution manages a staged transition from a release where the installation of a single package provides the given functionality, to a later release where the system administrator needs to know to install multiple packages to get that same functionality.
You can silence these deprecation warnings by installing the module
in question from CPAN. To install the latest version of it by role
rather than by name, just install Task::Deprecations::5_14
.
We strongly recommend that you install and use Devel::NYTProf instead of Devel::DProf, as Devel::NYTProf offers significantly improved profiling and reporting.
Signal dispatch has been moved from the runloop into control ops. This should give a few percent speed increase, and eliminates nearly all the speed penalty caused by the introduction of "safe signals" in 5.8.0. Signals should still be dispatched within the same statement as they were previously. If this does not happen, or if you find it possible to create uninterruptible loops, this is a bug, and reports are encouraged of how to recreate such issues.
Two fewer OPs are used for shift() and pop() calls with no argument (with
implicit @_
). This change makes shift() 5% faster than shift @_
on non-threaded perls, and 25% faster on threaded ones.
The foldEQ_utf8
API function for case-insensitive comparison of strings (which
is used heavily by the regexp engine) was substantially refactored and
optimised -- and its documentation much improved as a free bonus.
Compiling regular expressions has been made faster when upgrading the regex to utf8 is necessary but this isn't known when the compilation begins.
When doing a lot of string appending, perls built to use the system's
malloc
could end up allocating a lot more memory than needed in a
inefficient way.
sv_grow
, the function used to allocate more memory if necessary
when appending to a string, has been taught to round up the memory
it requests to a certain geometric progression, making it much faster on
certain platforms and configurations. On Win32, it's now about 100 times
faster.
PL_*
accessor functions under ithreadsWhen MULTIPLICITY
was first developed, and interpreter state moved into
an interpreter struct, thread- and interpreter-local PL_*
variables
were defined as macros that called accessor functions (returning the
address of the value) outside the Perl core. The intent was to allow
members within the interpreter struct to change size without breaking
binary compatibility, so that bug fixes could be merged to a maintenance
branch that necessitated such a size change. This mechanism was redundant
and penalised well-behaved code. It has been removed.
When there are many weak references to an object, freeing that object can under some circumstances take O(N²) time to free, where N is the number of references. The circumstances in which this can happen have been reduced [perl #75254]
An earlier optimisation to speed up my @array = ...
and
my %hash = ...
assignments caused a bug and was disabled in Perl 5.12.0.
Now we have found another way to speed up these assignments [perl #82110].
@_
uses less memoryPreviously, @_
was allocated for every subroutine at compile time with
enough space for four entries. Now this allocation is done on demand when
the subroutine is called [perl #72416].
xhv_fill
has been eliminated from struct xpvhv
, saving 1 IV per hash and
on some systems will cause struct xpvhv
to become cache-aligned. To avoid
this memory saving causing a slowdown elsewhere, boolean use of HvFILL
now calls HvTOTALKEYS
instead (which is equivalent), so while the fill
data when actually required are now calculated on demand, cases when
this needs to be done should be rare.
The order of structure elements in SV bodies has changed. Effectively, the NV slot has swapped location with STASH and MAGIC. As all access to SV members is via macros, this should be completely transparent. This change allows the space saving for PVHVs documented above, and may reduce the memory allocation needed for PVIVs on some architectures.
XPV
, XPVIV
, and XPVNV
now allocate only the parts of the SV
body
they actually use, saving some space.
Scalars containing regular expressions now allocate only the part of the SV
body they actually use, saving some space.
The @EXPORT_FAIL
AV is no longer created unless needed, hence neither is
the typeglob backing it. This saves about 200 bytes for every package that
uses Exporter but doesn't use this functionality.
For weak references, the common case of just a single weak reference per referent has been optimised to reduce the storage required. In this case it saves the equivalent of one small Perl array per referent.
%+
and %-
use less memoryThe bulk of the Tie::Hash::NamedCapture
module used to be in the Perl
core. It has now been moved to an XS module to reduce overhead for
programs that do not use %+
or %-
.
The internal structures of threading now make fewer API calls and fewer allocations, resulting in noticeably smaller object code. Additionally, many thread context checks have been deferred so they're done only as needed (although this is only possible for non-debugging builds).
Previously, in code such as
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
, etc.
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 when the first carries a label, since labels
must not be eliminated by the optimizer, and label usage isn't conclusively known
at compile time.
CPAN::Meta::YAML 0.003 has been added as a dual-life module. It supports a subset of YAML sufficient for reading and writing META.yml and MYMETA.yml files included with CPAN distributions or generated by the module installation toolchain. It should not be used for any other general YAML parsing or generation task.
CPAN::Meta version 2.110440 has been added as a dual-life module. It provides a standard library to read, interpret and write CPAN distribution metadata files (like META.json and META.yml) that describe a distribution, its contents, and the requirements for building it and installing it. The latest CPAN distribution metadata specification is included as CPAN::Meta::Spec and notes on changes in the specification over time are given in CPAN::Meta::History.
HTTP::Tiny 0.012 has been added as a dual-life module. It is a very small, simple HTTP/1.1 client designed for simple GET requests and file mirroring. It has been added so that CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS can "bootstrap" HTTP access to CPAN using pure Perl without relying on external binaries like curl(1) or wget(1).
JSON::PP 2.27105 has been added as a dual-life module to allow CPAN clients to read META.json files in CPAN distributions.
Module::Metadata 1.000004 has been added as a dual-life module. It gathers package and POD information from Perl module files. It is a standalone module based on Module::Build::ModuleInfo for use by other module installation toolchain components. Module::Build::ModuleInfo has been deprecated in favor of this module instead.
Perl::OSType 1.002 has been added as a dual-life module. It maps Perl operating system names (like "dragonfly" or "MSWin32") to more generic types with standardized names (like "Unix" or "Windows"). It has been refactored out of Module::Build and ExtUtils::CBuilder and consolidates such mappings into a single location for easier maintenance.
The following modules were added by the Unicode::Collate upgrade. See below for details.
Version::Requirements version 0.101020 has been added as a dual-life module. It provides a standard library to model and manipulates module prerequisites and version constraints defined in CPAN::Meta::Spec.
attributes has been upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.14.
Archive::Extract has been upgraded from version 0.38 to 0.48.
Updates since 0.38 include: a safe print method that guards
Archive::Extract from changes to $\
; a fix to the tests when run in core
Perl; support for TZ files; a modification for the lzma
logic to favour IO::Uncompress::Unlzma; and a fix
for an issue with NetBSD-current and its new unzip(1)
executable.
Archive::Tar has been upgraded from version 1.54 to 1.76.
Important changes since 1.54 include the following:
Compatibility with busybox implementations of tar(1).
A fix so that write() and create_archive() close only filehandles they themselves opened.
A bug was fixed regarding the exit code of extract_archive.
The ptar(1) utility has a new option to allow safe creation of tarballs without world-writable files on Windows, allowing those archives to be uploaded to CPAN.
A new ptargrep(1) utility for using regular expressions against the contents of files in a tar archive.
pax extended headers are now skipped.
Attribute::Handlers has been upgraded from version 0.87 to 0.89.
autodie has been upgraded from version 2.06_01 to 2.1001.
AutoLoader has been upgraded from version 5.70 to 5.71.
The B module has been upgraded from version 1.23 to 1.29.
It no longer crashes when taking apart a y/// containing characters
outside the octet range or compiled in a use utf8
scope.
The size of the shared object has been reduced by about 40%, with no reduction in functionality.
B::Concise has been upgraded from version 0.78 to 0.83.
B::Concise marks rv2sv(), rv2av(), and rv2hv() ops with the new
OPpDEREF
flag as "DREFed".
It no longer produces mangled output with the -tree option [perl #80632].
B::Debug has been upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.16.
B::Deparse has been upgraded from version 0.96 to 1.03.
The deparsing of a nextstate
op has changed when it has both a
change of package relative to the previous nextstate, or a change of
%^H
or other state and a label. The label was previously emitted
first, but is now emitted last (5.12.1).
The no 5.13.2
or similar form is now correctly handled by B::Deparse
(5.12.3).
B::Deparse now properly handles the code that applies a conditional
pattern match against implicit $_
as it was fixed in [perl #20444].
Deparsing of our followed by a variable with funny characters
(as permitted under the use utf8
pragma) has also been fixed [perl #33752].
B::Lint has been upgraded from version 1.11_01 to 1.13.
base has been upgraded from version 2.15 to 2.16.
Benchmark has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.12.
bignum has been upgraded from version 0.23 to 0.27.
Carp has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.20.
Carp now detects incomplete caller EXPR
overrides and avoids using bogus @DB::args
. To provide backtraces,
Carp relies on particular behaviour of the caller() builtin.
Carp now detects if other code has overridden this with an
incomplete implementation, and modifies its backtrace accordingly.
Previously incomplete overrides would cause incorrect values in
backtraces (best case), or obscure fatal errors (worst case).
This fixes certain cases of "Bizarre copy of ARRAY" caused by modules overriding caller() incorrectly (5.12.2).
It now also avoids using regular expressions that cause Perl to load its Unicode tables, so as to avoid the "BEGIN not safe after errors" error that ensue if there has been a syntax error [perl #82854].
CGI has been upgraded from version 3.48 to 3.52.
This provides the following security fixes: the MIME boundary in multipart_init() is now random and the handling of newlines embedded in header values has been improved.
Compress::Raw::Bzip2 has been upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.033.
It has been updated to use bzip2(1) 1.0.6.
Compress::Raw::Zlib has been upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.033.
constant has been upgraded from version 1.20 to 1.21.
Unicode constants work once more. They have been broken since Perl 5.10.0 [CPAN RT #67525].
CPAN has been upgraded from version 1.94_56 to 1.9600.
Major highlights:
Foo::Bar
CPANPLUS has been upgraded from version 0.90 to 0.9103.
A change to cpanp-run-perl
resolves RT #55964
and RT #57106, both
of which related to failures to install distributions that use
Module::Install::DSL
(5.12.2).
A dependency on Config was not recognised as a core module dependency. This has been fixed.
CPANPLUS now includes support for META.json and MYMETA.json.
CPANPLUS::Dist::Build has been upgraded from version 0.46 to 0.54.
Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.125 to 2.130_02.
The indentation used to be off when $Data::Dumper::Terse
was set. This
has been fixed [perl #73604].
This upgrade also fixes a crash when using custom sort functions that might cause the stack to change [perl #74170].
Dumpxs no longer crashes with globs returned by *$io_ref
[perl #72332].
DB_File has been upgraded from version 1.820 to 1.821.
DBM_Filter has been upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.04.
Devel::DProf has been upgraded from version 20080331.00 to 20110228.00.
Merely loading Devel::DProf now no longer triggers profiling to start.
Both use Devel::DProf
and perl -d:DProf ...
behave as before and start
the profiler.
NOTE: Devel::DProf is deprecated and will be removed from a future version of Perl. We strongly recommend that you install and use Devel::NYTProf instead, as it offers significantly improved profiling and reporting.
Devel::Peek has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.07.
Devel::SelfStubber has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.05.
diagnostics has been upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.22.
It now renders pod links slightly better, and has been taught to find descriptions for messages that share their descriptions with other messages.
Digest::MD5 has been upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.51.
It is now safe to use this module in combination with threads.
Digest::SHA has been upgraded from version 5.47 to 5.61.
shasum now more closely mimics sha1sum(1)/md5sum(1).
Addfile accepts all POSIX filenames.
New SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 transforms (ref. NIST Draft FIPS 180-4 [February 2011])
DirHandle has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.
Dumpvalue has been upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.16.
DynaLoader has been upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.13.
It fixes a buffer overflow when passed a very long file name.
It no longer inherits from AutoLoader; hence it no longer produces weird error messages for unsuccessful method calls on classes that inherit from DynaLoader [perl #84358].
Encode has been upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.42.
Now, all 66 Unicode non-characters are treated the same way U+FFFF has always been treated: in cases when it was disallowed, all 66 are disallowed, and in cases where it warned, all 66 warn.
Env has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.
Errno has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.13.
The implementation of Errno has been refactored to use about 55% less memory.
On some platforms with unusual header files, like Win32 gcc(1) using mingw64
headers, some constants that weren't actually error numbers have been exposed
by Errno. This has been fixed [perl #77416].
Exporter has been upgraded from version 5.64_01 to 5.64_03.
Exporter no longer overrides $SIG{__WARN__}
[perl #74472]
ExtUtils::CBuilder has been upgraded from version 0.27 to 0.280203.
ExtUtils::Command has been upgraded from version 1.16 to 1.17.
ExtUtils::Constant has been upgraded from 0.22 to 0.23.
The AUTOLOAD helper code generated by ExtUtils::Constant::ProxySubs
can now croak() for missing constants, or generate a complete AUTOLOAD
subroutine in XS, allowing simplification of many modules that use it
(Fcntl, File::Glob, GDBM_File, I18N::Langinfo, POSIX,
Socket).
ExtUtils::Constant::ProxySubs can now optionally push the names of all
constants onto the package's @EXPORT_OK
.
ExtUtils::Install has been upgraded from version 1.55 to 1.56.
ExtUtils::MakeMaker has been upgraded from version 6.56 to 6.57_05.
ExtUtils::Manifest has been upgraded from version 1.57 to 1.58.
ExtUtils::ParseXS has been upgraded from version 2.21 to 2.2210.
Fcntl has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.11.
File::Basename has been upgraded from version 2.78 to 2.82.
File::CheckTree has been upgraded from version 4.4 to 4.41.
File::Copy has been upgraded from version 2.17 to 2.21.
File::DosGlob has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.04.
It allows patterns containing literal parentheses: they no longer need to be escaped. On Windows, it no longer adds an extra ./ to file names returned when the pattern is a relative glob with a drive specification, like C:*.pl [perl #71712].
File::Fetch has been upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.32.
HTTP::Lite is now supported for the "http" scheme.
The fetch(1) utility is supported on FreeBSD, NetBSD, and
Dragonfly BSD for the http
and ftp
schemes.
File::Find has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.19.
It improves handling of backslashes on Windows, so that paths like C:\dir\/file are no longer generated [perl #71710].
File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.12.
File::Spec has been upgraded from version 3.31 to 3.33.
Several portability fixes were made in File::Spec::VMS: a colon is now recognized as a delimiter in native filespecs; caret-escaped delimiters are recognized for better handling of extended filespecs; catpath() returns an empty directory rather than the current directory if the input directory name is empty; and abs2rel() properly handles Unix-style input (5.12.2).
File::stat has been upgraded from 1.02 to 1.05.
The -x
and -X file test operators now work correctly when run
by the superuser.
Filter::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.84 to 0.86.
GDBM_File has been upgraded from 1.10 to 1.14.
This fixes a memory leak when DBM filters are used.
Hash::Util has been upgraded from 0.07 to 0.11.
Hash::Util no longer emits spurious "uninitialized" warnings when recursively locking hashes that have undefined values [perl #74280].
Hash::Util::FieldHash has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.09.
I18N::Collate has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.
I18N::Langinfo has been upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.08.
langinfo() now defaults to using $_
if there is no argument given, just
as the documentation has always claimed.
I18N::LangTags has been upgraded from version 0.35 to 0.35_01.
if has been upgraded from version 0.05 to 0.0601.
IO has been upgraded from version 1.25_02 to 1.25_04.
This version of IO includes a new IO::Select, which now allows IO::Handle objects (and objects in derived classes) to be removed from an IO::Select set even if the underlying file descriptor is closed or invalid.
IPC::Cmd has been upgraded from version 0.54 to 0.70.
Resolves an issue with splitting Win32 command lines. An argument consisting of the single character "0" used to be omitted (CPAN RT #62961).
IPC::Open3 has been upgraded from 1.05 to 1.09.
open3() now produces an error if the exec call fails, allowing this
condition to be distinguished from a child process that exited with a
non-zero status [perl #72016].
The internal xclose() routine now knows how to handle file descriptors as
documented, so duplicating STDIN
in a child process using its file
descriptor now works [perl #76474].
IPC::SysV has been upgraded from version 2.01 to 2.03.
lib has been upgraded from version 0.62 to 0.63.
Locale::Maketext has been upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.19.
Locale::Maketext now supports external caches.
This upgrade also fixes an infinite loop in
Locale::Maketext::Guts::_compile()
when
working with tainted values (CPAN RT #40727).
->maketext
calls now back up and restore $@
so error
messages are not suppressed (CPAN RT #34182).
Log::Message has been upgraded from version 0.02 to 0.04.
Log::Message::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.06 to 0.08.
Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.89_01 to 1.994.
This fixes, among other things, incorrect results when computing binomial coefficients [perl #77640].
It also prevents sqrt($int) from crashing under use bigrat
.
[perl #73534].
Math::BigInt::FastCalc has been upgraded from version 0.19 to 0.28.
Math::BigRat has been upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.26_02.
Memoize has been upgraded from version 1.01_03 to 1.02.
MIME::Base64 has been upgraded from 3.08 to 3.13.
Includes new functions to calculate the length of encoded and decoded base64 strings.
Now provides encode_base64url() and decode_base64url() functions to process the base64 scheme for "URL applications".
Module::Build has been upgraded from version 0.3603 to 0.3800.
A notable change is the deprecation of several modules. Module::Build::Version has been deprecated and Module::Build now relies on the version pragma directly. Module::Build::ModuleInfo has been deprecated in favor of a standalone copy called Module::Metadata. Module::Build::YAML has been deprecated in favor of CPAN::Meta::YAML.
Module::Build now also generates META.json and MYMETA.json files in accordance with version 2 of the CPAN distribution metadata specification, CPAN::Meta::Spec. The older format META.yml and MYMETA.yml files are still generated.
Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 2.29 to 2.47.
Besides listing the updated core modules of this release, it also stops listing
the Filespec
module. That module never existed in core. The scripts
generating Module::CoreList confused it with VMS::Filespec, which actually
is a core module as of Perl 5.8.7.
Module::Load has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.18.
Module::Load::Conditional has been upgraded from version 0.34 to 0.44.
The mro pragma has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.07.
NDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.12.
This fixes a memory leak when DBM filters are used.
Net::Ping has been upgraded from version 2.36 to 2.38.
NEXT has been upgraded from version 0.64 to 0.65.
Object::Accessor has been upgraded from version 0.36 to 0.38.
ODBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.10.
This fixes a memory leak when DBM filters are used.
Opcode has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.18.
The overload pragma has been upgraded from 1.10 to 1.13.
overload::Method
can now handle subroutines that are themselves blessed
into overloaded classes [perl #71998].
The documentation has greatly improved. See Documentation below.
Params::Check has been upgraded from version 0.26 to 0.28.
The parent pragma has been upgraded from version 0.223 to 0.225.
Parse::CPAN::Meta has been upgraded from version 1.40 to 1.4401.
The latest Parse::CPAN::Meta can now read YAML and JSON files using CPAN::Meta::YAML and JSON::PP, which are now part of the Perl core.
PerlIO::encoding has been upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.14.
PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from 0.07 to 0.11.
A read() after a seek() beyond the end of the string no longer thinks it has data to read [perl #78716].
PerlIO::via has been upgraded from version 0.09 to 0.11.
Pod::Html has been upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.11.
Pod::LaTeX has been upgraded from version 0.58 to 0.59.
Pod::Perldoc has been upgraded from version 3.15_02 to 3.15_03.
Pod::Simple has been upgraded from version 3.13 to 3.16.
POSIX has been upgraded from 1.19 to 1.24.
It now includes constants for POSIX signal constants.
The re pragma has been upgraded from version 0.11 to 0.18.
The use re '/flags'
subpragma is new.
The regmust() function used to crash when called on a regular expression belonging to a pluggable engine. Now it croaks instead.
regmust() no longer leaks memory.
Safe has been upgraded from version 2.25 to 2.29.
Coderefs returned by reval() and rdo() are now wrapped via wrap_code_refs() (5.12.1).
This fixes a possible infinite loop when looking for coderefs.
It adds several version::vxs::*
routines to the default share.
SDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.09.
SelfLoader has been upgraded from 1.17 to 1.18.
It now works in taint mode [perl #72062].
The sigtrap pragma has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.
It no longer tries to modify read-only arguments when generating a backtrace [perl #72340].
Socket has been upgraded from version 1.87 to 1.94.
See Improved IPv6 support above.
Storable has been upgraded from version 2.22 to 2.27.
Includes performance improvement for overloaded classes.
This adds support for serialising code references that contain UTF-8 strings
correctly. The Storable minor version
number changed as a result, meaning that
Storable users who set $Storable::accept_future_minor
to a FALSE
value
will see errors (see FORWARD COMPATIBILITY in Storable for more details).
Freezing no longer gets confused if the Perl stack gets reallocated during freezing [perl #80074].
Sys::Hostname has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.16.
Term::ANSIColor has been upgraded from version 2.02 to 3.00.
Term::UI has been upgraded from version 0.20 to 0.26.
Test::Harness has been upgraded from version 3.17 to 3.23.
Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.94 to 0.98.
Among many other things, subtests without a plan
or no_plan
now have an
implicit done_testing() added to them.
Thread::Semaphore has been upgraded from version 2.09 to 2.12.
It provides two new methods that give more control over the decrementing of
semaphores: down_nb
and down_force
.
Thread::Queue has been upgraded from version 2.11 to 2.12.
The threads pragma has been upgraded from version 1.75 to 1.83.
The threads::shared pragma has been upgraded from version 1.32 to 1.37.
Tie::Hash has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.
Calling Tie::Hash->TIEHASH()
used to loop forever. Now it croak
s.
Tie::Hash::NamedCapture has been upgraded from version 0.06 to 0.08.
Tie::RefHash has been upgraded from version 1.38 to 1.39.
Time::HiRes has been upgraded from version 1.9719 to 1.9721_01.
Time::Local has been upgraded from version 1.1901_01 to 1.2000.
Time::Piece has been upgraded from version 1.15_01 to 1.20_01.
Unicode::Collate has been upgraded from version 0.52_01 to 0.73.
Unicode::Collate has been updated to use Unicode 6.0.0.
Unicode::Collate::Locale now supports a plethora of new locales: ar, be, bg, de__phonebook, hu, hy, kk, mk, nso, om, tn, vi, hr, ig, ja, ko, ru, sq, se, sr, to, uk, zh, zh__big5han, zh__gb2312han, zh__pinyin, and zh__stroke.
The following modules have been added:
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Big5 for zh__big5han
which makes
tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's big5han ordering.
Unicode::Collate::CJK::GB2312 for zh__gb2312han
which makes
tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's gb2312han ordering.
Unicode::Collate::CJK::JISX0208 which makes tailoring of 6355 kanji (CJK Unified Ideographs) in the JIS X 0208 order.
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Korean which makes tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's Korean ordering.
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Pinyin for zh__pinyin
which makes
tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's pinyin ordering.
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Stroke for zh__stroke
which makes
tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's stroke ordering.
This also sees the switch from using the pure-Perl version of this module to the XS version.
Unicode::Normalize has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.10.
Unicode::UCD has been upgraded from version 0.27 to 0.32.
A new function, Unicode::UCD::num(), has been added. This function
returns the numeric value of the string passed it or undef if the string
in its entirety has no "safe" numeric value. (For more detail, and for the
definition of "safe", see num in Unicode::UCD.)
This upgrade also includes several bug fixes:
It is now updated to Unicode Version 6.0.0 with Corrigendum #8, excepting that, just as with Perl 5.14, the code point at U+1F514 has no name.
Hangul syllable code points have the correct names, and their decompositions are always output without requiring Lingua::KO::Hangul::Util to be installed.
CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) code points U+2A700 to U+2B734 and U+2B740 to U+2B81D are now properly handled.
Numeric values are now output for those CJK code points that have them.
Names output for code points with multiple aliases are now the corrected ones.
This now correctly returns "Unknown" instead of undef for the script
of a code point that hasn't been assigned another one.
This now correctly returns "No_Block" instead of undef for the block
of a code point that hasn't been assigned to another one.
The version pragma has been upgraded from 0.82 to 0.88.
Because of a bug, now fixed, the is_strict() and is_lax() functions did not work when exported (5.12.1).
The warnings pragma has been upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.12.
Calling use warnings
without arguments is now significantly more efficient.
The warnings::register pragma has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.
It is now possible to register warning categories other than the names of packages using warnings::register. See perllexwarn(1) for more information.
XSLoader has been upgraded from version 0.10 to 0.13.
VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.05.
Two bugs have been fixed [perl #84086]:
The symbol table name was lost when tying a hash, due to a thinko in
TIEHASH
. The result was that all tied hashes interacted with the
local symbol table.
Unless a symbol table name had been explicitly specified in the call
to the constructor, querying the special key :LOCAL
failed to
identify objects connected to the local symbol table.
The Win32 module has been upgraded from version 0.39 to 0.44.
This release has several new functions: Win32::GetSystemMetrics(), Win32::GetProductInfo(), Win32::GetOSDisplayName().
The names returned by Win32::GetOSName() and Win32::GetOSDisplayName() have been corrected.
XS::Typemap has been upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.05.
As promised in Perl 5.12.0's release notes, the following modules have been removed from the core distribution, and if needed should be installed from CPAN instead.
Class::ISA has been removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 0.36.
Pod::Plainer has been removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 1.02.
Switch has been removed from the Perl core. Prior version was 2.16.
The removal of Shell has been deferred until after 5.14, as the implementation of Shell shipped with 5.12.0 did not correctly issue the warning that it was to be removed from core.
perlgpl has been updated to contain GPL version 1, as is included in the README distributed with Perl (5.12.1).
The perldelta files for Perl 5.12.1 to 5.12.3 have been added from the maintenance branch: perl5121delta, perl5122delta, perl5123delta.
New style guide for POD documentation, split mostly from the NOTES section of the pod2man(1) manpage.
See perlhack and perlrepository revamp, below.
The perlmodlib manpage that came with Perl 5.12.0 was missing several modules due to a bug in the script that generates the list. This has been fixed [perl #74332] (5.12.1).
perlebcdic contains a helpful table to use in tr/// to convert
between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII. The table was the inverse of the one
it describes, though the code that used the table worked correctly for
the specific example given.
The table has been corrected and the sample code changed to correspond.
The table has also been changed to hex from octal, and the recipes in the pod have been altered to print out leading zeros to make all values the same length.
perlunicode now contains an explanation of how to override, mangle and otherwise tweak the way Perl handles upper-, lower- and other-case conversions on Unicode data, and how to provide scoped changes to alter one's own code's behaviour without stomping on anybody else's.
This was already true, but it's now Officially Stated For The Record (5.12.2).
\xHH and \oOOO escapesperlop has been updated with more detailed explanation of these two character escapes.
In perlrun, the behaviour of the -0NNN switch for -0400 or higher has been clarified (5.12.2).
perlpolicy now contains the policy on what patches are acceptable for maintenance branches (5.12.1).
perlpolicy now contains the policy on compatibility and deprecation along with definitions of terms like "deprecation" (5.12.2).
The following existing diagnostics are now documented:
perlbook has been expanded to cover many more popular books.
SvTRUE
macroThe documentation for the SvTRUE
macro in
perlapi was simply wrong in stating that
get-magic is not processed. It has been corrected.
Several API functions that process optrees have been newly documented.
perlvar reorders the variables and groups them by topic. Each variable introduced after Perl 5.000 notes the first version in which it is available. perlvar also has a new section for deprecated variables to note when they were removed.
These are now documented in perldata.
use locale
and formatsperlform and perllocale have been corrected to state that
use locale
affects formats.
overload's documentation has practically undergone a rewrite. It is now much more straightforward and clear.
The perlhack document is now much shorter, and focuses on the Perl 5 development process and submitting patches to Perl. The technical content has been moved to several new documents, perlsource, perlinterp, perlhacktut, and perlhacktips. This technical content has been only lightly edited.
The perlrepository document has been renamed to perlgit. This new document is just a how-to on using git with the Perl source code. Any other content that used to be in perlrepository has been moved to perlhack.
Examples in perlfaq4 have been updated to show the use of Time::Piece.
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.
This error occurs when a subroutine reference passed to an attribute handler is called, if the subroutine is a closure [perl #68560].
Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular
expression that contains a call to a user-defined character property
function, meaning \p{IsFoo}
or \p{InFoo}
.
See User-Defined Character Properties in perlunicode and perlsec.
This new error is triggered if a destructor called on an object in a typeglob that is being freed creates a new typeglob entry containing an object with a destructor that creates a new entry containing an object etc.
This new fatal error is produced when parsing code supplied by an extension violates the parser's API in a detectable way.
This new error only occurs if a internal consistency check fails when a pipe is about to be closed.
The regular expression pattern has one of the mutually exclusive modifiers repeated.
The regular expression pattern has more than one of the mutually exclusive modifiers.
Use of an unescaped "{" immediately following a \b
or \B
is now
deprecated in order to reserve its use for Perl itself in a future release.
Performing an operation requiring Unicode semantics (such as case-folding) on a Unicode surrogate or a non-Unicode character now triggers this warning.
See Use of qw(...) as parentheses, above, for details.
The "Variable $foo is not imported" warning that precedes a
strict 'vars'
error has now been assigned the "misc" category, so that
no warnings
will suppress it [perl #73712].
warn() and die() now produce "Wide character" warnings when fed a
character outside the byte range if STDERR
is a byte-sized handle.
The "Layer does not match this perl" error message has been replaced with these more helpful messages [perl #73754]:
PerlIO layer function table size (%d) does not match size expected by this perl (%d)
PerlIO layer instance size (%d) does not match size expected by this perl (%d)
The "Found = in conditional" warning that is emitted when a constant is
assigned to a variable in a condition is now withheld if the constant is
actually a subroutine or one generated by use constant
, since the value
of the constant may not be known at the time the program is written
[perl #77762].
Previously, if none of the gethostbyaddr(), gethostbyname() and gethostent() functions were implemented on a given platform, they would all die with the message "Unsupported socket function 'gethostent' called", with analogous messages for getnet*() and getserv*(). This has been corrected.
The warning message about unrecognized regular expression escapes passed through has been changed to include any literal "{" following the two-character escape. For example, "\q{" is now emitted instead of "\q".
perlbug now looks in the EMAIL environment variable for a return address if the REPLY-TO and REPLYTO variables are empty.
perlbug did not previously generate a "From:" header, potentially resulting in dropped mail; it now includes that header.
The user's address is now used as the Return-Path.
Many systems these days don't have a valid Internet domain name, and perlbug@perl.org does not accept email with a return-path that does not resolve. So the user's address is now passed to sendmail so it's less likely to get stuck in a mail queue somewhere [perl #82996].
perlbug now always gives the reporter a chance to change the email address it guesses for them (5.12.2).
perlbug should no longer warn about uninitialized values when using the -d and -v options (5.12.2).
The remote terminal works after forking and spawns new sessions, one per forked process.
ptargrep is a new utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of
files in a tar archive. It comes with Archive::Tar
.
See also Naming fixes in Policy_sh.SH may invalidate Policy.sh, above.
CCINCDIR and CCLIBDIR for the mingw64 cross-compiler are now correctly under $(CCHOME)\mingw\include and \lib rather than immediately below $(CCHOME).
This means the "incpath", "libpth", "ldflags", "lddlflags" and "ldflags_nolargefiles" values in Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl are now set correctly.
make test.valgrind
has been adjusted to account for cpan/dist/ext
separation.
On compilers that support it, -Wwrite-strings is now added to cflags by default.
The Encode module can now (once again) be included in a static Perl build. The special-case handling for this situation got broken in Perl 5.11.0, and has now been repaired.
The previous default size of a PerlIO buffer (4096 bytes) has been increased to the larger of 8192 bytes and your local BUFSIZ. Benchmarks show that doubling this decade-old default increases read and write performance by around 25% to 50% when using the default layers of perlio on top of unix. To choose a non-default size, such as to get back the old value or to obtain an even larger value, configure with:
- ./Configure -Accflags=-DPERLIOBUF_DEFAULT_BUFSIZ=N
where N is the desired size in bytes; it should probably be a multiple of your page size.
An "incompatible operand types" error in ternary expressions when building
with clang
has been fixed (5.12.2).
Perl now skips setuid File::Copy tests on partitions it detects mounted
as nosuid
(5.12.2).
The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised from the Perl distribution. It was officially discontinued in version 5.12.0. It had not worked for years before that.
The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised from the Perl distribution. It was officially discontinued in an earlier version.
README.aix has been updated with information about the XL C/C++ V11 compiler suite (5.12.2).
The d_u32align
configuration probe on ARM has been fixed (5.12.2).
MakeMaker has been updated to build manpages on cygwin.
Improved rebase behaviour
If a DLL is updated on cygwin the old imagebase address is reused. This solves most rebase errors, especially when updating on core DLL's. See http://www.tishler.net/jason/software/rebase/rebase-2.4.2.README for more information.
Support for the standard cygwin dll prefix (needed for FFIs)
Updated build hints file
FreeBSD 7 no longer contains /usr/bin/objformat. At build time, Perl now skips the objformat check for versions 7 and higher and assumes ELF (5.12.1).
Perl now allows -Duse64bitint without promoting to use64bitall
on HP-UX
(5.12.1).
Conversion of strings to floating-point numbers is now more accurate on IRIX systems [perl #32380].
Early versions of Mac OS X (Darwin) had buggy implementations of the setregid(), setreuid(), setrgid(,) and setruid() functions, so Perl would pretend they did not exist.
These functions are now recognised on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard; Darwin 9) and higher, as they have been fixed [perl #72990].
Previously if you built Perl with a shared libperl.so on MirBSD (the default config), it would work up to the installation; however, once installed, it would be unable to find libperl. Path handling is now treated as in the other BSD dialects.
The NetBSD hints file has been changed to make the system malloc the default.
OpenBSD > 3.7 has a new malloc implementation which is mmap-based, and as such can release memory back to the OS; however, Perl's use of this malloc causes a substantial slowdown, so we now default to using Perl's malloc instead [perl #75742].
Perl now builds again with OpenVOS (formerly known as Stratus VOS) [perl #78132] (5.12.3).
DTrace is now supported on Solaris. There used to be build failures, but these have been fixed [perl #73630] (5.12.3).
Extension building on older (pre 7.3-2) VMS systems was broken because configure.com hit the DCL symbol length limit of 1K. We now work within this limit when assembling the list of extensions in the core build (5.12.1).
We fixed configuring and building Perl with -Uuseperlio (5.12.1).
PerlIOUnix_open
now honours the default permissions on VMS.
When perlio
became the default and unix
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. This prevents
inheriting permissions from RMS defaults and ACLs, so to avoid that problem,
we now pass 0777
to open(). In theVMS CRTL, 0777
has a special
meaning over and above intersecting with the current umask; specifically, it
allows Unix syscalls to preserve native default permissions (5.12.3).
The shortening of symbols longer than 31 characters in the core C sources and in extensions is now by default done by the C compiler rather than by xsubpp (which could only do so for generated symbols in XS code). You can reenable xsubpp's symbol shortening by configuring with -Uuseshortenedsymbols, but you'll have some work to do to get the core sources to compile.
Record-oriented files (record format variable or variable with fixed control)
opened for write by the perlio
layer will now be line-buffered to prevent the
introduction of spurious line breaks whenever the perlio buffer fills up.
git_version.h is now installed on VMS. This was an oversight in v5.12.0 which caused some extensions to fail to build (5.12.2).
Several memory leaks in stat FILEHANDLE have been fixed (5.12.2).
A memory leak in Perl_rename() due to a double allocation has been fixed (5.12.2).
A memory leak in vms_fid_to_name() (used by realpath() and realname()> has been fixed (5.12.2).
See also fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children and Perl source code is read in text mode on Windows, above.
Fixed build process for SDK2003SP1 compilers.
Compilation with Visual Studio 2010 is now supported.
When using old 32-bit compilers, the define _USE_32BIT_TIME_T
is now
set in $Config{ccflags}
. This improves portability when compiling
XS extensions using new compilers, but for a Perl compiled with old 32-bit
compilers.
$Config{gccversion}
is now set correctly when Perl is built using the
mingw64 compiler from http://mingw64.org [perl #73754].
When building Perl with the mingw64 x64 cross-compiler incpath
,
libpth
, ldflags
, lddlflags
and ldflags_nolargefiles
values
in Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl were not previously being set
correctly because, with that compiler, the include and lib directories
are not immediately below $(CCHOME) (5.12.2).
The build process proceeds more smoothly with mingw and dmake when
C:\MSYS\bin is in the PATH, due to a Cwd
fix.
Support for building with Visual C++ 2010 is now underway, but is not yet complete. See README.win32 or perlwin32 for more details.
The option to use an externally-supplied crypt(), or to build with no crypt() at all, has been removed. Perl supplies its own crypt() implementation for Windows, and the political situation that required this part of the distribution to sometimes be omitted is long gone.
Modules that create threads should now create CLONE_PARAMS
structures
by calling the new function Perl_clone_params_new(), and free them with
Perl_clone_params_del(). This will ensure compatibility with any future
changes to the internals of the CLONE_PARAMS
structure layout, and that
it is correctly allocated and initialised.
Several functions have been added for parsing Perl statements and expressions. These functions are meant to be used by XS code invoked during Perl parsing, in a recursive-descent manner, to allow modules to augment the standard Perl syntax.
parse_stmtseq() parses a sequence of statements, up to closing brace or EOF.
parse_fullstmt() parses a complete Perl statement, including optional label.
parse_barestmt() parses a statement without a label.
parse_block() parses a code block.
parse_label() parses a statement label, separate from statements.
parse_fullexpr() , parse_listexpr() , parse_termexpr() , and parse_arithexpr() parse expressions at various precedence levels.
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.
A new, experimental API has been added for accessing the internal
structure that Perl uses for %^H
. See the functions beginning with
cophh_
in perlapi.
The caller_cx
function has been added as an XSUB-writer's equivalent of
caller(). See perlapi for details.
XS code in an extension module can now annotate a subroutine (whether
implemented in XS or in Perl) so that nominated XS code will be called
at compile time (specifically as part of op checking) to change the op
tree of that subroutine. The compile-time check function (supplied by
the extension module) can implement argument processing that can't be
expressed as a prototype, generate customised compile-time warnings,
perform constant folding for a pure function, inline a subroutine
consisting of sufficiently simple ops, replace the whole call with a
custom op, and so on. This was previously all possible by hooking the
entersub
op checker, but the new mechanism makes it easy to tie the
hook to a specific subroutine. See cv_set_call_checker in perlapi.
To help in writing custom check hooks, several subtasks within standard
entersub
op checking have been separated out and exposed in the API.
Custom ops can now be registered with the new custom_op_register
C
function and the XOP
structure. This will make it easier to add new
properties of custom ops in the future. Two new properties have been added
already, xop_class
and xop_peep
.
xop_class
is one of the OA_*OP constants. It allows B and other
introspection mechanisms to work with custom ops
that aren't BASEOPs. xop_peep
is a pointer to
a function that will be called for ops of this
type from Perl_rpeep
.
See Custom Operators in perlguts and Custom Operators in perlapi for more detail.
The old PL_custom_op_names
/PL_custom_op_descs
interface is still
supported but discouraged.
It is now possible for XS code to hook into Perl's lexical scope
mechanism at compile time, using the new Perl_blockhook_register
function. See Compile-time scope hooks in perlguts.
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.
The following functions/macros have been added to the API. The *_nomg
macros are equivalent to their non-_nomg
variants, except that they ignore
get-magic. Those ending in _flags
allow one to specify whether
get-magic is processed.
- sv_2bool_flags
- SvTRUE_nomg
- sv_2nv_flags
- SvNV_nomg
- sv_cmp_flags
- sv_cmp_locale_flags
- sv_eq_flags
- sv_collxfrm_flags
In some of these cases, the non-_flags
functions have
been replaced with wrappers around the new functions.
Many functions ending with pvn now have equivalent pv/pvs/sv
versions.
List op-building functions have been added to the API. See op_append_elem, op_append_list, and op_prepend_elem in perlapi.
LINKLIST
The LINKLIST macro, part of op building that constructs the execution-order op chain, has been added to the API.
The save_freeop
, save_op
, save_pushi32ptr
and save_pushptrptr
functions have been added to the API.
A stash can now have a list of effective names in addition to its usual
name. The first effective name can be accessed via the HvENAME
macro,
which is now the recommended name to use in MRO linearisations (HvNAME
being a fallback if there is no HvENAME
).
These names are added and deleted via hv_ename_add
and
hv_ename_delete
. These two functions are not part of the API.
The mg_findext() and
sv_unmagicext()
functions have been added to the API.
They allow extension authors to find and remove magic attached to
scalars based on both the magic type and the magic virtual table, similar to how
sv_magicext() attaches magic of a certain type and with a given virtual table
to a scalar. This eliminates the need for extensions to walk the list of
MAGIC
pointers of an SV
to find the magic that belongs to them.
find_rundefsv
This function returns the SV representing $_
, whether it's lexical
or dynamic.
Perl_croak_no_modify
Perl_croak_no_modify() is short-hand for
Perl_croak("%s", PL_no_modify)
.
PERL_STATIC_INLINE
defineThe PERL_STATIC_INLINE
define has been added to provide the best-guess
incantation to use for static inline functions, if the C compiler supports
C99-style static inline. If it doesn't, it'll give a plain static
.
HAS_STATIC_INLINE
can be used to check if the compiler actually supports
inline functions.
pv_escape
option for hexadecimal escapesA new option, PERL_PV_ESCAPE_NONASCII
, has been added to pv_escape
to
dump all characters above ASCII in hexadecimal. Before, one could get all
characters as hexadecimal or the Latin1 non-ASCII as octal.
lex_start
lex_start
has been added to the API, but is considered experimental.
The op_scope() and op_lvalue() functions have been added to the API, but are considered experimental.
PERL_POLLUTE
has been removedThe option to define PERL_POLLUTE
to expose older 5.005 symbols for
backwards compatibility has been removed. Its use was always discouraged,
and MakeMaker contains a more specific escape hatch:
- perl Makefile.PL POLLUTE=1
This can be used for modules that have not been upgraded to 5.6 naming conventions (and really should be completely obsolete by now).
When Perl's API changes in incompatible ways (which usually happens between major releases), XS modules compiled for previous versions of Perl will no longer work. They need to be recompiled against the new Perl.
The XS_APIVERSION_BOOTCHECK
macro has been added to ensure that modules
are recompiled and to prevent users from accidentally loading modules
compiled for old perls into newer perls. That macro, which is called when
loading every newly compiled extension, compares the API version of the
running perl with the version a module has been compiled for and raises an
exception if they don't match.
The first argument of the C API function Perl_fetch_cop_label
has changed
from struct refcounted_he *
to COP *
, to 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.)
The new GvCV_set() and GvGP_set() macros are now provided to replace assignment to those two macros.
This allows a future commit to eliminate some backref magic between GV
and CVs, which will require complete control over assignment to the
gp_cv
slot.
Under some circumstances, the CvGV() field of a CV is now
reference-counted. To ensure consistent behaviour, direct assignment to
it, for example CvGV(cv) = gv
is now a compile-time error. A new macro,
CvGV_set(cv,gv)
has been introduced to run this operation
safely. Note that modification of this field is not part of the public
API, regardless of this new macro (and despite its being listed in this section).
The CvSTASH() macro can now only be used as an rvalue. CvSTASH_set() has been added to replace assignment to CvSTASH(). This is to ensure that backreferences are handled properly. These macros are not part of the API.
newFOROP
and newWHILEOP
The way the parser handles labels has been cleaned up and refactored. As a result, the newFOROP() constructor function no longer takes a parameter stating what label is to go in the state op.
The newWHILEOP() and newFOROP() functions no longer accept a line number as a parameter.
uvuni_to_utf8_flags
and utf8n_to_uvuni
Some of the flags parameters to uvuni_to_utf8_flags() and
utf8n_to_uvuni() have changed. This is a result of Perl's now allowing
internal storage and manipulation of code points that are problematic
in some situations. Hence, the default actions for these functions has
been complemented to allow these code points. The new flags are
documented in perlapi. Code that requires the problematic code
points to be rejected needs to change to use the new flags. Some flag
names are retained for backward source compatibility, though they do
nothing, as they are now the default. However the flags
UNICODE_ALLOW_FDD0
, UNICODE_ALLOW_FFFF
, UNICODE_ILLEGAL
, and
UNICODE_IS_ILLEGAL
have been removed, as they stem from a
fundamentally broken model of how the Unicode non-character code points
should be handled, which is now described in
Non-character code points in perlunicode. See also the Unicode section
under Selected Bug Fixes.
Perl_ptr_table_clear
Perl_ptr_table_clear
is no longer part of Perl's public API. Calling it
now generates a deprecation warning, and it will be removed in a future
release.
sv_compile_2op
The sv_compile_2op() API function is now deprecated. Searches suggest that nothing on CPAN is using it, so this should have zero impact.
It attempted to provide an API to compile code down to an optree, but failed to bind correctly to lexicals in the enclosing scope. It's not possible to fix this problem within the constraints of its parameters and return value.
find_rundefsvoffset
The find_rundefsvoffset
function has been deprecated. It appeared that
its design was insufficient for reliably getting the lexical $_
at
run-time.
Use the new find_rundefsv
function or the UNDERBAR
macro
instead. They directly return the right SV
representing $_
, whether it's
lexical or dynamic.
CALL_FPTR
and CPERLscope
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.
The protocol for unwinding the C stack at the last stage of a die
has changed how it identifies the target stack frame. This now uses
a separate variable PL_restartjmpenv
, where previously it relied on
the blk_eval.cur_top_env
pointer in the eval context frame that
has nominally just been discarded. This change means that code running
during various stages of Perl-level unwinding no longer needs to take
care to avoid destroying the ghost frame.
The format of entries on the scope stack has been changed, resulting in a reduction of memory usage of about 10%. In particular, the memory used by the scope stack to record each active lexical variable has been halved.
Memory allocation for pointer tables has been changed. Previously
Perl_ptr_table_store
allocated memory from the same arena system as
SV
bodies and HE
s, with freed memory remaining bound to those arenas
until interpreter exit. Now it allocates memory from arenas private to the
specific pointer table, and that memory is returned to the system when
Perl_ptr_table_free
is called. Additionally, allocation and release are
both less CPU intensive.
UNDERBAR
The UNDERBAR
macro now calls find_rundefsv
. dUNDERBAR
is now a
noop but should still be used to ensure past and future compatibility.
The ibcmp_*
functions have been renamed and are now called foldEQ
,
foldEQ_locale
, and foldEQ_utf8
. The old names are still available as
macros.
chop and chomp implementations mergedThe opcode bodies for chop and chomp and for schop
and schomp
have been merged. The implementation functions Perl_do_chop() and
Perl_do_chomp(), never part of the public API, have been merged and
moved to a static function in pp.c. This shrinks the Perl binary
slightly, and should not affect any code outside the core (unless it is
relying on the order of side-effects when chomp is passed a list of
values).
Perl no longer produces this warning:
- $ perl -we 'open(my $f, ">", \my $x); binmode($f, "scalar")'
- Use of uninitialized value in binmode at -e line 1.
Opening a glob reference via open($fh, ">", \*glob)
no longer
causes 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].
PerlIO no longer crashes when called recursively, such as from a signal handler. Now it just leaks memory [perl #75556].
Most I/O functions were not warning for unopened handles unless the
"closed" and "unopened" warnings categories were both enabled. Now only
use warnings 'unopened'
is necessary to trigger these warnings, as
had always been the intention.
There have been several fixes to PerlIO layers:
When binmode(FH, ":crlf")
pushes the :crlf
layer on top of the stack,
it no longer enables crlf layers lower in the stack so as to avoid
unexpected results [perl #38456].
Opening a file in :raw
mode now does what it advertises to do (first
open the file, then binmode it), instead of simply leaving off the top
layer [perl #80764].
The three layers :pop
, :utf8
, and :bytes
didn't allow stacking when
opening a file. For example
this:
would throw an "Invalid argument" error. This has been fixed in this release [perl #82484].
The regular expression engine no longer loops when matching
"\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FF}" =~ /f+/i
and similar expressions
[perl #72998] (5.12.1).
The trie runtime code should no longer allocate massive amounts of memory, fixing #74484.
Syntax errors in (?{...}) blocks no longer cause panic messages
[perl #2353].
A pattern like (?:(o){2})?
no longer causes a "panic" error
[perl #39233].
A fatal error in regular expressions containing (.*?)
when processing
UTF-8 data has been fixed [perl #75680] (5.12.2).
An erroneous regular expression engine optimisation that caused regex verbs like
*COMMIT
sometimes to be ignored has been removed.
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.
A regular expression match in the right-hand side of a global substitution
(s///g) that is in the same scope will no longer cause match variables
to have the wrong values on subsequent iterations. This can happen when an
array or hash subscript is interpolated in the right-hand side, as in
s|(.)|@a{ print($1), /./ }|g
[perl #19078].
Several cases in which characters in the Latin-1 non-ASCII range (0x80 to
0xFF) used not to match themselves, or used to match both a character class
and its complement, have been fixed. For instance, U+00E2 could match both
\w
and \W
[perl #78464] [perl #18281] [perl #60156].
Matching a Unicode character against an alternation containing characters
that happened to match continuation bytes in the former's UTF8
representation (like qq{\x{30ab}} =~ /\xab|\xa9/
) would cause erroneous
warnings [perl #70998].
The trie optimisation was not taking empty groups into account, preventing
"foo" from matching /\A(?:(?:)foo|bar|zot)\z/
[perl #78356].
A pattern containing a +
inside a lookahead would sometimes cause an
incorrect match failure in a global match (for example, /(?=(\S+))/g
)
[perl #68564].
A regular expression optimisation would sometimes cause a match with a
{n,m} quantifier to fail when it should have matched [perl #79152].
Case-insensitive matching in regular expressions compiled under
use locale
now works much more sanely when the pattern or target
string is internally encoded in UTF8. Previously, under these
conditions the localeness was completely lost. Now, code points
above 255 are treated as Unicode, but code points between 0 and 255
are treated using the current locale rules, regardless of whether
the pattern or the string is encoded in UTF8. The few case-insensitive
matches that cross the 255/256 boundary are not allowed. For
example, 0xFF does not caselessly match the character at 0x178,
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS, because 0xFF may not be LATIN
SMALL LETTER Y in the current locale, and Perl has no way of knowing
if that character even exists in the locale, much less what code
point it is.
The (?|...) regular expression construct no longer crashes if the final
branch has more sets of capturing parentheses than any other branch. This
was fixed in Perl 5.10.1 for the case of a single branch, but that fix did
not take multiple branches into account [perl #84746].
A bug has been fixed in the implementation of {...}
quantifiers in
regular expressions that prevented the code block in
/((\w+)(?{ print $2 })){2}/
from seeing the $2
sometimes
[perl #84294].
when (scalar) {...}
no longer crashes, but produces a syntax error
[perl #74114] (5.12.1).
A label right before a string eval (foo: eval $string
) no longer causes
the label to be associated also with the first statement inside the eval
[perl #74290] (5.12.1).
The no 5.13.2
form of no no longer tries to turn on features or
pragmata (like strict) [perl #70075] (5.12.2).
BEGIN {require 5.12.0}
now behaves as documented, rather than behaving
identically to use 5.12.0
. Previously, require in a BEGIN
block
was erroneously executing the use feature ':5.12.0'
and
use strict
behaviour, which only use was documented to
provide [perl #69050].
A regression introduced in Perl 5.12.0, making
my $x = 3; $x = length(undef)
result in $x
set to 3
has been
fixed. $x
will now be undef [perl #85508] (5.12.2).
When strict "refs" mode is off, %{...}
in rvalue context returns
undef if its argument is undefined. An optimisation introduced in Perl
5.12.0 to make keys %{...}
faster when used as a boolean did not take
this into account, causing keys %{+undef}
(and keys %$foo
when
$foo
is undefined) to be an error, which it should be so in strict
mode only [perl #81750].
Constant-folding used to cause
- $text =~ ( 1 ? /phoo/ : /bear/)
to turn into
- $text =~ /phoo/
at compile time. Now it correctly matches against $_
[perl #20444].
Parsing Perl code (either with string eval or by loading modules) from
within a UNITCHECK
block no longer causes the interpreter to crash
[perl #70614].
String evals no longer fail after 2 billion scopes have been
compiled [perl #83364].
The parser no longer hangs when encountering certain Unicode characters, such as U+387 [perl #74022].
Defining a constant with the same name as one of Perl's special blocks
(like INIT
) stopped working in 5.12.0, but has now been fixed
[perl #78634].
A reference to a literal value used as a hash key ($hash{\"foo"}
) used
to be stringified, even if the hash was tied [perl #79178].
A closure containing an if
statement followed by a constant or variable
is no longer treated as a constant [perl #63540].
state can now be used with attributes. It
used to mean the same thing as
my if any attributes were present [perl #68658].
Expressions like @$a > 3
no longer cause $a
to be mentioned in
the "Use of uninitialized value in numeric gt" warning when $a
is
undefined (since it is not part of the > expression, but the operand
of the @
) [perl #72090].
Accessing an element of a package array with a hard-coded number (as opposed to an arbitrary expression) would crash if the array did not exist. Usually the array would be autovivified during compilation, but typeglob manipulation could remove it, as in these two cases which used to crash:
The -C command-line option, when used on the shebang line, can now be followed by other options [perl #72434].
The B
module was returning B::OP
s instead of B::LOGOP
s for
entertry
[perl #80622]. This was due to a bug in the Perl core,
not in B
itself.
Perl 5.10.0 introduced a new internal mechanism for caching MROs (method
resolution orders, or lists of parent classes; aka "isa" caches) to make
method lookup faster (so @ISA
arrays would not have to be searched
repeatedly). Unfortunately, this brought with it quite a few bugs. Almost
all of these have been fixed now, along with a few MRO-related bugs that
existed before 5.10.0:
The following used to have erratic effects on method resolution, because the "isa" caches were not reset or otherwise ended up listing the wrong classes. These have been fixed.
undef *Foo::
)
undef *Foo::ISA
)
delete $Foo::{ISA}
)
*Foo::ISA = \@Bar::ISA
or
*Foo::ISA = *Bar::ISA
) [perl #77238]
undef *Foo::ISA
would even stop a new @Foo::ISA
array from updating
caches.
Typeglob assignments would crash if the glob's stash no longer existed, so
long as the glob assigned to were named ISA
or the glob on either side of
the assignment contained a subroutine.
PL_isarev
, which is accessible to Perl via mro::get_isarev
is now
updated properly when packages are deleted or removed from the @ISA
of
other classes. This allows many packages to be created and deleted without
causing a memory leak [perl #75176].
In addition, various other bugs related to typeglobs and stashes have been fixed:
Some work has been done on the internal pointers that link between symbol tables (stashes), typeglobs, and subroutines. This has the effect that various edge cases related to deleting stashes or stash entries (for example, <%FOO:: = ()>), and complex typeglob or code-reference aliasing, will no longer crash the interpreter.
Assigning a reference to a glob copy now assigns to a glob slot instead of overwriting the glob with a scalar [perl #1804] [perl #77508].
A bug when replacing the glob of a loop variable within the loop has been fixed [perl #21469]. This means the following code will no longer crash:
- for $x (...) {
- *x = *y;
- }
Assigning a glob to a PVLV used to convert it to a plain string. Now it works correctly, and a PVLV can hold a glob. This would happen when a nonexistent hash or array element was passed to a subroutine:
- sub { $_[0] = *foo }->($hash{key});
- # $_[0] would have been the string "*main::foo"
It also happened when a glob was assigned to, or returned from, an element of a tied array or hash [perl #36051].
When trying to report Use of uninitialized value $Foo::BAR
, crashes could
occur if the glob holding the global variable in question had been detached
from its original stash by, for example, delete $::{"Foo::"}
. This has
been fixed by disabling the reporting of variable names in those
cases.
During the restoration of a localised typeglob on scope exit, any destructors called as a result would be able to see the typeglob in an inconsistent state, containing freed entries, which could result in a crash. This would affect code like this:
Now the glob entries are cleared before any destructors are called. This also means that destructors can vivify entries in the glob. So Perl tries again and, if the entries are re-created too many times, dies with a "panic: gp_free ..." error message.
If a typeglob is freed while a subroutine attached to it is still
referenced elsewhere, the subroutine is renamed to __ANON__
in the same
package, unless the package has been undefined, in which case the __ANON__
package is used. This could cause packages to be sometimes autovivified,
such as if the package had been deleted. Now this no longer occurs.
The __ANON__
package is also now used when the original package is
no longer attached to the symbol table. This avoids memory leaks in some
cases [perl #87664].
Subroutines and package variables inside a package whose name ends with
::
can now be accessed with a fully qualified name.
What has become known as "the Unicode Bug" is almost completely resolved in
this release. Under use feature 'unicode_strings'
(which is
automatically selected by use 5.012
and above), the internal
storage format of a string no longer affects the external semantics.
[perl #58182].
There are two known exceptions:
The now-deprecated, user-defined case-changing functions require utf8-encoded strings to operate. The CPAN module Unicode::Casing has been written to replace this feature without its drawbacks, and the feature is scheduled to be removed in 5.16.
quotemeta() (and its in-line equivalent \Q
) can also give different
results depending on whether a string is encoded in UTF-8. See
The Unicode Bug in perlunicode.
Handling of Unicode non-character code points has changed. Previously they were mostly considered illegal, except that in some place only one of the 66 of them was known. The Unicode Standard considers them all legal, but forbids their "open interchange". This is part of the change to allow internal use of any code point (see Core Enhancements). Together, these changes resolve [perl #38722], [perl #51918], [perl #51936], and [perl #63446].
Case-insensitive "/i"
regular expression matching of Unicode
characters that match multiple characters now works much more as
intended. For example
- "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /ffi/ui
and
- "ffi" =~ /\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}/ui
are both true. Previously, there were many bugs with this feature. What hasn't been fixed are the places where the pattern contains the multiple characters, but the characters are split up by other things, such as in
- "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /(f)(f)i/ui
or
- "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /ffi*/ui
or
- "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /[a-f][f-m][g-z]/ui
None of these match.
Also, this matching doesn't fully conform to the current Unicode Standard, which asks that the matching be made upon the NFD (Normalization Form Decomposed) of the text. However, as of this writing (April 2010), the Unicode Standard is currently in flux about what they will recommend doing with regard in such scenarios. It may be that they will throw out the whole concept of multi-character matches. [perl #71736].
Naming a deprecated character in \N{NAME} no longer leaks memory.
We fixed a bug that could cause \N{NAME} constructs followed by
a single "."
to be parsed incorrectly [perl #74978] (5.12.1).
chop now correctly handles characters above "\x{7fffffff}"
[perl #73246].
Passing to index an offset beyond the end of the string when the string
is encoded internally in UTF8 no longer causes panics [perl #75898].
warn() and die() now respect utf8-encoded scalars [perl #45549].
Sometimes the UTF8 length cache would not be reset on a value
returned by substr, causing length(substr($uni_string, ...))
to give
wrong answers. With ${^UTF8CACHE}
set to -1, it would also produce
a "panic" error message [perl #77692].
Overloading now works properly in conjunction with tied variables. What formerly happened was that most ops checked their arguments for overloading before checking for magic, so for example an overloaded object returned by a tied array access would usually be treated as not overloaded [RT #57012].
Various instances of magic (like tie methods) being called on tied variables too many or too few times have been fixed:
$tied->()
did not always call FETCH [perl #8438].
Filetest operators and y/// and tr/// were calling FETCH too
many times.
The =
operator used to ignore magic on its right-hand side if the
scalar happened to hold a typeglob (if a typeglob was the last thing
returned from or assigned to a tied scalar) [perl #77498].
Dereference operators used to ignore magic if the argument was a reference already (such as from a previous FETCH) [perl #72144].
splice now calls set-magic (so changes made
by splice @ISA
are respected by method calls) [perl #78400].
In-memory files created by open($fh, ">", \$buffer)
were not calling
FETCH/STORE at all [perl #43789] (5.12.2).
utf8::is_utf8() now respects get-magic (like $1
) (5.12.1).
Non-commutative binary operators used to swap their operands if the same
tied scalar was used for both operands and returned a different value for
each FETCH. For instance, if $t
returned 2 the first time and 3 the
second, then $t/$t
would evaluate to 1.5. This has been fixed
[perl #87708].
String eval now detects taintedness of overloaded or tied
arguments [perl #75716].
String eval and regular expression matches against objects with string
overloading no longer cause memory corruption or crashes [perl #77084].
readline EXPR now honors <>
overloading on tied
arguments.
<expr>
always respects overloading now if the expression is
overloaded.
Because "<> as glob" was parsed differently from
"<> as filehandle" from 5.6 onwards, something like <$foo[0]>
did
not handle overloading, even if $foo[0]
was an overloaded object. This
was contrary to the documentation for overload, and meant that <>
could not be used as a general overloaded iterator operator.
The fallback behaviour of overloading on binary operators was asymmetric [perl #71286].
Magic applied to variables in the main package no longer affects other packages. See Magic variables outside the main package above [perl #76138].
Sometimes magic (ties, taintedness, etc.) attached to variables could cause an object to last longer than it should, or cause a crash if a tied variable were freed from within a tie method. These have been fixed [perl #81230].
DESTROY methods of objects implementing ties are no longer able to crash by accessing the tied variable through a weak reference [perl #86328].
Fixed a regression of kill() when a match variable is used for the process ID to kill [perl #75812].
$AUTOLOAD
used to remain tainted forever if it ever became tainted. Now
it is correctly untainted if an autoloaded method is called and the method
name was not tainted.
sprintf now dies when passed a tainted scalar for the format. It did
already die for arbitrary expressions, but not for simple scalars
[perl #82250].
lc, uc, lcfirst, and ucfirst no longer return untainted strings
when the argument is tainted. This has been broken since perl 5.8.9
[perl #87336].
The Perl debugger now also works in taint mode [perl #76872].
Subroutine redefinition works once more in the debugger [perl #48332].
When -d is used on the shebang (#!
) line, the debugger now has access
to the lines of the main program. In the past, this sometimes worked and
sometimes did not, depending on the order in which things happened to be
arranged in memory [perl #71806].
A possible memory leak when using caller EXPR to set
@DB::args
has been fixed (5.12.2).
Perl no longer stomps on $DB::single
, $DB::trace
, and $DB::signal
if these variables already have values when $^P
is assigned to [perl #72422].
#line
directives in string evals were not properly updating the arrays
of lines of code (@{"_< ..."}
) that the debugger (or any debugging or
profiling module) uses. In threaded builds, they were not being updated at
all. In non-threaded builds, the line number was ignored, so any change to
the existing line number would cause the lines to be misnumbered
[perl #79442].
Perl no longer accidentally clones lexicals in scope within active stack frames in the parent when creating a child thread [perl #73086].
Several memory leaks in cloning and freeing threaded Perl interpreters have been fixed [perl #77352].
Creating a new thread when directory handles were open used to cause a crash, because the handles were not cloned, but simply passed to the new thread, resulting in a double free.
Now directory handles are cloned properly on Windows
and on systems that have a fchdir
function. On other
systems, new threads simply do not inherit directory
handles from their parent threads [perl #75154].
The typeglob *,
, which holds the scalar variable $,
(output field
separator), had the wrong reference count in child threads.
[perl #78494] When pipes are shared between threads, the close function
(and any implicit close, such as on thread exit) no longer blocks.
Perl now does a timely cleanup of SVs that are cloned into a new thread but then discovered to be orphaned (that is, their owners are not cloned). This eliminates several "scalars leaked" warnings when joining threads.
Lvalue subroutines are again able to return copy-on-write scalars. This had been broken since version 5.10.0 [perl #75656] (5.12.3).
require no longer causes caller to return the wrong file name for
the scope that called require and other scopes higher up that had the
same file name [perl #68712].
sort with a ($$)
-prototyped comparison routine used to cause the value
of @_
to leak out of the sort. Taking a reference to @_
within the
sorting routine could cause a crash [perl #72334].
Match variables (like $1
) no longer persist between calls to a sort
subroutine [perl #76026].
Iterating with foreach
over an array returned by an lvalue sub now works
[perl #23790].
$@
is now localised during calls to binmode to prevent action at a
distance [perl #78844].
Calling a closure prototype (what is passed to an attribute handler for a closure) now results in a "Closure prototype called" error message instead of a crash [perl #68560].
Mentioning a read-only lexical variable from the enclosing scope in a
string eval no longer causes the variable to become writable
[perl #19135].
Within signal handlers, $!
is now implicitly localized.
CHLD signals are no longer unblocked after a signal handler is called if
they were blocked before by POSIX::sigprocmask
[perl #82040].
A signal handler called within a signal handler could cause leaks or double-frees. Now fixed [perl #76248].
Several memory leaks when loading XS modules were fixed (5.12.2).
substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH,REPLACEMENT, index STR,SUBSTR,POSITION, keys HASH, and vec EXPR,OFFSET,BITS could, when used in combination with lvalues, result in leaking the scalar value they operate on, and cause its destruction to happen too late. This has now been fixed.
The postincrement and postdecrement operators, ++
and --
, used to cause
leaks when used on references. This has now been fixed.
Nested map and grep blocks no longer leak memory when processing
large lists [perl #48004].
use VERSION and no VERSION no longer leak memory [perl #78436]
[perl #69050].
.=
followed by <>
or readline would leak memory if $/
contained characters beyond the octet range and the scalar assigned to
happened to be encoded as UTF8 internally [perl #72246].
eval 'BEGIN{die}'
no longer leaks memory on non-threaded builds.
glob() no longer crashes when %File::Glob::
is empty and
CORE::GLOBAL::glob
isn't present [perl #75464] (5.12.2).
readline() has been fixed when interrupted by signals so it no longer returns the "same thing" as before or random memory.
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].
The mechanism for freeing objects in globs used to leave dangling pointers to freed SVs, meaning Perl users could see corrupted state during destruction.
Perl now frees only the affected slots of the GV, rather than freeing the GV itself. This makes sure that there are no dangling refs or corrupted state during destruction.
The interpreter no longer crashes when freeing deeply-nested arrays of arrays. Hashes have not been fixed yet [perl #44225].
Concatenating long strings under use encoding
no longer causes Perl to
crash [perl #78674].
Calling ->import
on a class lacking an import method could corrupt
the stack, resulting in strange behaviour. For instance,
- push @a, "foo", $b = bar->import;
would assign "foo" to $b
[perl #63790].
The recv function could crash when called with the MSG_TRUNC flag
[perl #75082].
formline no longer crashes when passed a tainted format picture. It also
taints $^A
now if its arguments are tainted [perl #79138].
A bug in how we process filetest operations could cause a segfault.
Filetests don't always expect an op on the stack, so we now use
TOPs only if we're sure that we're not stating the _
filehandle.
This is indicated by OPf_KIDS
(as checked in ck_ftst) [perl #74542]
(5.12.1).
unpack() now handles scalar context correctly for %32H
and %32u
,
fixing a potential crash. split() would crash because the third item
on the stack wasn't the regular expression it expected. unpack("%2H",
...)
would return both the unpacked result and the checksum on the stack,
as would unpack("%2u", ...)
[perl #73814] (5.12.2).
The &
, |, and ^ bitwise operators no longer coerce read-only arguments
[perl #20661].
Stringifying a scalar containing "-0.0" no longer has the effect of turning false into true [perl #45133].
Some numeric operators were converting integers to floating point, resulting in loss of precision on 64-bit platforms [perl #77456].
sprintf() was ignoring locales when called with constant arguments [perl #78632].
Combining the vector (%v
) flag and dynamic precision would
cause sprintf to confuse the order of its arguments, making it
treat the string as the precision and vice-versa [perl #83194].
The C-level lex_stuff_pvn
function would sometimes cause a spurious
syntax error on the last line of the file if it lacked a final semicolon
[perl #74006] (5.12.1).
The eval_sv
and eval_pv
C functions now set $@
correctly when
there is a syntax error and no G_KEEPERR
flag, and never set it if the
G_KEEPERR
flag is present [perl #3719].
The XS multicall API no longer causes subroutines to lose reference counts if called via the multicall interface from within those very subroutines. This affects modules like List::Util. Calling one of its functions with an active subroutine as the first argument could cause a crash [perl #78070].
The SvPVbyte
function available to XS modules now calls magic before
downgrading the SV, to avoid warnings about wide characters [perl #72398].
The ref types in the typemap for XS bindings now support magical variables [perl #72684].
sv_catsv_flags
no longer calls mg_get
on its second argument (the
source string) if the flags passed to it do not include SV_GMAGIC. So it
now matches the documentation.
my_strftime
no longer leaks memory. This fixes a memory leak in
POSIX::strftime
[perl #73520].
XSUB.h now correctly redefines fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS [perl #55049] (5.12.1).
XS code using fputc() or fputs() on Windows could cause an error due to their arguments being swapped [perl #72704] (5.12.1).
A possible segfault in the T_PTROBJ
default typemap has been fixed
(5.12.2).
A bug that could cause "Unknown error" messages when
call_sv(code, G_EVAL)
is called from an XS destructor has been fixed
(5.12.2).
This is a list of significant unresolved issues which are regressions from earlier versions of Perl or which affect widely-used CPAN modules.
List::Util::first
misbehaves in the presence of a lexical $_
(typically introduced by my $_
or implicitly by given
). The variable
that gets set for each iteration is the package variable $_
, not the
lexical $_
.
A similar issue may occur in other modules that provide functions which take a block as their first argument, like
- foo { ... $_ ...} list
See also: http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=67694
readline() returns an empty string instead of undef when it is interrupted by a signal.
The changes in prototype handling break Switch. A patch has been sent upstream and will hopefully appear on CPAN soon.
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.)
On VMS, Time::HiRes
tests will fail due to a bug in the CRTL's
implementation of setitimer
: previous timer values would be cleared
if a timer expired but not if the timer was reset before expiring. HP
OpenVMS Engineering have corrected the problem and will release a patch
in due course (Quix case # QXCM1001115136).
On VMS, there were a handful of Module::Build
test failures we didn't
get to before the release; please watch CPAN for updates.
You can now use the keys(), values(), and each() builtins on arrays; previously you could use them only on hashes. See perlfunc for details. This is actually a change introduced in perl 5.12.0, but it was missed from that release's perl5120delta.
@_
split() no longer modifies @_
when called in scalar or void context.
In void context it now produces a "Useless use of split" warning.
This was also a perl 5.12.0 change that missed the perldelta.
Randy Kobes, creator of http://kobesearch.cpan.org/ and contributor/maintainer to several core Perl toolchain modules, passed away on September 18, 2010 after a battle with lung cancer. The community was richer for his involvement. He will be missed.
Perl 5.14.0 represents one year of development since Perl 5.12.0 and contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes across nearly 3,000 files from 150 authors and committers.
Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.14.0:
Aaron Crane, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alastair Douglas, Alexander Alekseev, Alexander Hartmaier, Alexandr Ciornii, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Ali Polatel, Allen Smith, Andreas König, Andrew Rodland, Andy Armstrong, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Arkturuz, Arvan, A. Sinan Unur, Ben Morrow, Bo Lindbergh, Boris Ratner, Brad Gilbert, Bram, brian d foy, Brian Phillips, Casey West, Charles Bailey, Chas. Owens, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Dan Dascalescu, Dave Rolsky, David Caldwell, David Cantrell, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, David Wheeler, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Fingle Nark, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Franz Fasching, Gene Sullivan, George Greer, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Goro Fuji, Grant McLean, gregor herrmann, H.Merijn Brand, Hongwen Qiu, Hugo van der Sanden, Ian Goodacre, James E Keenan, James Mastros, Jan Dubois, Jay Hannah, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Jirka Hruška, John Peacock, Joshua ben Jore, Joshua Pritikin, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, kmx, Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯, Larwan Berke, Leon Brocard, Leon Timmermans, Lubomir Rintel, Lukas Mai, Maik Hentsche, Marty Pauley, Marvin Humphrey, Matt Johnson, Matt S Trout, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael Fig, Michael G Schwern, Michael Parker, Michael Stevens, Michael Witten, Mike Kelly, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Nick Cleaton, Nick Johnston, Nicolas Kaiser, Niko Tyni, Noirin Shirley, Nuno Carvalho, Paul Evans, Paul Green, Paul Johnson, Paul Marquess, Peter J. Holzer, Peter John Acklam, Peter Martini, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Piotr Fusik, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes, Richard Möhn, Richard Soderberg, Rob Hoelz, Robin Barker, Ruslan Zakirov, Salvador Fandiño, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Shlomi Fish, Sinan Unur, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Steven Schubiger, Steve Peters, Sullivan Beck, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Tye McQueen, Vadim Konovalov, Vernon Lyon, Vincent Pit, Walt Mankowski, Wolfram Humann, Yves Orton, Zefram, and Zsbán Ambrus.
This is woefully incomplete as it's automatically generated from version
control history. In particular, it doesn't include the names of the
(very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues in previous
versions of Perl that helped make Perl 5.14.0 better. For a more complete
list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS
file in the Perl 5.14.0 distribution.
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.
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 use this address for security issues in the Perl core only, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
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.