perl573delta - what's new for perl v5.7.3

This document describes differences between the 5.7.2 release and the 5.7.3 release.

(To view the differences between the 5.6.0 release and the 5.7.0 release, see perl570delta. To view the differences between the 5.7.0 release and the 5.7.1 release, see perl571delta. To view the differences between the 5.7.1 release and the 5.7.2 release, see perl572delta.)

This is just a selected list of some of the more notable changes. The numbers refer to the Perl repository change numbers; see Changes58 (or Changes in Perl 5.8.1). In addition to these changes, lots of work took place in integrating threads, PerlIO, and Unicode; general code cleanup; and last but not least porting to non-UNIX lands such as Win32, VMS, Cygwin, DJGPP, VOS, MacOS Classic, and EBCDIC.

11362

add LC_MESSAGES to POSIX :locale_h export tag

11371

add DEL to [:cntrl:]

11375

make h2ph understand constants like 1234L and 5678LL

11405

Win32: fix bugs in handling of the virtualized environment

11410

fix a bug in the security taint checking of open()

11423

make perl fork() safe even on platforms that don't have pthread_atfork()

11459

make switching optimization and debugging levels during Perl builds easier via the OPTIMIZE environment variable

11475

make split()'s unused captures to be undef, not ''

11485

Search::Dict: allow transforming lines before comparing

11490

allow installing extra modules or bundles when building Perl

11516

add -Wall in cflags when compiling with gcc to weed out dubious C practices

11541

pluggable optimizer

11549

WinCE: integrate the port

11589

Win32: 4-arg select was broken

11594

introduce the perlivp utility for verifying the Perl installation (IVP = Installation Verification Procedure)

11623

rename lib/unicode to lib/unicore to avoid case-insensitivity problems with lib/Unicode

111631

remove Time::Piece

11643

document that use utf8 is not the right way most of the time

11656

allow building perl with -DUSE_UTF8_SCRIPTS which makes UTF-8 the default script encoding (not the default since that would break all scripts having legacy eight-bit data in them)

11725

division preserving 64-bit integers

11743

document the coderef-in-@INC feature

11794

modulo (%) preserving 64-bit integers

11825

update to Unicode 3.1.1

11865

add the \[$@%&*] prototype support

11874

oct() and hex() in glorious 64 bit

11877

Class::Struct: allow recursive classes

11993

fix unpack U to be the reverse of pack U

12056

VMS: waitpid enhancements

12180

unpack(Z*Z*, pack(Z*Z*, ..)) was broken

12243

Devel::Peek: display UTF-8 SVs also also as \x{...}

12288

Data::Dumper: option to sort hashes

12542

add perlpodspec

12652

threadsafe DynaLoader, re, Opcode, File::Glob, and B

12756

support BeOS better

12874

read-only hashes (user-level interface is Hash::Util)

13162

add Devel::PPPort

13179

add the sort pragma

13326

VMS: fix perl -P

13358

add perlpacktut

13452

SUPER-UX: add hints file

13575

Win32: non-blocking waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)

13684

introduce the -t option for gentler taint checking

14694

add the if pragma

14832

implement IV/UV/NV/long double un/packing with j/J/F/D

14854

document the new taint behaviour of exec LIST and system LIST

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be information at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of CWperl -V, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.

The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.

The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

The README file for general stuff.

The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.

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

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