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CONTENTS

NAME

perl5133delta - what is new for perl v5.13.3

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.13.3 release and the 5.13.2 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.13.1, first read perl5132delta, which describes differences between 5.13.1 and 5.13.2.

Core Enhancements

\o{...} for octals

There is a new escape sequence, "\o", in double-quote-like contexts. It must be followed by braces enclosing an octal number of at least one digit. It interpolates as the character with an ordinal value equal to the octal number. 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.

\N{name} and charnames enhancements

\N{} and charnames::vianame now know about the abbreviated character names listed by Unicode, such as NBSP, SHY, LRO, ZWJ, etc., as well as all the customary abbreviations for the C0 and C1 control characters (such as ACK, BEL, CAN, etc.), as well as a few new variants in common usage of some C1 full names.

In the past, it was ineffective to override one of Perl's abbreviations with your own custom alias. Now it works.

You can also create a custom alias directly to the ordinal of a character, known by \N{...}, charnames::vianame(), and charnames::viacode(). Previously, an alias had to be to an official Unicode character name. This made it impossible to create an alias for a code point that had no name, such as the ones reserved for private use. So this change allows you to make more effective use of private use characters. Only if there is no official name will charnames::viacode() return your custom one.

See charnames for details on all these changes.

Uppercase X/B allowed in hexadecimal/binary literals

Literals may now use either upper case 0X... or 0B... prefixes, in addition to the already supported 0x... and 0b... syntax. (RT#76296) (a674e8d, 333f87f)

C, Ruby, Python and PHP already supported this syntax, and it makes Perl more internally consistent. A round-trip with eval sprintf "%#X", 0x10 now returns 16 in addition to eval sprintf "%#x", 0x10, which worked before.

Incompatible Changes

\400 - \777

Use of \400 - \777 in regexes in certain circumstances has given different, anomalous behavior than their use in all other double-quote-like contexts. Since 5.10.1, a deprecated warning message has been raised when this happens. Now, all double-quote-like contexts have the same behavior, namely to be equivalent to \x{100} - \x{1FF}, with no deprecation warning. Use of these values in the command line option "-0" retains the current meaning to slurp input files whole; previously, this was documented only for "-0777". It is recommended, however, because of various ambiguities, to use the new \o{...} construct to represent characters in octal. (fa1639c..f6993e9).

Deprecations

Omitting a space between a regular expression and subsequent word

Omitting a space between a regex pattern or pattern modifiers and the following word is deprecated. Deprecation for regular expression matches was added in Perl 5.13.2. In this release, the deprecation is extended to regular expression substitutions. For example, s/foo/bar/sand $bar will still be parsed as s/foo/bar/s and $bar but will issue a warning. (aa78b66)

Deprecation warning added for deprecated-in-core .pl libs

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 version, of course, does not generate the warning. (0111154)

Performance Enhancements

There are several small optimizations to reduce CPU cache misses in various very commonly used modules like warnings and Carp as well in accessing file-handles for reading.

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

autodie

Upgraded from version 2.06_01 to 2.10.

charnames

Upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.10.

viacode() is now significantly faster. (f3227b7)

lib

Upgraded from version 0.62 to 0.63.

threads

Upgraded from version 1.77_02 to 1.77_03.

threads::shared

Upgraded from version 1.33_01 to 1.33_02.

warnings

Upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.10.

Calling use warnings without arguments is now significantly more efficient. (8452af9)

Archive::Extract

Upgraded from version 0.38 to 0.42.

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; and a modification for the lzma logic to favour IO::Uncompress::Unlzma (d7f8799)

Archive::Tar

Upgraded from version 1.54 to 1.64.

Important changes since 1.54 include: compatibility with busybox implementations of tar; a fix so that write() and create_archive() close only handles they opened; and a bug was fixed regarding the exit code of extract_archive. (afabe0e)

Attribute::Handlers

Upgraded from version 0.87 to 0.88.

Compress::Raw::Bzip2

Upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.027.

Compress::Raw::Zlib

Upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.027_01.

Compress::Zlib

Upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.027.

CPANPLUS

Upgraded from version 0.90 to 0.9007.

Fixed the shell test to skip if test is not being run under a terminal; resolved the issue where a prereq on Config would not be recognised as a core module. (d4e225a)

Digest::MD5

Upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.40.

Digest::SHA

Upgraded from version 5.47 to 5.48.

Exporter

Upgraded from version 5.64_02 to 5.64_03.

Exporter no longer overrides $SIG{__WARN__} (RT #74472) (9b86bb5)

ExtUtils::CBuilder

Upgraded from version 0.27 to 0.2703.

ExtUtils::Manifest

Upgraded from version 1.57 to 1.58.

ExtUtils::ParseXS

Upgraded from version 2.2205 to 2.2206.

File::Copy

Upgraded from version 2.19 to 2.20.

Skips suid tests on a nosuid partition. These tests were being skipped on OpenBSD, but nosuid partitions can exist on other systems too. Now it just checks if it can create a suid directory, if not the tests are skipped. Perl builds without errors in a nosuid /tmp with this patch. (cae9400)

I18N::LangTags

Upgraded from version 0.35 to 0.35_01.

IPC::Cmd

Upgraded from version 0.58 to 0.60.

IPC::SysV

Upgraded from version 2.01 to 2.03.

Locale::Maketext

Upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.15.

Locale::Maketext guts have been merged back into the main module (87d86da) and adds external cache support (ace47d6)

Module::Build

Upgraded from version 0.3603 to 0.3607.

Module::CoreList

Upgraded from version 2.34 to 2.36.

Module::Load

Upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.18.

Term::ANSIColor

Upgraded from version 2.02 to 3.00.

Test::Harness

Upgraded from version 3.17 to 3.21.

The core update from Test-Harness 3.17 to 3.21 fixed some things, but also introduced a known problem with argument passing to non-Perl tests.

Time::HiRes

Upgraded from version 1.9719 to 1.9721.

Time::Piece

Upgraded from version 1.15_01 to 1.20_01.

Unicode::Collate

Upgraded from version 0.52_01 to 0.53.

Includes Unicode Collation Algorithm 18 (74b94a7)

Unicode::Normalize

Upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.06.

Documentation

New Documentation

perl5121delta

The Perl 5.12.1 perldelta file was added from the Perl maintenance branch

Changes to Existing Documentation

General changes

perlfunc

perlop

perlrun

perlpolicy

perlre

perltie

Utility Changes

perldb

Configuration and Compilation

Testing

Platform Support

Discontinued Platforms

MacOS Classic

Support for MacOS Classic within ExtUtils::MakeMaker was removed from Perl in December 2004. Vestigial MacOS Classic specific code has now been removed from other core modules as well (8f8c2a4..c457df0)

Platform-Specific Notes

Win32

t/io/openpid.t now uses the alarm() watchdog strategy for more robustness (5732108)

Internal Changes

Selected Bug Fixes

Known Problems

Errata

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.13.3 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.13.2, and contains 12,184 lines of changes across 575 files from 104 authors and committers.

Thank you to the following for contributing to this release:

Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Alexandr Ciornii, Andreas J. Koenig, Andrew Rodland, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Arkturuz, Ben Morrow, Bo Borgerson, Bo Lindbergh, Brad Gilbert, Bram, Brian Phillips, Chas. Owens, Chip Salzenberg, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dan Dascalescu, Daniel Frederick Crisman, Dave Rolsky, David Caldwell, David E. Wheeler, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene Sullivan, George Greer, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Goro Fuji, Graham Barr, H.Merijn Brand, Harmen, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, James Mastros, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, John Peacock, Jos Boumans, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, Leon Brocard, Lubomir Rintel, Maik Hentsche, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Matt Johnson, Matt S Trout, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael G Schwern, Moritz Lenz, Nga Tang Chan, Nicholas Clark, Nick Cleaton, Nick Johnston, Niko Tyni, Offer Kaye, Paul Marquess, Philip Hazel, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Richard Soderberg, Robin Barker, Ruslan Zakirov, Salvador Fandino, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Shlomi Fish, Sinan Unur, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Mueller, Stepan Kasal, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Sullivan Beck, Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit, Yuval Kogman, Yves Orton, Zefram, brian d foy, chromatic, kmx, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

Reporting Bugs

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

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

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

SEE ALSO

The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.

The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

The README file for general stuff.

The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.