You are viewing the version of this documentation from Perl 5.35.8. This is a development version of Perl.

CONTENTS

NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.35.8

DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.35.7 release and the 5.35.8 release.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.35.6, first read perl5357delta, which describes differences between 5.35.6 and 5.35.7.

Core Enhancements

Try/Catch Syntax Now Recognises finally Blocks

The experimental try/catch syntax has been extended to support an optional third block introduced by the finally keyword.

try {
    attempt();
    print "Success\n";
}
catch ($e) {
    print "Failure\n";
}
finally {
    print "This happens regardless\n";
}

This provides code which runs at the end of the try/catch construct, even if aborted by an exception or control-flow keyword. They are similar to defer blocks.

For more information, see "Try Catch Exception Handling" in perlsyn.

Incompatible Changes

A physically empty sort is now a compile-time error

@a = sort @empty; # unaffected
@a = sort;        # now a compile-time error

A bare sort used to be a weird way to create an empty list; now it croaks at compile time. This is change is intended to free up some of the syntax space for possible future enhancements to sort.

Performance Enhancements

Modules and Pragmata

Updated Modules and Pragmata

Documentation

Changes to Existing Documentation

We have attempted to update the documentation to reflect the changes listed in this document. If you find any we have missed, open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues.

Additionally, the following selected changes have been made:

perlrun

Testing

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release.

Tests were added and changed to reflect the other additions and changes in this release. Furthermore, these significant changes were made:

Platform Support

Platform-Specific Notes

z/OS
  • Update z/OS (previously called OS/390) README to describe ASCII and EBCDIC builds z/OS ASCII Enablement: Manage untagged header errno.h by copy & tag

Windows
  • Support for compiling perl on Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 (containing Visual C++ 14.3) has been added.

Internal Changes

Acknowledgements

Perl 5.35.8 represents approximately 4 weeks of development since Perl 5.35.7 and contains approximately 29,000 lines of changes across 190 files from 19 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there were approximately 23,000 lines of changes to 120 .pm, .t, .c and .h files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.35.8:

Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, David Mitchell, E. Choroba, François Perrad, Graham Knop, Ivan Panchenko, James E Keenan, Karl Williamson, Michiel Beijen, Mike Fulton, Neil Bowers, Nicholas Clark, Nicolas R., Paul Evans, Richard Leach, Sawyer X, TAKAI Kousuke, Tomasz Konojacki.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

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.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the perl bug database at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. There may also be information at http://www.perl.org/, the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please open an issue at https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case.

If the bug you are reporting has security implications which make it inappropriate to send to a public issue tracker, then see "SECURITY VULNERABILITY CONTACT INFORMATION" in perlsec for details of how to report the issue.

Give Thanks

If you wish to thank the Perl 5 Porters for the work we had done in Perl 5, you can do so by running the perlthanks program:

perlthanks

This will send an email to the Perl 5 Porters list with your show of thanks.

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.