Provided by: perl-doc_5.18.2-2ubuntu1.7_all 
NAME
perl5140delta - what is new for perl v5.14.0
DESCRIPTION
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.
Notice
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.
Core Enhancements
Unicode
Unicode Version 6.0 is now supported (mostly)
Perl comes with the Unicode 6.0 data base updated with Corrigendum #8
<http://www.unicode.org/versions/corrigendum8.html>, 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.
Full functionality for "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.
New warnings categories for problematic (non-)Unicode code points.
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.
Any unsigned value can be encoded as a character
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".
Unicode database files not installed
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/>.
Regular Expressions
"(?^...)" construct signifies default modifiers
An 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" modifiers
Four 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.
Non-destructive substitution
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.
my $old = "cat";
my $new = $old =~ s/cat/dog/r;
# $old is "cat" and $new is "dog"
This is particularly useful with "map". See perlop for more examples.
Re-entrant regular expression engine
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.
\o{...} for octals
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.
Add "\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 improvement
Regular expression debugging output (turned on by "use re 'debug'") now uses hexadecimal
when escaping non-ASCII characters, instead of octal.
Return value of "delete $+{...}"
Custom regular expression engines can now determine the return value of "delete" on an
entry of "%+" or "%-".
Syntactical Enhancements
Array and hash container functions accept references
Warning: This feature is considered experimental, as the exact behaviour may change in a
future version of Perl.
All builtin functions that operate directly on array or hash containers now also accept
unblessed hard references to arrays or hashes:
|----------------------------+---------------------------|
| Traditional syntax | Terse syntax |
|----------------------------+---------------------------|
| push @$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 $arrayref |
|----------------------------+---------------------------|
This allows these builtin functions to act on long dereferencing chains or on the return
value of subroutines without needing to wrap them in "@{}" or "%{}":
push @{$obj->tags}, $new_tag; # old way
push $obj->tags, $new_tag; # new way
for ( keys %{$hoh->{genres}{artists}} ) {...} # old way
for ( keys $hoh->{genres}{artists} ) {...} # new way
Single term prototype
The "+" prototype is a special alternative to "$" 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 syntax
A 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 appear in more places
Statement labels can now occur before any type of statement or declaration, such as
"package".
Stacked labels
Multiple statement labels can now appear before a single statement.
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 [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".
Overridable tie functions
"tie", "tied" and "untie" can now be overridden [perl #75902].
Exception Handling
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.
Other Enhancements
Assignment to $0 sets the legacy process name with prctl() on Linux
On 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 $0. The string you supply is truncated at 16 bytes; this limitation is
imposed by Linux.
srand() now returns the seed
This allows programs that need to have repeatable results not to have to come up with
their own seed-generating mechanism. Instead, they can use srand() and stash the return
value for future use. One example is a test program with too many combinations to test
comprehensively in the time available for each run. It can test a random subset each time
and, should there be a failure, log the seed used for that run so this can later be used
to produce the same results.
printf-like functions understand post-1980 size modifiers
Perl's printf and sprintf operators, and Perl's internal printf replacement function, now
understand the C90 size modifiers "hh" ("char"), "z" ("size_t"), and "t" ("ptrdiff_t").
Also, when compiled with a C99 compiler, Perl now understands the size modifier "j"
("intmax_t") (but this is not portable).
So, for example, on any modern machine, "sprintf("%hhd", 257)" returns "1".
New global variable "${^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.
Filehandle method calls load IO::File on demand
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:
open my $fh, ">", $file;
$fh->binmode(":raw"); # loads IO::File and succeeds
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:
use IO::Handle;
open my $fh, ">", $file;
$fh->autoflush(1); # IO::File not loaded
Improved IPv6 support
The "Socket" module provides new affordances for IPv6, including implementations of the
"Socket::getaddrinfo()" and "Socket::getnameinfo()" functions, along with related
constants and a handful of new functions. See Socket.
DTrace probes now include package name
The "DTrace" probes now include an additional argument, "arg3", which contains the package
the subroutine being entered or left was compiled in.
For example, using the following DTrace script:
perl$target:::sub-entry
{
printf("%s::%s\n", copyinstr(arg0), copyinstr(arg3));
}
and then running:
$ perl -e 'sub test { }; test'
"DTrace" will print:
main::test
New C APIs
See "Internal Changes".
Security
User-defined regular expression properties
"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].
Incompatible Changes
Perl 5.14.0 is not binary-compatible with any previous stable release.
In addition to the sections that follow, see "C API Changes".
Regular Expressions and String Escapes
Inverted bracketed character classes and multi-character folds
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.
\400-\777
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.
Most "\p{}" properties are now immune to case-insensitive matching
For 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.
\p{} implies Unicode semantics
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 retain their localeness when interpolated
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.
Stringification of regexes has changed
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):
use re qw(regexp_pattern);
my ($pat, $mods) = regexp_pattern($re_ref);
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".
Run-time code blocks in regular expressions inherit pragmata
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.
Stashes and Package Variables
Localised tied hashes and arrays are no longed tied
In the following:
tie @a, ...;
{
local @a;
# here, @a is a now a new, untied array
}
# here, @a refers again to the old, tied array
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.
Stashes are now always defined
"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.
Clearing stashes
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].
Dereferencing typeglobs
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.
Magic variables outside the main package
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($_) strips all magic from $_
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 of package and variable names
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.
Changes to Syntax or to Perl Operators
"given" return values
"given" blocks now return the last evaluated expression, or an empty list if the block was
exited by "break". Thus you can now write:
my $type = do {
given ($num) {
break when undef;
"integer" when /^[+-]?[0-9]+$/;
"float" when /^[+-]?[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?$/;
"unknown";
}
};
See "Return value" in perlsyn for details.
Change in parsing of certain prototypes
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.
, =>
Smart-matching against array slices
Previously, the following code resulted in a successful match:
my @a = qw(a y0 z);
my @b = qw(a x0 z);
@a[0 .. $#b] ~~ @b;
This odd behaviour has now been fixed [perl #77468].
Negation treats strings differently from before
The unary negation operator, "-", now treats strings that look like numbers as numbers
[perl #57706].
Negative zero
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 error
Previously "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 "=".
Change in the parsing of identifiers
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.
Threads and Processes
Directory handles not copied to threads
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 pipes
To 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.
fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children
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.
Configuration
Naming fixes in Policy_sh.SH may invalidate Policy.sh
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 source code is read in text mode on Windows
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].
Deprecations
See also "Deprecated C APIs".
Omitting a space between a regular expression and subsequent word
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.
"\cX"
The 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 4-era .pl libraries
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.
List assignment to $[
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.
Use of qw(...) as parentheses
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:
use POSIX qw(setlocale localeconv);
our @EXPORT = qw(foo bar baz);
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?".
Tie functions on scalars holding typeglobs
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 "*".
User-defined case-mapping
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.
Deprecated modules
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".
Devel::DProf
We strongly recommend that you install and use Devel::NYTProf instead of Devel::DProf,
as Devel::NYTProf offers significantly improved profiling and reporting.
Performance Enhancements
"Safe signals" optimisation
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.
Optimisation of shift() and pop() calls without arguments
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.
Optimisation of regexp engine string comparison work
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.
Regular expression compilation speed-up
Compiling regular expressions has been made faster when upgrading the regex to utf8 is
necessary but this isn't known when the compilation begins.
String appending is 100 times faster
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.
Eliminate "PL_*" accessor functions under ithreads
When "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.
Freeing weak references
When there are many weak references to an object, freeing that object can under some
circumstances take O(N*N) time to free, where N is the number of references. The
circumstances in which this can happen have been reduced [perl #75254]
Lexical array and hash assignments
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 memory
Previously, @_ 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].
Size optimisations to SV and HV structures
"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.
Memory consumption improvements to Exporter
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.
Memory savings for weak references
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 memory
The 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 "%-".
Multiple small improvements to threads
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).
Adjacent pairs of nextstate opcodes are now optimized away
Previously, in code such as
use constant DEBUG => 0;
sub GAK {
warn if DEBUG;
print "stuff\n";
}
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.
Modules and Pragmata
New Modules and Pragmata
• 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.
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Big5
Unicode::Collate::CJK::GB2312
Unicode::Collate::CJK::JISX0208
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Korean
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Pinyin
Unicode::Collate::CJK::Stroke
• 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.
Updated Modules and Pragma
• 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() 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:
• much less configuration dialog hassle
• support for META/MYMETA.json
• support for local::lib
• support for HTTP::Tiny to reduce the dependency on FTP sites
• automatic mirror selection
• iron out all known bugs in configure_requires
• support for distributions compressed with bzip2(1)
• allow Foo/Bar.pm on the command line to mean "Foo::Bar"
• CPANPLUS has been upgraded from version 0.90 to 0.9103.
A change to cpanp-run-perl resolves RT #55964
<http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55964> and RT #57106
<http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=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:
charinfo()
• 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.
charscript()
This now correctly returns "Unknown" instead of "undef" for the script of a code
point that hasn't been assigned another one.
charblock()
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.
Removed Modules and Pragmata
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.
Documentation
New Documentation
perlgpl
perlgpl has been updated to contain GPL version 1, as is included in the README
distributed with Perl (5.12.1).
Perl 5.12.x delta files
The perldelta files for Perl 5.12.1 to 5.12.3 have been added from the maintenance branch:
perl5121delta, perl5122delta, perl5123delta.
perlpodstyle
New style guide for POD documentation, split mostly from the NOTES section of the
pod2man(1) manpage.
perlsource, perlinterp, perlhacktut, and perlhacktips
See "perlhack and perlrepository revamp", below.
Changes to Existing Documentation
perlmodlib is now complete
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).
Replace incorrect tr/// table in perlebcdic
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.
Tricks for user-defined casing
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.
INSTALL explicitly states that Perl requires a C89 compiler
This was already true, but it's now Officially Stated For The Record (5.12.2).
Explanation of "\xHH" and "\oOOO" escapes
perlop has been updated with more detailed explanation of these two character escapes.
-0NNN switch
In perlrun, the behaviour of the -0NNN switch for -0400 or higher has been clarified
(5.12.2).
Maintenance policy
perlpolicy now contains the policy on what patches are acceptable for maintenance branches
(5.12.1).
Deprecation policy
perlpolicy now contains the policy on compatibility and deprecation along with definitions
of terms like "deprecation" (5.12.2).
New descriptions in perldiag
The following existing diagnostics are now documented:
• Ambiguous use of %c resolved as operator %c
• Ambiguous use of %c{%s} resolved to %c%s
• Ambiguous use of %c{%s[...]} resolved to %c%s[...]
• Ambiguous use of %c{%s{...}} resolved to %c%s{...}
• Ambiguous use of -%s resolved as -&%s()
• Invalid strict version format (%s)
• Invalid version format (%s)
• Invalid version object
perlbook
perlbook has been expanded to cover many more popular books.
"SvTRUE" macro
The documentation for the "SvTRUE" macro in perlapi was simply wrong in stating that get-
magic is not processed. It has been corrected.
op manipulation functions
Several API functions that process optrees have been newly documented.
perlvar revamp
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.
Array and hash slices in scalar context
These are now documented in perldata.
"use locale" and formats
perlform and perllocale have been corrected to state that "use locale" affects formats.
overload
overload's documentation has practically undergone a rewrite. It is now much more
straightforward and clear.
perlhack and perlrepository revamp
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.
Time::Piece examples
Examples in perlfaq4 have been updated to show the use of Time::Piece.
Diagnostics
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.
New Diagnostics
New Errors
Closure prototype called
This error occurs when a subroutine reference passed to an attribute handler is
called, if the subroutine is a closure [perl #68560].
Insecure user-defined property %s
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.
panic: gp_free failed to free glob pointer - something is repeatedly re-creating entries
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.
Parsing code internal error (%s)
This new fatal error is produced when parsing code supplied by an extension violates
the parser's API in a detectable way.
refcnt: fd %d%s
This new error only occurs if a internal consistency check fails when a pipe is about
to be closed.
Regexp modifier "/%c" may not appear twice
The regular expression pattern has one of the mutually exclusive modifiers repeated.
Regexp modifiers "/%c" and "/%c" are mutually exclusive
The regular expression pattern has more than one of the mutually exclusive modifiers.
Using !~ with %s doesn't make sense
This error occurs when "!~" is used with "s///r" or "y///r".
New Warnings
"\b{" is deprecated; use "\b\{" instead
"\B{" is deprecated; use "\B\{" instead
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.
Operation "%s" returns its argument for ...
Performing an operation requiring Unicode semantics (such as case-folding) on a
Unicode surrogate or a non-Unicode character now triggers this warning.
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated
See "Use of qw(...) as parentheses", above, for details.
Changes to Existing Diagnostics
• 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".
Utility Changes
perlbug(1)
• 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).
perl5db.pl
• The remote terminal works after forking and spawns new sessions, one per forked
process.
ptargrep
• ptargrep is a new utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of files in a tar
archive. It comes with "Archive::Tar".
Configuration and Compilation
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).
Platform Support
New Platforms
AIX Perl now builds on AIX 4.2 (5.12.1).
Discontinued Platforms
Apollo DomainOS
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.
MacOS Classic
The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised from the Perl
distribution. It was officially discontinued in an earlier version.
Platform-Specific Notes
AIX
• README.aix has been updated with information about the XL C/C++ V11 compiler suite
(5.12.2).
ARM
• The "d_u32align" configuration probe on ARM has been fixed (5.12.2).
Cygwin
• 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
• 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).
HP-UX
• Perl now allows -Duse64bitint without promoting to "use64bitall" on HP-UX (5.12.1).
IRIX
• Conversion of strings to floating-point numbers is now more accurate on IRIX systems
[perl #32380].
Mac OS X
• 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].
MirBSD
• 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.
NetBSD
• The NetBSD hints file has been changed to make the system malloc the default.
OpenBSD
• 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].
OpenVOS
• Perl now builds again with OpenVOS (formerly known as Stratus VOS) [perl #78132]
(5.12.3).
Solaris
• DTrace is now supported on Solaris. There used to be build failures, but these have
been fixed [perl #73630] (5.12.3).
VMS
• 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
the VMS 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() 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).
Windows
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.
Internal Changes
New APIs
CLONE_PARAMS structure added to ease correct thread creation
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.
New parsing functions
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.
Hints hash API
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.
C interface to caller()
The "caller_cx" function has been added as an XSUB-writer's equivalent of caller(). See
perlapi for details.
Custom per-subroutine check hooks
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.
Improved support for custom OPs
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.
Scope hooks
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.
The recursive part of the peephole optimizer is now hookable
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.
New non-magical variants of existing functions
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.
pv/pvs/sv versions of existing functions
Many functions ending with pvn now have equivalent "pv/pvs/sv" versions.
List op-building functions
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.
Localisation functions
The "save_freeop", "save_op", "save_pushi32ptr" and "save_pushptrptr" functions have been
added to the API.
Stash names
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.
New functions for finding and removing magic
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" define
The "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.
New "pv_escape" option for hexadecimal escapes
A 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.
op_scope() and op_lvalue()
The op_scope() and op_lvalue() functions have been added to the API, but are considered
experimental.
C API Changes
"PERL_POLLUTE" has been removed
The 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).
Check API compatibility when loading XS modules
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.
Perl_fetch_cop_label
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.)
GvCV() and GvGP() are no longer lvalues
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.
CvGV() is no longer an lvalue
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).
CvSTASH() is no longer an lvalue
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.
Calling conventions for "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.
Flags passed to "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".
Deprecated C APIs
"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.
Other Internal Changes
Stack unwinding
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.
Scope stack entries
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
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.
String comparison routines renamed
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 merged
The 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).
Selected Bug Fixes
I/O
• 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:
open(FH, ">:pop:perlio", "some.file") or die $!;
would throw an "Invalid argument" error. This has been fixed in this release [perl
#82484].
Regular Expression Bug Fixes
• 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].
Syntax/Parsing Bugs
• "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 $_ [perl #20444].
• Parsing Perl code (either with string "eval" or by loading modules) from within a
"UNITCHECK" block no longer causes the interpreter to crash [perl #70614].
• String "eval"s no longer fail after 2 billion scopes have been compiled [perl #83364].
• The parser no longer hangs when encountering certain Unicode characters, such as U+387
[perl #74022].
• Defining a constant with the same name as one of Perl's special blocks (like "INIT")
stopped working in 5.12.0, but has now been fixed [perl #78634].
• A reference to a literal value used as a hash key ($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:
*d = *a; print $d[0];
undef *d; print $d[0];
• 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.
Stashes, Globs and Method Lookup
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.
Aliasing packages by assigning to globs [perl #77358]
Deleting packages by deleting their containing stash elements
Undefining the glob containing a package ("undef *Foo::")
Undefining an ISA glob ("undef *Foo::ISA")
Deleting an ISA stash element ("delete $Foo::{ISA}")
Sharing @ISA arrays between classes (via "*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:
local *@;
eval { die bless [] }; # puts an object in $@
sub DESTROY {
local $@; # boom
}
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.
Unicode
• 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:
1. 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.
2. 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
"${^UTF8CACHE}" set to -1, it would also produce a "panic" error message [perl
#77692].
Ties, Overloading and Other Magic
• Overloading now works properly in conjunction with tied variables. What formerly
happened was that most ops checked their arguments for overloading before checking for
magic, so for example an overloaded object returned by a tied array access would
usually be treated as not overloaded [RT #57012].
• Various instances of magic (like tie methods) being called on tied variables too many
or too few times have been fixed:
• "$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/$t" would
evaluate to 1.5. This has been fixed [perl #87708].
• String "eval" now detects taintedness of overloaded or tied arguments [perl #75716].
• String "eval" and regular expression matches against objects with string overloading
no longer cause memory corruption or crashes [perl #77084].
• readline now honors "<>" overloading on tied arguments.
• "<expr>" always respects overloading now if the expression is overloaded.
Because "<> as glob" was parsed differently from "<> as filehandle" from 5.6 onwards,
something like "<$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 Debugger
• 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() 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].
Threads
• 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.
Scoping and Subroutines
• 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].
Signals
• 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].
Miscellaneous Memory Leaks
• Several memory leaks when loading XS modules were fixed (5.12.2).
• substr(), pos(), keys(), and vec() 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.
Memory Corruption and Crashes
• 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
"stat"ing 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).
Fixes to Various Perl Operators
• 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].
Bugs Relating to the C API
• 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).
Known Problems
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 a cached previous value 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.
Errata
keys(), values(), and each() work on arrays
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() and @_
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.
Obituary
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.
Acknowledgements
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, AEvar Arnfjoer` Bjarmason, Alastair Douglas,
Alexander Alekseev, Alexander Hartmaier, Alexandr Ciornii, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Ali
Polatel, Allen Smith, Andreas Koenig, 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 Mannsaaker, 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 HruXka,
John Peacock, Joshua ben Jore, Joshua Pritikin, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, kmx, Lars
DXXXXXX XXX, 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 Moehn, Richard Soderberg, Rob Hoelz, Robin Barker, Ruslan Zakirov,
Salvador Fandin~o, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Shlomi Fish, Sinan Unur, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic,
Steffen Mueller, 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 Zsban 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.
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 are 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.
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.