perl581delta(1)


NAME

   perl581delta - what is new for perl v5.8.1

DESCRIPTION

   This document describes differences between the 5.8.0 release and the
   5.8.1 release.

   If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.6.1, first read
   the perl58delta, which describes differences between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0.

   In case you are wondering about 5.6.1, it was bug-fix-wise rather
   identical to the development release 5.7.1.  Confused?  This timeline
   hopefully helps a bit: it lists the new major releases, their
   maintenance releases, and the development releases.

             New     Maintenance  Development

             5.6.0                             2000-Mar-22
                                  5.7.0        2000-Sep-02
                     5.6.1                     2001-Apr-08
                                  5.7.1        2001-Apr-09
                                  5.7.2        2001-Jul-13
                                  5.7.3        2002-Mar-05
             5.8.0                             2002-Jul-18
                     5.8.1                     2003-Sep-25

Incompatible Changes

   Hash Randomisation
   Mainly due to security reasons, the "random ordering" of hashes has
   been made even more random.  Previously while the order of hash
   elements from keys(), values(), and each() was essentially random, it
   was still repeatable.  Now, however, the order varies between different
   runs of Perl.

   Perl has never guaranteed any ordering of the hash keys, and the
   ordering has already changed several times during the lifetime of Perl
   5.  Also, the ordering of hash keys has always been, and continues to
   be, affected by the insertion order.

   The added randomness may affect applications.

   One possible scenario is when output of an application has included
   hash data.  For example, if you have used the Data::Dumper module to
   dump data into different files, and then compared the files to see
   whether the data has changed, now you will have false positives since
   the order in which hashes are dumped will vary.  In general the cure is
   to sort the keys (or the values); in particular for Data::Dumper to use
   the "Sortkeys" option.  If some particular order is really important,
   use tied hashes: for example the Tie::IxHash module which by default
   preserves the order in which the hash elements were added.

   More subtle problem is reliance on the order of "global destruction".
   That is what happens at the end of execution: Perl destroys all data
   structures, including user data.  If your destructors (the DESTROY
   subroutines) have assumed any particular ordering to the global
   destruction, there might be problems ahead.  For example, in a
   destructor of one object you cannot assume that objects of any other
   class are still available, unless you hold a reference to them.  If the
   environment variable PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL is set to a non-zero value, or
   if Perl is exiting a spawned thread, it will also destruct the ordinary
   references and the symbol tables that are no longer in use.  You can't
   call a class method or an ordinary function on a class that has been
   collected that way.

   The hash randomisation is certain to reveal hidden assumptions about
   some particular ordering of hash elements, and outright bugs: it
   revealed a few bugs in the Perl core and core modules.

   To disable the hash randomisation in runtime, set the environment
   variable PERL_HASH_SEED to 0 (zero) before running Perl (for more
   information see "PERL_HASH_SEED" in perlrun), or to disable the feature
   completely in compile time, compile with "-DNO_HASH_SEED" (see
   INSTALL).

   See "Algorithmic Complexity Attacks" in perlsec for the original
   rationale behind this change.

   UTF-8 On Filehandles No Longer Activated By Locale
   In Perl 5.8.0 all filehandles, including the standard filehandles, were
   implicitly set to be in Unicode UTF-8 if the locale settings indicated
   the use of UTF-8.  This feature caused too many problems, so the
   feature was turned off and redesigned: see "Core Enhancements".

   Single-number v-strings are no longer v-strings before "=>"
   The version strings or v-strings (see "Version Strings" in perldata)
   feature introduced in Perl 5.6.0 has been a source of some confusion--
   especially when the user did not want to use it, but Perl thought it
   knew better.  Especially troublesome has been the feature that before a
   "=>" a version string (a "v" followed by digits) has been interpreted
   as a v-string instead of a string literal.  In other words:

           %h = ( v65 => 42 );

   has meant since Perl 5.6.0

           %h = ( 'A' => 42 );

   (at least in platforms of ASCII progeny)  Perl 5.8.1 restores the more
   natural interpretation

           %h = ( 'v65' => 42 );

   The multi-number v-strings like v65.66 and 65.66.67 still continue to
   be v-strings in Perl 5.8.

   (Win32) The -C Switch Has Been Repurposed
   The -C switch has changed in an incompatible way.  The old semantics of
   this switch only made sense in Win32 and only in the "use utf8"
   universe in 5.6.x releases, and do not make sense for the Unicode
   implementation in 5.8.0.  Since this switch could not have been used by
   anyone, it has been repurposed.  The behavior that this switch enabled
   in 5.6.x releases may be supported in a transparent, data-dependent
   fashion in a future release.

   For the new life of this switch, see "UTF-8 no longer default under
   UTF-8 locales", and "-C" in perlrun.

   (Win32) The /d Switch Of cmd.exe
   Perl 5.8.1 uses the /d switch when running the cmd.exe shell internally
   for system(), backticks, and when opening pipes to external programs.
   The extra switch disables the execution of AutoRun commands from the
   registry, which is generally considered undesirable when running
   external programs.  If you wish to retain compatibility with the older
   behavior, set PERL5SHELL in your environment to "cmd /x/c".

Core Enhancements

   UTF-8 no longer default under UTF-8 locales
   In Perl 5.8.0 many Unicode features were introduced.   One of them was
   found to be of more nuisance than benefit: the automagic (and silent)
   "UTF-8-ification" of filehandles, including the standard filehandles,
   if the user's locale settings indicated use of UTF-8.

   For example, if you had "en_US.UTF-8" as your locale, your STDIN and
   STDOUT were automatically "UTF-8", in other words an implicit
   binmode(..., ":utf8") was made.  This meant that trying to print, say,
   chr(0xff), ended up printing the bytes 0xc3 0xbf.  Hardly what you had
   in mind unless you were aware of this feature of Perl 5.8.0.  The
   problem is that the vast majority of people weren't: for example in
   RedHat releases 8 and 9 the default locale setting is UTF-8, so all
   RedHat users got UTF-8 filehandles, whether they wanted it or not.  The
   pain was intensified by the Unicode implementation of Perl 5.8.0
   (still) having nasty bugs, especially related to the use of s/// and
   tr///.  (Bugs that have been fixed in 5.8.1)

   Therefore a decision was made to backtrack the feature and change it
   from implicit silent default to explicit conscious option.  The new
   Perl command line option "-C" and its counterpart environment variable
   PERL_UNICODE can now be used to control how Perl and Unicode interact
   at interfaces like I/O and for example the command line arguments.  See
   "-C" in perlrun and "PERL_UNICODE" in perlrun for more information.

   Unsafe signals again available
   In Perl 5.8.0 the so-called "safe signals" were introduced.  This means
   that Perl no longer handles signals immediately but instead "between
   opcodes", when it is safe to do so.  The earlier immediate handling
   easily could corrupt the internal state of Perl, resulting in
   mysterious crashes.

   However, the new safer model has its problems too.  Because now an
   opcode, a basic unit of Perl execution, is never interrupted but
   instead let to run to completion, certain operations that can take a
   long time now really do take a long time.  For example, certain network
   operations have their own blocking and timeout mechanisms, and being
   able to interrupt them immediately would be nice.

   Therefore perl 5.8.1 introduces a "backdoor" to restore the pre-5.8.0
   (pre-5.7.3, really) signal behaviour.  Just set the environment
   variable PERL_SIGNALS to "unsafe", and the old immediate (and unsafe)
   signal handling behaviour returns.  See "PERL_SIGNALS" in perlrun and
   "Deferred Signals (Safe Signals)" in perlipc.

   In completely unrelated news, you can now use safe signals with
   POSIX::SigAction.  See "POSIX::SigAction" in POSIX.

   Tied Arrays with Negative Array Indices
   Formerly, the indices passed to "FETCH", "STORE", "EXISTS", and
   "DELETE" methods in tied array class were always non-negative.  If the
   actual argument was negative, Perl would call FETCHSIZE implicitly and
   add the result to the index before passing the result to the tied array
   method.  This behaviour is now optional.  If the tied array class
   contains a package variable named $NEGATIVE_INDICES which is set to a
   true value, negative values will be passed to "FETCH", "STORE",
   "EXISTS", and "DELETE" unchanged.

   local ${$x}
   The syntaxes

           local ${$x}
           local @{$x}
           local %{$x}

   now do localise variables, given that the $x is a valid variable name.

   Unicode Character Database 4.0.0
   The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.8 has
   been updated to 4.0.0 from 3.2.0.  This means for example that the
   Unicode character properties are as in Unicode 4.0.0.

   Deprecation Warnings
   There is one new feature deprecation.  Perl 5.8.0 forgot to add some
   deprecation warnings, these warnings have now been added.  Finally, a
   reminder of an impending feature removal.

   (Reminder) Pseudo-hashes are deprecated (really)

   Pseudo-hashes were deprecated in Perl 5.8.0 and will be removed in Perl
   5.10.0, see perl58delta for details.  Each attempt to access pseudo-
   hashes will trigger the warning "Pseudo-hashes are deprecated".  If you
   really want to continue using pseudo-hashes but not to see the
   deprecation warnings, use:

       no warnings 'deprecated';

   Or you can continue to use the fields pragma, but please don't expect
   the data structures to be pseudohashes any more.

   (Reminder) 5.005-style threads are deprecated (really)

   5.005-style threads (activated by "use Thread;") were deprecated in
   Perl 5.8.0 and will be removed after Perl 5.8, see perl58delta for
   details.  Each 5.005-style thread creation will trigger the warning
   "5.005 threads are deprecated".  If you really want to continue using
   the 5.005 threads but not to see the deprecation warnings, use:

       no warnings 'deprecated';

   (Reminder) The $* variable is deprecated (really)

   The $* variable controlling multi-line matching has been deprecated and
   will be removed after 5.8.  The variable has been deprecated for a long
   time, and a deprecation warning "Use of $* is deprecated" is given, now
   the variable will just finally be removed.  The functionality has been
   supplanted by the "/s" and "/m" modifiers on pattern matching.  If you
   really want to continue using the $*-variable but not to see the
   deprecation warnings, use:

       no warnings 'deprecated';

   Miscellaneous Enhancements
   "map" in void context is no longer expensive. "map" is now context
   aware, and will not construct a list if called in void context.

   If a socket gets closed by the server while printing to it, the client
   now gets a SIGPIPE.  While this new feature was not planned, it fell
   naturally out of PerlIO changes, and is to be considered an accidental
   feature.

   PerlIO::get_layers(FH) returns the names of the PerlIO layers active on
   a filehandle.

   PerlIO::via layers can now have an optional UTF8 method to indicate
   whether the layer wants to "auto-:utf8" the stream.

   utf8::is_utf8() has been added as a quick way to test whether a scalar
   is encoded internally in UTF-8 (Unicode).

Modules and Pragmata

   Updated Modules And Pragmata
   The following modules and pragmata have been updated since Perl 5.8.0:

   base
   B::Bytecode
       In much better shape than it used to be.  Still far from perfect,
       but maybe worth a try.

   B::Concise
   B::Deparse
   Benchmark
       An optional feature, ":hireswallclock", now allows for high
       resolution wall clock times (uses Time::HiRes).

   ByteLoader
       See B::Bytecode.

   bytes
       Now has bytes::substr.

   CGI
   charnames
       One can now have custom character name aliases.

   CPAN
       There is now a simple command line frontend to the CPAN.pm module
       called cpan.

   Data::Dumper
       A new option, Pair, allows choosing the separator between hash keys
       and values.

   DB_File
   Devel::PPPort
   Digest::MD5
   Encode
       Significant updates on the encoding pragma functionality (tr/// and
       the DATA filehandle, formats).

       If a filehandle has been marked as to have an encoding, unmappable
       characters are detected already during input, not later (when the
       corrupted data is being used).

       The ISO 8859-6 conversion table has been corrected (the 0x30..0x39
       erroneously mapped to U+0660..U+0669, instead of U+0030..U+0039).
       The GSM 03.38 conversion did not handle escape sequences correctly.
       The UTF-7 encoding has been added (making Encode feature-complete
       with Unicode::String).

   fields
   libnet
   Math::BigInt
       A lot of bugs have been fixed since v1.60, the version included in
       Perl v5.8.0. Especially noteworthy are the bug in Calc that caused
       div and mod to fail for some large values, and the fixes to the
       handling of bad inputs.

       Some new features were added, e.g. the broot() method, you can now
       pass parameters to config() to change some settings at runtime, and
       it is now possible to trap the creation of NaN and infinity.

       As usual, some optimizations took place and made the math overall a
       tad faster. In some cases, quite a lot faster, actually. Especially
       alternative libraries like Math::BigInt::GMP benefit from this. In
       addition, a lot of the quite clunky routines like fsqrt() and
       flog() are now much much faster.

   MIME::Base64
   NEXT
       Diamond inheritance now works.

   Net::Ping
   PerlIO::scalar
       Reading from non-string scalars (like the special variables, see
       perlvar) now works.

   podlators
   Pod::LaTeX
   PodParsers
   Pod::Perldoc
       Complete rewrite.  As a side-effect, no longer refuses to startup
       when run by root.

   Scalar::Util
       New utilities: refaddr, isvstring, looks_like_number,
       set_prototype.

   Storable
       Can now store code references (via B::Deparse, so not foolproof).

   strict
       Earlier versions of the strict pragma did not check the parameters
       implicitly passed to its "import" (use) and "unimport" (no)
       routine.  This caused the false idiom such as:

               use strict qw(@ISA);
               @ISA = qw(Foo);

       This however (probably) raised the false expectation that the
       strict refs, vars and subs were being enforced (and that @ISA was
       somehow "declared").  But the strict refs, vars, and subs are not
       enforced when using this false idiom.

       Starting from Perl 5.8.1, the above will cause an error to be
       raised.  This may cause programs which used to execute seemingly
       correctly without warnings and errors to fail when run under 5.8.1.
       This happens because

               use strict qw(@ISA);

       will now fail with the error:

               Unknown 'strict' tag(s) '@ISA'

       The remedy to this problem is to replace this code with the correct
       idiom:

               use strict;
               use vars qw(@ISA);
               @ISA = qw(Foo);

   Term::ANSIcolor
   Test::Harness
       Now much more picky about extra or missing output from test
       scripts.

   Test::More
   Test::Simple
   Text::Balanced
   Time::HiRes
       Use of nanosleep(), if available, allows mixing subsecond sleeps
       with alarms.

   threads
       Several fixes, for example for join() problems and memory leaks.
       In some platforms (like Linux) that use glibc the minimum memory
       footprint of one ithread has been reduced by several hundred
       kilobytes.

   threads::shared
       Many memory leaks have been fixed.

   Unicode::Collate
   Unicode::Normalize
   Win32::GetFolderPath
   Win32::GetOSVersion
       Now returns extra information.

Utility Changes

   The "h2xs" utility now produces a more modern layout:
   Foo-Bar/lib/Foo/Bar.pm instead of Foo/Bar/Bar.pm.  Also, the
   boilerplate test is now called t/Foo-Bar.t instead of t/1.t.

   The Perl debugger (lib/perl5db.pl) has now been extensively documented
   and bugs found while documenting have been fixed.

   "perldoc" has been rewritten from scratch to be more robust and feature
   rich.

   "perlcc -B" works now at least somewhat better, while "perlcc -c" is
   rather more broken.  (The Perl compiler suite as a whole continues to
   be experimental.)

New Documentation

   perl573delta has been added to list the differences between the (now
   quite obsolete) development releases 5.7.2 and 5.7.3.

   perl58delta has been added: it is the perldelta of 5.8.0, detailing the
   differences between 5.6.0 and 5.8.0.

   perlartistic has been added: it is the Artistic License in pod format,
   making it easier for modules to refer to it.

   perlcheat has been added: it is a Perl cheat sheet.

   perlgpl has been added: it is the GNU General Public License in pod
   format, making it easier for modules to refer to it.

   perlmacosx has been added to tell about the installation and use of
   Perl in Mac OS X.

   perlos400 has been added to tell about the installation and use of Perl
   in OS/400 PASE.

   perlreref has been added: it is a regular expressions quick reference.

Installation and Configuration Improvements

   The Unix standard Perl location, /usr/bin/perl, is no longer
   overwritten by default if it exists.  This change was very prudent
   because so many Unix vendors already provide a /usr/bin/perl, but
   simultaneously many system utilities may depend on that exact version
   of Perl, so better not to overwrite it.

   One can now specify installation directories for site and vendor man
   and HTML pages, and site and vendor scripts.  See INSTALL.

   One can now specify a destination directory for Perl installation by
   specifying the DESTDIR variable for "make install".  (This feature is
   slightly different from the previous "Configure -Dinstallprefix=...".)
   See INSTALL.

   gcc versions 3.x introduced a new warning that caused a lot of noise
   during Perl compilation: "gcc -Ialreadyknowndirectory (warning:
   changing search order)".  This warning has now been avoided by
   Configure weeding out such directories before the compilation.

   One can now build subsets of Perl core modules by using the Configure
   flags "-Dnoextensions=..." and "-Donlyextensions=...", see INSTALL.

   Platform-specific enhancements
   In Cygwin Perl can now be built with threads ("Configure
   -Duseithreads").  This works with both Cygwin 1.3.22 and Cygwin 1.5.3.

   In newer FreeBSD releases Perl 5.8.0 compilation failed because of
   trying to use malloc.h, which in FreeBSD is just a dummy file, and a
   fatal error to even try to use.  Now malloc.h is not used.

   Perl is now known to build also in Hitachi HI-UXMPP.

   Perl is now known to build again in LynxOS.

   Mac OS X now installs with Perl version number embedded in installation
   directory names for easier upgrading of user-compiled Perl, and the
   installation directories in general are more standard.  In other words,
   the default installation no longer breaks the Apple-provided Perl.  On
   the other hand, with "Configure -Dprefix=/usr" you can now really
   replace the Apple-supplied Perl (please be careful).

   Mac OS X now builds Perl statically by default.  This change was done
   mainly for faster startup times.  The Apple-provided Perl is still
   dynamically linked and shared, and you can enable the sharedness for
   your own Perl builds by "Configure -Duseshrplib".

   Perl has been ported to IBM's OS/400 PASE environment.  The best way to
   build a Perl for PASE is to use an AIX host as a cross-compilation
   environment.  See README.os400.

   Yet another cross-compilation option has been added: now Perl builds on
   OpenZaurus, an Linux distribution based on Mandrake + Embedix for the
   Sharp Zaurus PDA.  See the Cross/README file.

   Tru64 when using gcc 3 drops the optimisation for toke.c to "-O2"
   because of gigantic memory use with the default "-O3".

   Tru64 can now build Perl with the newer Berkeley DBs.

   Building Perl on WinCE has been much enhanced, see README.ce and
   README.perlce.

Selected Bug Fixes

   Closures, eval and lexicals
   There have been many fixes in the area of anonymous subs, lexicals and
   closures.  Although this means that Perl is now more "correct", it is
   possible that some existing code will break that happens to rely on the
   faulty behaviour.  In practice this is unlikely unless your code
   contains a very complex nesting of anonymous subs, evals and lexicals.

   Generic fixes
   If an input filehandle is marked ":utf8" and Perl sees illegal UTF-8
   coming in when doing "<FH>", if warnings are enabled a warning is
   immediately given - instead of being silent about it and Perl being
   unhappy about the broken data later.  (The ":encoding(utf8)" layer also
   works the same way.)

   binmode(SOCKET, ":utf8") only worked on the input side, not on the
   output side of the socket.  Now it works both ways.

   For threaded Perls certain system database functions like getpwent()
   and getgrent() now grow their result buffer dynamically, instead of
   failing.  This means that at sites with lots of users and groups the
   functions no longer fail by returning only partial results.

   Perl 5.8.0 had accidentally broken the capability for users to define
   their own uppercase<->lowercase Unicode mappings (as advertised by the
   Camel).  This feature has been fixed and is also documented better.

   In 5.8.0 this

           $some_unicode .= <FH>;

   didn't work correctly but instead corrupted the data.  This has now
   been fixed.

   Tied methods like FETCH etc. may now safely access tied values, i.e.
   resulting in a recursive call to FETCH etc.  Remember to break the
   recursion, though.

   At startup Perl blocks the SIGFPE signal away since there isn't much
   Perl can do about it.  Previously this blocking was in effect also for
   programs executed from within Perl.  Now Perl restores the original
   SIGFPE handling routine, whatever it was, before running external
   programs.

   Linenumbers in Perl scripts may now be greater than 65536, or 2**16.
   (Perl scripts have always been able to be larger than that, it's just
   that the linenumber for reported errors and warnings have "wrapped
   around".)  While scripts that large usually indicate a need to rethink
   your code a bit, such Perl scripts do exist, for example as results
   from generated code.  Now linenumbers can go all the way to 4294967296,
   or 2**32.

   Platform-specific fixes
   Linux

   *   Setting $0 works again (with certain limitations that Perl cannot
       do much about: see "$0" in perlvar)

   HP-UX

   *   Setting $0 now works.

   VMS

   *   Configuration now tests for the presence of "poll()", and IO::Poll
       now uses the vendor-supplied function if detected.

   *   A rare access violation at Perl start-up could occur if the Perl
       image was installed with privileges or if there was an identifier
       with the subsystem attribute set in the process's rightslist.
       Either of these circumstances triggered tainting code that
       contained a pointer bug.  The faulty pointer arithmetic has been
       fixed.

   *   The length limit on values (not keys) in the %ENV hash has been
       raised from 255 bytes to 32640 bytes (except when the
       PERL_ENV_TABLES setting overrides the default use of logical names
       for %ENV).  If it is necessary to access these long values from
       outside Perl, be aware that they are implemented using search list
       logical names that store the value in pieces, each 255-byte piece
       (up to 128 of them) being an element in the search list. When doing
       a lookup in %ENV from within Perl, the elements are combined into a
       single value.  The existing VMS-specific ability to access
       individual elements of a search list logical name via the
       $ENV{'foo;N'} syntax (where N is the search list index) is
       unimpaired.

   *   The piping implementation now uses local rather than global DCL
       symbols for inter-process communication.

   *   File::Find could become confused when navigating to a relative
       directory whose name collided with a logical name.  This problem
       has been corrected by adding directory syntax to relative path
       names, thus preventing logical name translation.

   Win32

   *   A memory leak in the fork() emulation has been fixed.

   *   The return value of the ioctl() built-in function was accidentally
       broken in 5.8.0.  This has been corrected.

   *   The internal message loop executed by perl during blocking
       operations sometimes interfered with messages that were external to
       Perl.  This often resulted in blocking operations terminating
       prematurely or returning incorrect results, when Perl was executing
       under environments that could generate Windows messages.  This has
       been corrected.

   *   Pipes and sockets are now automatically in binary mode.

   *   The four-argument form of select() did not preserve $! (errno)
       properly when there were errors in the underlying call.  This is
       now fixed.

   *   The "CR CR LF" problem of has been fixed, binmode(FH, ":crlf") is
       now effectively a no-op.

New or Changed Diagnostics

   All the warnings related to pack() and unpack() were made more
   informative and consistent.

   Changed "A thread exited while %d threads were running"
   The old version

       A thread exited while %d other threads were still running

   was misleading because the "other" included also the thread giving the
   warning.

   Removed "Attempt to clear a restricted hash"
   It is not illegal to clear a restricted hash, so the warning was
   removed.

   New "Illegal declaration of anonymous subroutine"
   You must specify the block of code for "sub".

   Changed "Invalid range "%s" in transliteration operator"
   The old version

       Invalid [] range "%s" in transliteration operator

   was simply wrong because there are no "[] ranges" in tr///.

   New "Missing control char name in \c"
   Self-explanatory.

   New "Newline in left-justified string for %s"
   The padding spaces would appear after the newline, which is probably
   not what you had in mind.

   New "Possible precedence problem on bitwise %c operator"
   If you think this

       $x & $y == 0

   tests whether the bitwise AND of $x and $y is zero, you will like this
   warning.

   New "Pseudo-hashes are deprecated"
   This warning should have been already in 5.8.0, since they are.

   New "read() on %s filehandle %s"
   You cannot read() (or sysread()) from a closed or unopened filehandle.

   New "5.005 threads are deprecated"
   This warning should have been already in 5.8.0, since they are.

   New "Tied variable freed while still in use"
   Something pulled the plug on a live tied variable, Perl plays safe by
   bailing out.

   New "To%s: illegal mapping '%s'"
   An illegal user-defined Unicode casemapping was specified.

   New "Use of freed value in iteration"
   Something modified the values being iterated over.  This is not good.

Changed Internals

   These news matter to you only if you either write XS code or like to
   know about or hack Perl internals (using Devel::Peek or any of the
   "B::" modules counts), or like to run Perl with the "-D" option.

   The embedding examples of perlembed have been reviewed to be up to date
   and consistent: for example, the correct use of PERL_SYS_INIT3() and
   PERL_SYS_TERM().

   Extensive reworking of the pad code (the code responsible for lexical
   variables) has been conducted by Dave Mitchell.

   Extensive work on the v-strings by John Peacock.

   UTF-8 length and position cache: to speed up the handling of Unicode
   (UTF-8) scalars, a cache was introduced.  Potential problems exist if
   an extension bypasses the official APIs and directly modifies the PV of
   an SV: the UTF-8 cache does not get cleared as it should.

   APIs obsoleted in Perl 5.8.0, like sv_2pv, sv_catpvn, sv_catsv,
   sv_setsv, are again available.

   Certain Perl core C APIs like cxinc and regatom are no longer available
   at all to code outside the Perl core of the Perl core extensions.  This
   is intentional.  They never should have been available with the shorter
   names, and if you application depends on them, you should (be ashamed
   and) contact perl5-porters to discuss what are the proper APIs.

   Certain Perl core C APIs like "Perl_list" are no longer available
   without their "Perl_" prefix.  If your XS module stops working because
   some functions cannot be found, in many cases a simple fix is to add
   the "Perl_" prefix to the function and the thread context "aTHX_" as
   the first argument of the function call.  This is also how it should
   always have been done: letting the Perl_-less forms to leak from the
   core was an accident.  For cleaner embedding you can also force this
   for all APIs by defining at compile time the cpp define
   PERL_NO_SHORT_NAMES.

   Perl_save_bool() has been added.

   Regexp objects (those created with "qr") now have S-magic rather than
   R-magic.  This fixed regexps of the form /...(??{...;$x})/ to no longer
   ignore changes made to $x.  The S-magic avoids dropping the caching
   optimization and making (??{...}) constructs obscenely slow (and
   consequently useless).  See also "Magic Variables" in perlguts.
   Regexp::Copy was affected by this change.

   The Perl internal debugging macros DEBUG() and DEB() have been renamed
   to PERL_DEBUG() and PERL_DEB() to avoid namespace conflicts.

   "-DL" removed (the leaktest had been broken and unsupported for years,
   use alternative debugging mallocs or tools like valgrind and Purify).

   Verbose modifier "v" added for "-DXv" and "-Dsv", see perlrun.

New Tests

   In Perl 5.8.0 there were about 69000 separate tests in about 700 test
   files, in Perl 5.8.1 there are about 77000 separate tests in about 780
   test files.  The exact numbers depend on the Perl configuration and on
   the operating system platform.

Known Problems

   The hash randomisation mentioned in "Incompatible Changes" is
   definitely problematic: it will wake dormant bugs and shake out bad
   assumptions.

   If you want to use mod_perl 2.x with Perl 5.8.1, you will need
   mod_perl-1.99_10 or higher.  Earlier versions of mod_perl 2.x do not
   work with the randomised hashes.  (mod_perl 1.x works fine.)  You will
   also need Apache::Test 1.04 or higher.

   Many of the rarer platforms that worked 100% or pretty close to it with
   perl 5.8.0 have been left a little bit untended since their maintainers
   have been otherwise busy lately, and therefore there will be more
   failures on those platforms.  Such platforms include Mac OS Classic,
   IBM z/OS (and other EBCDIC platforms), and NetWare.  The most common
   Perl platforms (Unix and Unix-like, Microsoft platforms, and VMS) have
   large enough testing and expert population that they are doing well.

   Tied hashes in scalar context
   Tied hashes do not currently return anything useful in scalar context,
   for example when used as boolean tests:

           if (%tied_hash) { ... }

   The current nonsensical behaviour is always to return false, regardless
   of whether the hash is empty or has elements.

   The root cause is that there is no interface for the implementors of
   tied hashes to implement the behaviour of a hash in scalar context.

   Net::Ping 450_service and 510_ping_udp failures
   The subtests 9 and 18 of lib/Net/Ping/t/450_service.t, and the subtest
   2 of lib/Net/Ping/t/510_ping_udp.t might fail if you have an unusual
   networking setup.  For example in the latter case the test is trying to
   send a UDP ping to the IP address 127.0.0.1.

   B::C
   The C-generating compiler backend B::C (the frontend being "perlcc -c")
   is even more broken than it used to be because of the extensive lexical
   variable changes.  (The good news is that B::Bytecode and ByteLoader
   are better than they used to be.)

Platform Specific Problems

   EBCDIC Platforms
   IBM z/OS and other EBCDIC platforms continue to be problematic
   regarding Unicode support.  Many Unicode tests are skipped when they
   really should be fixed.

   Cygwin 1.5 problems
   In Cygwin 1.5 the io/tell and op/sysio tests have failures for some yet
   unknown reason.  In 1.5.5 the threads tests stress_cv, stress_re, and
   stress_string are failing unless the environment variable PERLIO is set
   to "perlio" (which makes also the io/tell failure go away).

   Perl 5.8.1 does build and work well with Cygwin 1.3: with (uname -a)
   "CYGWIN_NT-5.0 ... 1.3.22(0.78/3/2) 2003-03-18 09:20 i686 ..."  a 100%
   "make test"  was achieved with "Configure -des -Duseithreads".

   HP-UX: HP cc warnings about sendfile and sendpath
   With certain HP C compiler releases (e.g. B.11.11.02) you will get many
   warnings like this (lines wrapped for easier reading):

     cc: "/usr/include/sys/socket.h", line 504: warning 562:
       Redeclaration of "sendfile" with a different storage class specifier:
         "sendfile" will have internal linkage.
     cc: "/usr/include/sys/socket.h", line 505: warning 562:
       Redeclaration of "sendpath" with a different storage class specifier:
         "sendpath" will have internal linkage.

   The warnings show up both during the build of Perl and during certain
   lib/ExtUtils tests that invoke the C compiler.  The warning, however,
   is not serious and can be ignored.

   IRIX: t/uni/tr_7jis.t falsely failing
   The test t/uni/tr_7jis.t is known to report failure under 'make test'
   or the test harness with certain releases of IRIX (at least IRIX 6.5
   and MIPSpro Compilers Version 7.3.1.1m), but if run manually the test
   fully passes.

   Mac OS X: no usemymalloc
   The Perl malloc ("-Dusemymalloc") does not work at all in Mac OS X.
   This is not that serious, though, since the native malloc works just
   fine.

   Tru64: No threaded builds with GNU cc (gcc)
   In the latest Tru64 releases (e.g. v5.1B or later) gcc cannot be used
   to compile a threaded Perl (-Duseithreads) because the system
   "<pthread.h>" file doesn't know about gcc.

   Win32: sysopen, sysread, syswrite
   As of the 5.8.0 release, sysopen()/sysread()/syswrite() do not behave
   like they used to in 5.6.1 and earlier with respect to "text" mode.
   These built-ins now always operate in "binary" mode (even if sysopen()
   was passed the O_TEXT flag, or if binmode() was used on the file
   handle).  Note that this issue should only make a difference for disk
   files, as sockets and pipes have always been in "binary" mode in the
   Windows port.  As this behavior is currently considered a bug,
   compatible behavior may be re-introduced in a future release.  Until
   then, the use of sysopen(), sysread() and syswrite() is not supported
   for "text" mode operations.

Future Directions

   The following things might happen in future.  The first publicly
   available releases having these characteristics will be the developer
   releases Perl 5.9.x, culminating in the Perl 5.10.0 release.  These are
   our best guesses at the moment: we reserve the right to rethink.

   *   PerlIO will become The Default.  Currently (in Perl 5.8.x) the
       stdio library is still used if Perl thinks it can use certain
       tricks to make stdio go really fast.  For future releases our goal
       is to make PerlIO go even faster.

   *   A new feature called assertions will be available.  This means that
       one can have code called assertions sprinkled in the code: usually
       they are optimised away, but they can be enabled with the "-A"
       option.

   *   A new operator "//" (defined-or) will be available.  This means
       that one will be able to say

           $a // $b

       instead of

          defined $a ? $a : $b

       and

          $c //= $d;

       instead of

          $c = $d unless defined $c;

       The operator will have the same precedence and associativity as
       "||".  A source code patch against the Perl 5.8.1 sources will be
       available in CPAN as authors/id/H/HM/HMBRAND/dor-5.8.1.diff.

   *   "unpack()" will default to unpacking the $_.

   *   Various Copy-On-Write techniques will be investigated in hopes of
       speeding up Perl.

   *   CPANPLUS, Inline, and Module::Build will become core modules.

   *   The ability to write true lexically scoped pragmas will be
       introduced.

   *   Work will continue on the bytecompiler and byteloader.

   *   v-strings as they currently exist are scheduled to be deprecated.
       The v-less form (1.2.3) will become a "version object" when used
       with "use", "require", and $VERSION.  $^V will also be a "version
       object" so the printf("%vd",...) construct will no longer be
       needed.  The v-ful version (v1.2.3) will become obsolete.  The
       equivalence of strings and v-strings (e.g.  that currently 5.8.0 is
       equal to "\5\8\0") will go away.  There may be no deprecation
       warning for v-strings, though: it is quite hard to detect when
       v-strings are being used safely, and when they are not.

   *   5.005 Threads Will Be Removed

   *   The $* Variable Will Be Removed (it was deprecated a long time ago)

   *   Pseudohashes Will Be Removed

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://bugs.perl.org/ .  There may also be information at
   http://www.perl.com/ , the Perl Home Page.

   If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
   program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
   tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
   of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
   the Perl porting team.  You can browse and search the Perl 5 bugs at
   http://bugs.perl.org/

SEE ALSO

   The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.

   The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

   The README file for general stuff.

   The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.





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