perl5100delta
(1)
Name
perl5100delta - what is new for perl 5.10.0
Synopsis
Please see following description for synopsis
Description
Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERL5100DELTA(1)
NAME
perl5100delta - what is new for perl 5.10.0
DESCRIPTION
This document describes the differences between the 5.8.8
release and the 5.10.0 release.
Many of the bug fixes in 5.10.0 were already seen in the
5.8.X maintenance releases; they are not duplicated here and
are documented in the set of man pages named
perl58[1-8]?delta.
Core Enhancements
The "feature" pragma
The "feature" pragma is used to enable new syntax that would
break Perl's backwards-compatibility with older releases of
the language. It's a lexical pragma, like "strict" or
"warnings".
Currently the following new features are available: "switch"
(adds a switch statement), "say" (adds a "say" built-in
function), and "state" (adds a "state" keyword for declaring
"static" variables). Those features are described in their
own sections of this document.
The "feature" pragma is also implicitly loaded when you
require a minimal perl version (with the "use VERSION"
construct) greater than, or equal to, 5.9.5. See feature for
details.
New -E command-line switch
-E is equivalent to -e, but it implicitly enables all
optional features (like "use feature ":5.10"").
Defined-or operator
A new operator "//" (defined-or) has been implemented. The
following expression:
$a // $b
is merely equivalent to
defined $a ? $a : $b
and the statement
$c //= $d;
can now be used instead of
$c = $d unless defined $c;
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The "//" operator has the same precedence and associativity
as "||". Special care has been taken to ensure that this
operator Do What You Mean while not breaking old code, but
some edge cases involving the empty regular expression may
now parse differently. See perlop for details.
Switch and Smart Match operator
Perl 5 now has a switch statement. It's available when "use
feature 'switch'" is in effect. This feature introduces
three new keywords, "given", "when", and "default":
given ($foo) {
when (/^abc/) { $abc = 1; }
when (/^def/) { $def = 1; }
when (/^xyz/) { $xyz = 1; }
default { $nothing = 1; }
}
A more complete description of how Perl matches the switch
variable against the "when" conditions is given in "Switch
statements" in perlsyn.
This kind of match is called smart match, and it's also
possible to use it outside of switch statements, via the new
"~~" operator. See "Smart matching in detail" in perlsyn.
This feature was contributed by Robin Houston.
Regular expressions
Recursive Patterns
It is now possible to write recursive patterns without
using the "(??{})" construct. This new way is more
efficient, and in many cases easier to read.
Each capturing parenthesis can now be treated as an
independent pattern that can be entered by using the
"(?PARNO)" syntax ("PARNO" standing for "parenthesis
number"). For example, the following pattern will match
nested balanced angle brackets:
/
^ # start of line
( # start capture buffer 1
< # match an opening angle bracket
(?: # match one of:
(?> # don't backtrack over the inside of this group
[^<>]+ # one or more non angle brackets
) # end non backtracking group
| # ... or ...
(?1) # recurse to bracket 1 and try it again
)* # 0 or more times.
> # match a closing angle bracket
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) # end capture buffer one
$ # end of line
/x
PCRE users should note that Perl's recursive regex
feature allows backtracking into a recursed pattern,
whereas in PCRE the recursion is atomic or "possessive"
in nature. As in the example above, you can add (?>) to
control this selectively. (Yves Orton)
Named Capture Buffers
It is now possible to name capturing parenthesis in a
pattern and refer to the captured contents by name. The
naming syntax is "(?<NAME>....)". It's possible to
backreference to a named buffer with the "\k<NAME>"
syntax. In code, the new magical hashes "%+" and "%-"
can be used to access the contents of the capture
buffers.
Thus, to replace all doubled chars with a single copy,
one could write
s/(?<letter>.)\k<letter>/$+{letter}/g
Only buffers with defined contents will be "visible" in
the "%+" hash, so it's possible to do something like
foreach my $name (keys %+) {
print "content of buffer '$name' is $+{$name}\n";
}
The "%-" hash is a bit more complete, since it will
contain array refs holding values from all capture
buffers similarly named, if there should be many of
them.
"%+" and "%-" are implemented as tied hashes through the
new module "Tie::Hash::NamedCapture".
Users exposed to the .NET regex engine will find that
the perl implementation differs in that the numerical
ordering of the buffers is sequential, and not "unnamed
first, then named". Thus in the pattern
/(A)(?<B>B)(C)(?<D>D)/
$1 will be 'A', $2 will be 'B', $3 will be 'C' and $4
will be 'D' and not $1 is 'A', $2 is 'C' and $3 is 'B'
and $4 is 'D' that a .NET programmer would expect. This
is considered a feature. :-) (Yves Orton)
Possessive Quantifiers
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Perl now supports the "possessive quantifier" syntax of
the "atomic match" pattern. Basically a possessive
quantifier matches as much as it can and never gives any
back. Thus it can be used to control backtracking. The
syntax is similar to non-greedy matching, except instead
of using a '?' as the modifier the '+' is used. Thus
"?+", "*+", "++", "{min,max}+" are now legal
quantifiers. (Yves Orton)
Backtracking control verbs
The regex engine now supports a number of special-
purpose backtrack control verbs: (*THEN), (*PRUNE),
(*MARK), (*SKIP), (*COMMIT), (*FAIL) and (*ACCEPT). See
perlre for their descriptions. (Yves Orton)
Relative backreferences
A new syntax "\g{N}" or "\gN" where "N" is a decimal
integer allows a safer form of back-reference notation
as well as allowing relative backreferences. This should
make it easier to generate and embed patterns that
contain backreferences. See "Capture buffers" in perlre.
(Yves Orton)
"\K" escape
The functionality of Jeff Pinyan's module Regexp::Keep
has been added to the core. In regular expressions you
can now use the special escape "\K" as a way to do
something like floating length positive lookbehind. It
is also useful in substitutions like:
s/(foo)bar/$1/g
that can now be converted to
s/foo\Kbar//g
which is much more efficient. (Yves Orton)
Vertical and horizontal whitespace, and linebreak
Regular expressions now recognize the "\v" and "\h"
escapes that match vertical and horizontal whitespace,
respectively. "\V" and "\H" logically match their
complements.
"\R" matches a generic linebreak, that is, vertical
whitespace, plus the multi-character sequence
"\x0D\x0A".
"say()"
say() is a new built-in, only available when "use feature
'say'" is in effect, that is similar to print(), but that
implicitly appends a newline to the printed string. See
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"say" in perlfunc. (Robin Houston)
Lexical $_
The default variable $_ can now be lexicalized, by declaring
it like any other lexical variable, with a simple
my $_;
The operations that default on $_ will use the lexically-
scoped version of $_ when it exists, instead of the global
$_.
In a "map" or a "grep" block, if $_ was previously my'ed,
then the $_ inside the block is lexical as well (and scoped
to the block).
In a scope where $_ has been lexicalized, you can still have
access to the global version of $_ by using $::_, or, more
simply, by overriding the lexical declaration with "our $_".
(Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
The "_" prototype
A new prototype character has been added. "_" is equivalent
to "$" but defaults to $_ if the corresponding argument
isn't supplied (both "$" and "_" denote a scalar). Due to
the optional nature of the argument, you can only use it at
the end of a prototype, or before a semicolon.
This has a small incompatible consequence: the prototype()
function has been adjusted to return "_" for some built-ins
in appropriate cases (for example,
"prototype('CORE::rmdir')"). (Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
UNITCHECK blocks
"UNITCHECK", a new special code block has been introduced,
in addition to "BEGIN", "CHECK", "INIT" and "END".
"CHECK" and "INIT" blocks, while useful for some specialized
purposes, are always executed at the transition between the
compilation and the execution of the main program, and thus
are useless whenever code is loaded at runtime. On the other
hand, "UNITCHECK" blocks are executed just after the unit
which defined them has been compiled. See perlmod for more
information. (Alex Gough)
New Pragma, "mro"
A new pragma, "mro" (for Method Resolution Order) has been
added. It permits to switch, on a per-class basis, the
algorithm that perl uses to find inherited methods in case
of a multiple inheritance hierarchy. The default MRO hasn't
changed (DFS, for Depth First Search). Another MRO is
available: the C3 algorithm. See mro for more information.
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(Brandon Black)
Note that, due to changes in the implementation of class
hierarchy search, code that used to undef the *ISA glob will
most probably break. Anyway, undef'ing *ISA had the side-
effect of removing the magic on the @ISA array and should
not have been done in the first place. Also, the cache
*::ISA::CACHE:: no longer exists; to force reset the @ISA
cache, you now need to use the "mro" API, or more simply to
assign to @ISA (e.g. with "@ISA = @ISA").
readdir() may return a "short filename" on Windows
The readdir() function may return a "short filename" when
the long filename contains characters outside the ANSI
codepage. Similarly Cwd::cwd() may return a short directory
name, and glob() may return short names as well. On the
NTFS file system these short names can always be represented
in the ANSI codepage. This will not be true for all other
file system drivers; e.g. the FAT filesystem stores short
filenames in the OEM codepage, so some files on FAT volumes
remain unaccessible through the ANSI APIs.
Similarly, $^X, @INC, and $ENV{PATH} are preprocessed at
startup to make sure all paths are valid in the ANSI
codepage (if possible).
The Win32::GetLongPathName() function now returns the UTF-8
encoded correct long file name instead of using replacement
characters to force the name into the ANSI codepage. The
new Win32::GetANSIPathName() function can be used to turn a
long pathname into a short one only if the long one cannot
be represented in the ANSI codepage.
Many other functions in the "Win32" module have been
improved to accept UTF-8 encoded arguments. Please see
Win32 for details.
readpipe() is now overridable
The built-in function readpipe() is now overridable.
Overriding it permits also to override its operator
counterpart, "qx//" (a.k.a. "``"). Moreover, it now
defaults to $_ if no argument is provided. (Rafael Garcia-
Suarez)
Default argument for readline()
readline() now defaults to *ARGV if no argument is provided.
(Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
state() variables
A new class of variables has been introduced. State
variables are similar to "my" variables, but are declared
with the "state" keyword in place of "my". They're visible
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only in their lexical scope, but their value is persistent:
unlike "my" variables, they're not undefined at scope entry,
but retain their previous value. (Rafael Garcia-Suarez,
Nicholas Clark)
To use state variables, one needs to enable them by using
use feature 'state';
or by using the "-E" command-line switch in one-liners. See
"Persistent Private Variables" in perlsub.
Stacked filetest operators
As a new form of syntactic sugar, it's now possible to stack
up filetest operators. You can now write "-f -w -x $file" in
a row to mean "-x $file && -w _ && -f _". See "-X" in
perlfunc.
UNIVERSAL::DOES()
The "UNIVERSAL" class has a new method, "DOES()". It has
been added to solve semantic problems with the "isa()"
method. "isa()" checks for inheritance, while "DOES()" has
been designed to be overridden when module authors use other
types of relations between classes (in addition to
inheritance). (chromatic)
See "$obj->DOES( ROLE )" in UNIVERSAL.
Formats
Formats were improved in several ways. A new field, "^*",
can be used for variable-width, one-line-at-a-time text.
Null characters are now handled correctly in picture lines.
Using "@#" and "~~" together will now produce a compile-time
error, as those format fields are incompatible. perlform
has been improved, and miscellaneous bugs fixed.
Byte-order modifiers for pack() and unpack()
There are two new byte-order modifiers, ">" (big-endian) and
"<" (little-endian), that can be appended to most pack() and
unpack() template characters and groups to force a certain
byte-order for that type or group. See "pack" in perlfunc
and perlpacktut for details.
"no VERSION"
You can now use "no" followed by a version number to specify
that you want to use a version of perl older than the
specified one.
"chdir", "chmod" and "chown" on filehandles
"chdir", "chmod" and "chown" can now work on filehandles as
well as filenames, if the system supports respectively
"fchdir", "fchmod" and "fchown", thanks to a patch provided
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by Gisle Aas.
OS groups
$( and $) now return groups in the order where the OS
returns them, thanks to Gisle Aas. This wasn't previously
the case.
Recursive sort subs
You can now use recursive subroutines with sort(), thanks to
Robin Houston.
Exceptions in constant folding
The constant folding routine is now wrapped in an exception
handler, and if folding throws an exception (such as
attempting to evaluate 0/0), perl now retains the current
optree, rather than aborting the whole program. Without
this change, programs would not compile if they had
expressions that happened to generate exceptions, even
though those expressions were in code that could never be
reached at runtime. (Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell)
Source filters in @INC
It's possible to enhance the mechanism of subroutine hooks
in @INC by adding a source filter on top of the filehandle
opened and returned by the hook. This feature was planned a
long time ago, but wasn't quite working until now. See
"require" in perlfunc for details. (Nicholas Clark)
New internal variables
"${^RE_DEBUG_FLAGS}"
This variable controls what debug flags are in effect
for the regular expression engine when running under
"use re "debug"". See re for details.
"${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}"
This variable gives the native status returned by the
last pipe close, backtick command, successful call to
wait() or waitpid(), or from the system() operator. See
perlvar for details. (Contributed by Gisle Aas.)
"${^RE_TRIE_MAXBUF}"
See "Trie optimisation of literal string alternations".
"${^WIN32_SLOPPY_STAT}"
See "Sloppy stat on Windows".
Miscellaneous
"unpack()" now defaults to unpacking the $_ variable.
"mkdir()" without arguments now defaults to $_.
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The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-
printable characters such as newline and backspace are
output in "\x" notation, rather than octal.
The -C option can no longer be used on the "#!" line. It
wasn't working there anyway, since the standard streams are
already set up at this point in the execution of the perl
interpreter. You can use binmode() instead to get the
desired behaviour.
UCD 5.0.0
The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl
5 has been updated to version 5.0.0.
MAD
MAD, which stands for Miscellaneous Attribute Decoration, is
a still-in-development work leading to a Perl 5 to Perl 6
converter. To enable it, it's necessary to pass the argument
"-Dmad" to Configure. The obtained perl isn't binary
compatible with a regular perl 5.10, and has space and speed
penalties; moreover not all regression tests still pass with
it. (Larry Wall, Nicholas Clark)
kill() on Windows
On Windows platforms, "kill(-9, $pid)" now kills a process
tree. (On Unix, this delivers the signal to all processes
in the same process group.)
Incompatible Changes
Packing and UTF-8 strings
The semantics of pack() and unpack() regarding UTF-8-encoded
data has been changed. Processing is now by default
character per character instead of byte per byte on the
underlying encoding. Notably, code that used things like
"pack("a*", $string)" to see through the encoding of string
will now simply get back the original $string. Packed
strings can also get upgraded during processing when you
store upgraded characters. You can get the old behaviour by
using "use bytes".
To be consistent with pack(), the "C0" in unpack() templates
indicates that the data is to be processed in character
mode, i.e. character by character; on the contrary, "U0" in
unpack() indicates UTF-8 mode, where the packed string is
processed in its UTF-8-encoded Unicode form on a byte by
byte basis. This is reversed with regard to perl 5.8.X, but
now consistent between pack() and unpack().
Moreover, "C0" and "U0" can also be used in pack() templates
to specify respectively character and byte modes.
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"C0" and "U0" in the middle of a pack or unpack format now
switch to the specified encoding mode, honoring parens
grouping. Previously, parens were ignored.
Also, there is a new pack() character format, "W", which is
intended to replace the old "C". "C" is kept for unsigned
chars coded as bytes in the strings internal representation.
"W" represents unsigned (logical) character values, which
can be greater than 255. It is therefore more robust when
dealing with potentially UTF-8-encoded data (as "C" will
wrap values outside the range 0..255, and not respect the
string encoding).
In practice, that means that pack formats are now encoding-
neutral, except "C".
For consistency, "A" in unpack() format now trims all
Unicode whitespace from the end of the string. Before perl
5.9.2, it used to strip only the classical ASCII space
characters.
Byte/character count feature in unpack()
A new unpack() template character, ".", returns the number
of bytes or characters (depending on the selected encoding
mode, see above) read so far.
The $* and $# variables have been removed
$*, which was deprecated in favor of the "/s" and "/m"
regexp modifiers, has been removed.
The deprecated $# variable (output format for numbers) has
been removed.
Two new severe warnings, "$#/$* is no longer supported",
have been added.
substr() lvalues are no longer fixed-length
The lvalues returned by the three argument form of substr()
used to be a "fixed length window" on the original string.
In some cases this could cause surprising action at distance
or other undefined behaviour. Now the length of the window
adjusts itself to the length of the string assigned to it.
Parsing of "-f _"
The identifier "_" is now forced to be a bareword after a
filetest operator. This solves a number of misparsing issues
when a global "_" subroutine is defined.
":unique"
The ":unique" attribute has been made a no-op, since its
current implementation was fundamentally flawed and not
threadsafe.
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Effect of pragmas in eval
The compile-time value of the "%^H" hint variable can now
propagate into eval("")uated code. This makes it more useful
to implement lexical pragmas.
As a side-effect of this, the overloaded-ness of constants
now propagates into eval("").
chdir FOO
A bareword argument to chdir() is now recognized as a file
handle. Earlier releases interpreted the bareword as a
directory name. (Gisle Aas)
Handling of .pmc files
An old feature of perl was that before "require" or "use"
look for a file with a .pm extension, they will first look
for a similar filename with a .pmc extension. If this file
is found, it will be loaded in place of any potentially
existing file ending in a .pm extension.
Previously, .pmc files were loaded only if more recent than
the matching .pm file. Starting with 5.9.4, they'll be
always loaded if they exist.
$^V is now a "version" object instead of a v-string
$^V can still be used with the %vd format in printf, but any
character-level operations will now access the string
representation of the "version" object and not the ordinals
of a v-string. Expressions like "substr($^V, 0, 2)" or
"split //, $^V" no longer work and must be rewritten.
@- and @+ in patterns
The special arrays "@-" and "@+" are no longer interpolated
in regular expressions. (Sadahiro Tomoyuki)
$AUTOLOAD can now be tainted
If you call a subroutine by a tainted name, and if it defers
to an AUTOLOAD function, then $AUTOLOAD will be (correctly)
tainted. (Rick Delaney)
Tainting and printf
When perl is run under taint mode, "printf()" and
"sprintf()" will now reject any tainted format argument.
(Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
undef and signal handlers
Undefining or deleting a signal handler via "undef
$SIG{FOO}" is now equivalent to setting it to 'DEFAULT'.
(Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
strictures and dereferencing in defined()
"use strict 'refs'" was ignoring taking a hard reference in
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an argument to defined(), as in :
use strict 'refs';
my $x = 'foo';
if (defined $$x) {...}
This now correctly produces the run-time error "Can't use
string as a SCALAR ref while "strict refs" in use".
"defined @$foo" and "defined %$bar" are now also subject to
"strict 'refs'" (that is, $foo and $bar shall be proper
references there.) ("defined(@foo)" and "defined(%bar)" are
discouraged constructs anyway.) (Nicholas Clark)
"(?p{})" has been removed
The regular expression construct "(?p{})", which was
deprecated in perl 5.8, has been removed. Use "(??{})"
instead. (Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
Pseudo-hashes have been removed
Support for pseudo-hashes has been removed from Perl 5.9.
(The "fields" pragma remains here, but uses an alternate
implementation.)
Removal of the bytecode compiler and of perlcc
"perlcc", the byteloader and the supporting modules (B::C,
B::CC, B::Bytecode, etc.) are no longer distributed with the
perl sources. Those experimental tools have never worked
reliably, and, due to the lack of volunteers to keep them in
line with the perl interpreter developments, it was decided
to remove them instead of shipping a broken version of
those. The last version of those modules can be found with
perl 5.9.4.
However the B compiler framework stays supported in the perl
core, as with the more useful modules it has permitted
(among others, B::Deparse and B::Concise).
Removal of the JPL
The JPL (Java-Perl Lingo) has been removed from the perl
sources tarball.
Recursive inheritance detected earlier
Perl will now immediately throw an exception if you modify
any package's @ISA in such a way that it would cause
recursive inheritance.
Previously, the exception would not occur until Perl
attempted to make use of the recursive inheritance while
resolving a method or doing a "$foo->isa($bar)" lookup.
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warnings::enabled and warnings::warnif changed to favor users
of modules
The behaviour in 5.10.x favors the person using the module;
The behaviour in 5.8.x favors the module writer;
Assume the following code:
main calls Foo::Bar::baz()
Foo::Bar inherits from Foo::Base
Foo::Bar::baz() calls Foo::Base::_bazbaz()
Foo::Base::_bazbaz() calls: warnings::warnif('substr', 'some warning
message');
On 5.8.x, the code warns when Foo::Bar contains "use
warnings;" It does not matter if Foo::Base or main have
warnings enabled to disable the warning one has to modify
Foo::Bar.
On 5.10.0 and newer, the code warns when main contains "use
warnings;" It does not matter if Foo::Base or Foo::Bar have
warnings enabled to disable the warning one has to modify
main.
Modules and Pragmata
Upgrading individual core modules
Even more core modules are now also available separately
through the CPAN. If you wish to update one of these
modules, you don't need to wait for a new perl release.
From within the cpan shell, running the 'r' command will
report on modules with upgrades available. See "perldoc
CPAN" for more information.
Pragmata Changes
"feature"
The new pragma "feature" is used to enable new features
that might break old code. See "The "feature" pragma"
above.
"mro"
This new pragma enables to change the algorithm used to
resolve inherited methods. See "New Pragma, "mro""
above.
Scoping of the "sort" pragma
The "sort" pragma is now lexically scoped. Its effect
used to be global.
Scoping of "bignum", "bigint", "bigrat"
The three numeric pragmas "bignum", "bigint" and
"bigrat" are now lexically scoped. (Tels)
"base"
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The "base" pragma now warns if a class tries to inherit
from itself. (Curtis "Ovid" Poe)
"strict" and "warnings"
"strict" and "warnings" will now complain loudly if they
are loaded via incorrect casing (as in "use Strict;").
(Johan Vromans)
"version"
The "version" module provides support for version
objects.
"warnings"
The "warnings" pragma doesn't load "Carp" anymore. That
means that code that used "Carp" routines without having
loaded it at compile time might need to be adjusted;
typically, the following (faulty) code won't work
anymore, and will require parentheses to be added after
the function name:
use warnings;
require Carp;
Carp::confess 'argh';
"less"
"less" now does something useful (or at least it tries
to). In fact, it has been turned into a lexical pragma.
So, in your modules, you can now test whether your users
have requested to use less CPU, or less memory, less
magic, or maybe even less fat. See less for more.
(Joshua ben Jore)
New modules
o "encoding::warnings", by Audrey Tang, is a module to
emit warnings whenever an ASCII character string
containing high-bit bytes is implicitly converted into
UTF-8. It's a lexical pragma since Perl 5.9.4; on older
perls, its effect is global.
o "Module::CoreList", by Richard Clamp, is a small handy
module that tells you what versions of core modules ship
with any versions of Perl 5. It comes with a command-
line frontend, "corelist".
o "Math::BigInt::FastCalc" is an XS-enabled, and thus
faster, version of "Math::BigInt::Calc".
o "Compress::Zlib" is an interface to the zlib compression
library. It comes with a bundled version of zlib, so
having a working zlib is not a prerequisite to install
it. It's used by "Archive::Tar" (see below).
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o "IO::Zlib" is an "IO::"-style interface to
"Compress::Zlib".
o "Archive::Tar" is a module to manipulate "tar" archives.
o "Digest::SHA" is a module used to calculate many types
of SHA digests, has been included for SHA support in the
CPAN module.
o "ExtUtils::CBuilder" and "ExtUtils::ParseXS" have been
added.
o "Hash::Util::FieldHash", by Anno Siegel, has been added.
This module provides support for field hashes: hashes
that maintain an association of a reference with a
value, in a thread-safe garbage-collected way. Such
hashes are useful to implement inside-out objects.
o "Module::Build", by Ken Williams, has been added. It's
an alternative to "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" to build and
install perl modules.
o "Module::Load", by Jos Boumans, has been added. It
provides a single interface to load Perl modules and .pl
files.
o "Module::Loaded", by Jos Boumans, has been added. It's
used to mark modules as loaded or unloaded.
o "Package::Constants", by Jos Boumans, has been added.
It's a simple helper to list all constants declared in a
given package.
o "Win32API::File", by Tye McQueen, has been added (for
Windows builds). This module provides low-level access
to Win32 system API calls for files/dirs.
o "Locale::Maketext::Simple", needed by CPANPLUS, is a
simple wrapper around "Locale::Maketext::Lexicon". Note
that "Locale::Maketext::Lexicon" isn't included in the
perl core; the behaviour of "Locale::Maketext::Simple"
gracefully degrades when the later isn't present.
o "Params::Check" implements a generic input
parsing/checking mechanism. It is used by CPANPLUS.
o "Term::UI" simplifies the task to ask questions at a
terminal prompt.
o "Object::Accessor" provides an interface to create per-
object accessors.
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o "Module::Pluggable" is a simple framework to create
modules that accept pluggable sub-modules.
o "Module::Load::Conditional" provides simple ways to
query and possibly load installed modules.
o "Time::Piece" provides an object oriented interface to
time functions, overriding the built-ins localtime() and
gmtime().
o "IPC::Cmd" helps to find and run external commands,
possibly interactively.
o "File::Fetch" provide a simple generic file fetching
mechanism.
o "Log::Message" and "Log::Message::Simple" are used by
the log facility of "CPANPLUS".
o "Archive::Extract" is a generic archive extraction
mechanism for .tar (plain, gziped or bzipped) or .zip
files.
o "CPANPLUS" provides an API and a command-line tool to
access the CPAN mirrors.
o "Pod::Escapes" provides utilities that are useful in
decoding Pod E<...> sequences.
o "Pod::Simple" is now the backend for several of the Pod-
related modules included with Perl.
Selected Changes to Core Modules
"Attribute::Handlers"
"Attribute::Handlers" can now report the caller's file
and line number. (David Feldman)
All interpreted attributes are now passed as array
references. (Damian Conway)
"B::Lint"
"B::Lint" is now based on "Module::Pluggable", and so
can be extended with plugins. (Joshua ben Jore)
"B" It's now possible to access the lexical pragma hints
("%^H") by using the method B::COP::hints_hash(). It
returns a "B::RHE" object, which in turn can be used to
get a hash reference via the method B::RHE::HASH().
(Joshua ben Jore)
"Thread"
As the old 5005thread threading model has been removed,
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in favor of the ithreads scheme, the "Thread" module is
now a compatibility wrapper, to be used in old code
only. It has been removed from the default list of
dynamic extensions.
Utility Changes
perl -d
The Perl debugger can now save all debugger commands for
sourcing later; notably, it can now emulate stepping
backwards, by restarting and rerunning all bar the last
command from a saved command history.
It can also display the parent inheritance tree of a
given class, with the "i" command.
ptar
"ptar" is a pure perl implementation of "tar" that comes
with "Archive::Tar".
ptardiff
"ptardiff" is a small utility used to generate a diff
between the contents of a tar archive and a directory
tree. Like "ptar", it comes with "Archive::Tar".
shasum
"shasum" is a command-line utility, used to print or to
check SHA digests. It comes with the new "Digest::SHA"
module.
corelist
The "corelist" utility is now installed with perl (see
"New modules" above).
h2ph and h2xs
"h2ph" and "h2xs" have been made more robust with regard
to "modern" C code.
"h2xs" implements a new option "--use-xsloader" to force
use of "XSLoader" even in backwards compatible modules.
The handling of authors' names that had apostrophes has
been fixed.
Any enums with negative values are now skipped.
perlivp
"perlivp" no longer checks for *.ph files by default.
Use the new "-a" option to run all tests.
find2perl
"find2perl" now assumes "-print" as a default action.
Previously, it needed to be specified explicitly.
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Several bugs have been fixed in "find2perl", regarding
"-exec" and "-eval". Also the options "-path", "-ipath"
and "-iname" have been added.
config_data
"config_data" is a new utility that comes with
"Module::Build". It provides a command-line interface to
the configuration of Perl modules that use
Module::Build's framework of configurability (that is,
*::ConfigData modules that contain local configuration
information for their parent modules.)
cpanp
"cpanp", the CPANPLUS shell, has been added.
("cpanp-run-perl", a helper for CPANPLUS operation, has
been added too, but isn't intended for direct use).
cpan2dist
"cpan2dist" is a new utility that comes with CPANPLUS.
It's a tool to create distributions (or packages) from
CPAN modules.
pod2html
The output of "pod2html" has been enhanced to be more
customizable via CSS. Some formatting problems were also
corrected. (Jari Aalto)
New Documentation
The perlpragma manpage documents how to write one's own
lexical pragmas in pure Perl (something that is possible
starting with 5.9.4).
The new perlglossary manpage is a glossary of terms used in
the Perl documentation, technical and otherwise, kindly
provided by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
The perlreguts manpage, courtesy of Yves Orton, describes
internals of the Perl regular expression engine.
The perlreapi manpage describes the interface to the perl
interpreter used to write pluggable regular expression
engines (by var Arnfjoer` Bjarmason).
The perlunitut manpage is an tutorial for programming with
Unicode and string encodings in Perl, courtesy of Juerd
Waalboer.
A new manual page, perlunifaq (the Perl Unicode FAQ), has
been added (Juerd Waalboer).
The perlcommunity manpage gives a description of the Perl
community on the Internet and in real life. (Edgar "Trizor"
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Bering)
The CORE manual page documents the "CORE::" namespace.
(Tels)
The long-existing feature of "/(?{...})/" regexps setting $_
and pos() is now documented.
Performance Enhancements
In-place sorting
Sorting arrays in place ("@a = sort @a") is now optimized to
avoid making a temporary copy of the array.
Likewise, "reverse sort ..." is now optimized to sort in
reverse, avoiding the generation of a temporary intermediate
list.
Lexical array access
Access to elements of lexical arrays via a numeric constant
between 0 and 255 is now faster. (This used to be only the
case for global arrays.)
XS-assisted SWASHGET
Some pure-perl code that perl was using to retrieve Unicode
properties and transliteration mappings has been
reimplemented in XS.
Constant subroutines
The interpreter internals now support a far more memory
efficient form of inlineable constants. Storing a reference
to a constant value in a symbol table is equivalent to a
full typeglob referencing a constant subroutine, but using
about 400 bytes less memory. This proxy constant subroutine
is automatically upgraded to a real typeglob with subroutine
if necessary. The approach taken is analogous to the
existing space optimisation for subroutine stub
declarations, which are stored as plain scalars in place of
the full typeglob.
Several of the core modules have been converted to use this
feature for their system dependent constants - as a result
"use POSIX;" now takes about 200K less memory.
"PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV"
The new compilation flag "PERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV", introduced
as an option in perl 5.8.8, is turned on by default in perl
5.9.3. It prevents perl from creating an empty scalar with
every new typeglob. See perl589delta for details.
Weak references are cheaper
Weak reference creation is now O(1) rather than O(n),
courtesy of Nicholas Clark. Weak reference deletion remains
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O(n), but if deletion only happens at program exit, it may
be skipped completely.
sort() enhancements
Salvador Fandin~o provided improvements to reduce the memory
usage of "sort" and to speed up some cases.
Memory optimisations
Several internal data structures (typeglobs, GVs, CVs,
formats) have been restructured to use less memory.
(Nicholas Clark)
UTF-8 cache optimisation
The UTF-8 caching code is now more efficient, and used more
often. (Nicholas Clark)
Sloppy stat on Windows
On Windows, perl's stat() function normally opens the file
to determine the link count and update attributes that may
have been changed through hard links. Setting
${^WIN32_SLOPPY_STAT} to a true value speeds up stat() by
not performing this operation. (Jan Dubois)
Regular expressions optimisations
Engine de-recursivised
The regular expression engine is no longer recursive,
meaning that patterns that used to overflow the stack
will either die with useful explanations, or run to
completion, which, since they were able to blow the
stack before, will likely take a very long time to
happen. If you were experiencing the occasional stack
overflow (or segfault) and upgrade to discover that now
perl apparently hangs instead, look for a degenerate
regex. (Dave Mitchell)
Single char char-classes treated as literals
Classes of a single character are now treated the same
as if the character had been used as a literal, meaning
that code that uses char-classes as an escaping
mechanism will see a speedup. (Yves Orton)
Trie optimisation of literal string alternations
Alternations, where possible, are optimised into more
efficient matching structures. String literal
alternations are merged into a trie and are matched
simultaneously. This means that instead of O(N) time
for matching N alternations at a given point, the new
code performs in O(1) time. A new special variable,
${^RE_TRIE_MAXBUF}, has been added to fine-tune this
optimization. (Yves Orton)
Note: Much code exists that works around perl's historic
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poor performance on alternations. Often the tricks used
to do so will disable the new optimisations. Hopefully
the utility modules used for this purpose will be
educated about these new optimisations.
Aho-Corasick start-point optimisation
When a pattern starts with a trie-able alternation and
there aren't better optimisations available, the regex
engine will use Aho-Corasick matching to find the start
point. (Yves Orton)
Installation and Configuration Improvements
Configuration improvements
"-Dusesitecustomize"
Run-time customization of @INC can be enabled by passing
the "-Dusesitecustomize" flag to Configure. When
enabled, this will make perl run
$sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl before anything else. This
script can then be set up to add additional entries to
@INC.
Relocatable installations
There is now Configure support for creating a
relocatable perl tree. If you Configure with
"-Duserelocatableinc", then the paths in @INC (and
everything else in %Config) can be optionally located
via the path of the perl executable.
That means that, if the string ".../" is found at the
start of any path, it's substituted with the directory
of $^X. So, the relocation can be configured on a per-
directory basis, although the default with
"-Duserelocatableinc" is that everything is relocated.
The initial install is done to the original configured
prefix.
strlcat() and strlcpy()
The configuration process now detects whether strlcat()
and strlcpy() are available. When they are not
available, perl's own version is used (from Russ
Allbery's public domain implementation). Various places
in the perl interpreter now use them. (Steve Peters)
"d_pseudofork" and "d_printf_format_null"
A new configuration variable, available as
$Config{d_pseudofork} in the Config module, has been
added, to distinguish real fork() support from fake
pseudofork used on Windows platforms.
A new configuration variable, "d_printf_format_null",
has been added, to see if printf-like formats are
allowed to be NULL.
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Configure help
"Configure -h" has been extended with the most commonly
used options.
Compilation improvements
Parallel build
Parallel makes should work properly now, although there
may still be problems if "make test" is instructed to
run in parallel.
Borland's compilers support
Building with Borland's compilers on Win32 should work
more smoothly. In particular Steve Hay has worked to
side step many warnings emitted by their compilers and
at least one C compiler internal error.
Static build on Windows
Perl extensions on Windows now can be statically built
into the Perl DLL.
Also, it's now possible to build a "perl-static.exe"
that doesn't depend on the Perl DLL on Win32. See the
Win32 makefiles for details. (Vadim Konovalov)
ppport.h files
All ppport.h files in the XS modules bundled with perl
are now autogenerated at build time. (Marcus Holland-
Moritz)
C++ compatibility
Efforts have been made to make perl and the core XS
modules compilable with various C++ compilers (although
the situation is not perfect with some of the compilers
on some of the platforms tested.)
Support for Microsoft 64-bit compiler
Support for building perl with Microsoft's 64-bit
compiler has been improved. (ActiveState)
Visual C++
Perl can now be compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005
(and 2008 Beta 2).
Win32 builds
All win32 builds (MS-Win, WinCE) have been merged and
cleaned up.
Installation improvements
Module auxiliary files
README files and changelogs for CPAN modules bundled
with perl are no longer installed.
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New Or Improved Platforms
Perl has been reported to work on Symbian OS. See
perlsymbian for more information.
Many improvements have been made towards making Perl work
correctly on z/OS.
Perl has been reported to work on DragonFlyBSD and
MidnightBSD.
Perl has also been reported to work on NexentaOS (
http://www.gnusolaris.org/ ).
The VMS port has been improved. See perlvms.
Support for Cray XT4 Catamount/Qk has been added. See
hints/catamount.sh in the source code distribution for more
information.
Vendor patches have been merged for RedHat and Gentoo.
DynaLoader::dl_unload_file() now works on Windows.
Selected Bug Fixes
strictures in regexp-eval blocks
"strict" wasn't in effect in regexp-eval blocks
("/(?{...})/").
Calling CORE::require()
CORE::require() and CORE::do() were always parsed as
require() and do() when they were overridden. This is
now fixed.
Subscripts of slices
You can now use a non-arrowed form for chained
subscripts after a list slice, like in:
({foo => "bar"})[0]{foo}
This used to be a syntax error; a "->" was required.
"no warnings 'category'" works correctly with -w
Previously when running with warnings enabled globally
via "-w", selective disabling of specific warning
categories would actually turn off all warnings. This
is now fixed; now "no warnings 'io';" will only turn off
warnings in the "io" class. Previously it would
erroneously turn off all warnings.
threads improvements
Several memory leaks in ithreads were closed. Also,
ithreads were made less memory-intensive.
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"threads" is now a dual-life module, also available on
CPAN. It has been expanded in many ways. A kill() method
is available for thread signalling. One can get thread
status, or the list of running or joinable threads.
A new "threads->exit()" method is used to exit from the
application (this is the default for the main thread) or
from the current thread only (this is the default for
all other threads). On the other hand, the exit() built-
in now always causes the whole application to terminate.
(Jerry D. Hedden)
chr() and negative values
chr() on a negative value now gives "\x{FFFD}", the
Unicode replacement character, unless when the "bytes"
pragma is in effect, where the low eight bits of the
value are used.
PERL5SHELL and tainting
On Windows, the PERL5SHELL environment variable is now
checked for taintedness. (Rafael Garcia-Suarez)
Using *FILE{IO}
"stat()" and "-X" filetests now treat *FILE{IO}
filehandles like *FILE filehandles. (Steve Peters)
Overloading and reblessing
Overloading now works when references are reblessed into
another class. Internally, this has been implemented by
moving the flag for "overloading" from the reference to
the referent, which logically is where it should always
have been. (Nicholas Clark)
Overloading and UTF-8
A few bugs related to UTF-8 handling with objects that
have stringification overloaded have been fixed.
(Nicholas Clark)
eval memory leaks fixed
Traditionally, "eval 'syntax error'" has leaked badly.
Many (but not all) of these leaks have now been
eliminated or reduced. (Dave Mitchell)
Random device on Windows
In previous versions, perl would read the file
/dev/urandom if it existed when seeding its random
number generator. That file is unlikely to exist on
Windows, and if it did would probably not contain
appropriate data, so perl no longer tries to read it on
Windows. (Alex Davies)
PERLIO_DEBUG
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The "PERLIO_DEBUG" environment variable no longer has
any effect for setuid scripts and for scripts run with
-T.
Moreover, with a thread-enabled perl, using
"PERLIO_DEBUG" could lead to an internal buffer
overflow. This has been fixed.
PerlIO::scalar and read-only scalars
PerlIO::scalar will now prevent writing to read-only
scalars. Moreover, seek() is now supported with
PerlIO::scalar-based filehandles, the underlying string
being zero-filled as needed. (Rafael, Jarkko Hietaniemi)
study() and UTF-8
study() never worked for UTF-8 strings, but could lead
to false results. It's now a no-op on UTF-8 data. (Yves
Orton)
Critical signals
The signals SIGILL, SIGBUS and SIGSEGV are now always
delivered in an "unsafe" manner (contrary to other
signals, that are deferred until the perl interpreter
reaches a reasonably stable state; see "Deferred Signals
(Safe Signals)" in perlipc). (Rafael)
@INC-hook fix
When a module or a file is loaded through an @INC-hook,
and when this hook has set a filename entry in %INC,
__FILE__ is now set for this module accordingly to the
contents of that %INC entry. (Rafael)
"-t" switch fix
The "-w" and "-t" switches can now be used together
without messing up which categories of warnings are
activated. (Rafael)
Duping UTF-8 filehandles
Duping a filehandle which has the ":utf8" PerlIO layer
set will now properly carry that layer on the duped
filehandle. (Rafael)
Localisation of hash elements
Localizing a hash element whose key was given as a
variable didn't work correctly if the variable was
changed while the local() was in effect (as in "local
$h{$x}; ++$x"). (Bo Lindbergh)
New or Changed Diagnostics
Use of uninitialized value
Perl will now try to tell you the name of the variable
(if any) that was undefined.
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Deprecated use of my() in false conditional
A new deprecation warning, Deprecated use of my() in
false conditional, has been added, to warn against the
use of the dubious and deprecated construct
my $x if 0;
See perldiag. Use "state" variables instead.
!=~ should be !~
A new warning, "!=~ should be !~", is emitted to prevent
this misspelling of the non-matching operator.
Newline in left-justified string
The warning Newline in left-justified string has been
removed.
Too late for "-T" option
The error Too late for "-T" option has been reformulated
to be more descriptive.
"%s" variable %s masks earlier declaration
This warning is now emitted in more consistent cases; in
short, when one of the declarations involved is a "my"
variable:
my $x; my $x; # warns
my $x; our $x; # warns
our $x; my $x; # warns
On the other hand, the following:
our $x; our $x;
now gives a ""our" variable %s redeclared" warning.
readdir()/closedir()/etc. attempted on invalid dirhandle
These new warnings are now emitted when a dirhandle is
used but is either closed or not really a dirhandle.
Opening dirhandle/filehandle %s also as a file/directory
Two deprecation warnings have been added: (Rafael)
Opening dirhandle %s also as a file
Opening filehandle %s also as a directory
Use of -P is deprecated
Perl's command-line switch "-P" is now deprecated.
v-string in use/require is non-portable
Perl will warn you against potential backwards
compatibility problems with the "use VERSION" syntax.
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perl -V
"perl -V" has several improvements, making it more
useable from shell scripts to get the value of
configuration variables. See perlrun for details.
Changed Internals
In general, the source code of perl has been refactored,
tidied up, and optimized in many places. Also, memory
management and allocation has been improved in several
points.
When compiling the perl core with gcc, as many gcc warning
flags are turned on as is possible on the platform. (This
quest for cleanliness doesn't extend to XS code because we
cannot guarantee the tidiness of code we didn't write.)
Similar strictness flags have been added or tightened for
various other C compilers.
Reordering of SVt_* constants
The relative ordering of constants that define the various
types of "SV" have changed; in particular, "SVt_PVGV" has
been moved before "SVt_PVLV", "SVt_PVAV", "SVt_PVHV" and
"SVt_PVCV". This is unlikely to make any difference unless
you have code that explicitly makes assumptions about that
ordering. (The inheritance hierarchy of "B::*" objects has
been changed to reflect this.)
Elimination of SVt_PVBM
Related to this, the internal type "SVt_PVBM" has been
removed. This dedicated type of "SV" was used by the "index"
operator and parts of the regexp engine to facilitate fast
Boyer-Moore matches. Its use internally has been replaced by
"SV"s of type "SVt_PVGV".
New type SVt_BIND
A new type "SVt_BIND" has been added, in readiness for the
project to implement Perl 6 on 5. There deliberately is no
implementation yet, and they cannot yet be created or
destroyed.
Removal of CPP symbols
The C preprocessor symbols "PERL_PM_APIVERSION" and
"PERL_XS_APIVERSION", which were supposed to give the
version number of the oldest perl binary-compatible (resp.
source-compatible) with the present one, were not used, and
sometimes had misleading values. They have been removed.
Less space is used by ops
The "BASEOP" structure now uses less space. The "op_seq"
field has been removed and replaced by a single bit bit-
field "op_opt". "op_type" is now 9 bits long. (Consequently,
the "B::OP" class doesn't provide an "seq" method anymore.)
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New parser
perl's parser is now generated by bison (it used to be
generated by byacc.) As a result, it seems to be a bit more
robust.
Also, Dave Mitchell improved the lexer debugging output
under "-DT".
Use of "const"
Andy Lester supplied many improvements to determine which
function parameters and local variables could actually be
declared "const" to the C compiler. Steve Peters provided
new *_set macros and reworked the core to use these rather
than assigning to macros in LVALUE context.
Mathoms
A new file, mathoms.c, has been added. It contains functions
that are no longer used in the perl core, but that remain
available for binary or source compatibility reasons.
However, those functions will not be compiled in if you add
"-DNO_MATHOMS" in the compiler flags.
"AvFLAGS" has been removed
The "AvFLAGS" macro has been removed.
"av_*" changes
The "av_*()" functions, used to manipulate arrays, no longer
accept null "AV*" parameters.
$^H and %^H
The implementation of the special variables $^H and %^H has
changed, to allow implementing lexical pragmas in pure Perl.
B:: modules inheritance changed
The inheritance hierarchy of "B::" modules has changed;
"B::NV" now inherits from "B::SV" (it used to inherit from
"B::IV").
Anonymous hash and array constructors
The anonymous hash and array constructors now take 1 op in
the optree instead of 3, now that pp_anonhash and
pp_anonlist return a reference to an hash/array when the op
is flagged with OPf_SPECIAL. (Nicholas Clark)
Known Problems
There's still a remaining problem in the implementation of
the lexical $_: it doesn't work inside "/(?{...})/" blocks.
(See the TODO test in t/op/mydef.t.)
Stacked filetest operators won't work when the "filetest"
pragma is in effect, because they rely on the stat() buffer
"_" being populated, and filetest bypasses stat().
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UTF-8 problems
The handling of Unicode still is unclean in several places,
where it's dependent on whether a string is internally
flagged as UTF-8. This will be made more consistent in perl
5.12, but that won't be possible without a certain amount of
backwards incompatibility.
Platform Specific Problems
When compiled with g++ and thread support on Linux, it's
reported that the $! stops working correctly. This is
related to the fact that the glibc provides two
strerror_r(3) implementation, and perl selects the wrong
one.
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/rt3/ . 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 [email protected] to be analysed by the Perl porting team.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following
attributes:
+---------------+------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+------------------+
|Availability | runtime/perl-512 |
+---------------+------------------+
|Stability | Uncommitted |
+---------------+------------------+
SEE ALSO
The Changes file and the perl590delta to perl595delta man
pages 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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NOTES
This software was built from source available at
https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland. The original
community source was downloaded from
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.5.tar.bz2
Further information about this software can be found on the
open source community website at http://www.perl.org/.
perl v5.12.5 Last change: 2012-11-03 30