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* UpdatedPerl 5 Porters1995-12-071-150/+127
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* New file.Perl 5 Porters1995-12-269-0/+348
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* Updated.Perl 5 Porters1996-01-027-357/+249
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* perl5.001 patch.1h: [re-organisations and patch description]Andy Dougherty1995-05-251-54/+0
| | | | | [editor's note: individual patches have been split from this combined patch]
* 5.002 beta 1Larry Wall1995-11-2110-0/+2150
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | If you're adventurous, have a look at ftp://ftp.sems.com/pub/outgoing/perl5.0/perl5.002beta1.tar.gz Many thanks to Andy for doing the integration. Obviously, if you consult the bugs database, you'll note there are still plenty of buglets that need fixing, and several enhancements that I've intended to put in still haven't made it in (Hi, Tim and Ilya). But I think it'll be pretty stable. And you can start to fiddle around with prototypes (which are, of course, still totally undocumented). Packrats, don't worry too much about readvertising this widely. Nowadays we're on a T1 here, so our bandwidth is okay. Have the appropriate amount of jollity. Larry
* perl 5.000perl-5.000Larry Wall1994-10-1731-4455/+0
| | | | | | | | | | | [editor's note: this commit combines approximate 4 months of furious releases of Andy Dougherty and Larry Wall - see pod/perlhist.pod for details. Andy notes that; Alas neither my "Irwin AccuTrack" nor my DC 600A quarter-inch cartridge backup tapes from that era seem to be readable anymore. I guess 13 years exceeds the shelf life for that backup technology :-(. ]
* perl 5.0 alpha 2perl-5a2Larry Wall1993-10-073-2/+6
| | | | [editor's note: from history.perl.org. The sparc executables originally included in the distribution are not in this commit.]
* perl 4.0 patch 32: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-081-0/+589
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 29: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-083-9/+12
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 28: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-085-67/+31
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 27: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-081-28/+1
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 26: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-081-7/+10
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 24: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-081-222/+565
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 23: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-081-0/+276
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 21: patch #20, continuedLarry Wall1992-06-082-3/+32
| | | | See patch #20.
* perl 4.0 patch 20: (combined patch)Larry Wall1992-06-083-112/+52
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ENHANCEMENTS Subject: relaxed requirement for semicolon at the end of a block Subject: scalar keys %array now counts keys for you Subject: added ... as variant on .. Subject: get*by* routines now return something useful in a scalar context Subject: form feed for formats is now specifiable via $^L Subject: PERLLIB now supports multiple directories Subject: paragraph mode now skips extra newlines automatically MANPAGE Subject: documented that numbers may contain underline Subject: clarified that DATA may only be read from main script Subject: documented need for 1; at the end of a required file Subject: extended bracket-style quotes to two-arg operators: s()() and tr()() Subject: documented PERLLIB and PERLDB Subject: documented limit on size of regexp CONFIGURATION Subject: bcopy() and memcpy() now tested for overlap safety Subject: isascii() may now be supplied by a library routine Subject: Configure now allows optional continuation with files missing Subject: many more hints files added Subject: many more hints added Subject: hints now auto selected on uname -s as well as uname -m Subject: OSF/1 support added Subject: Configure growing-library-list bug fixed Subject: seekdir(), telldir() and rewinddir() now checked for independently Subject: cray didn't give enough memory to /bin/sh Subject: perl -P now uses location of sed determined by Configure Subject: SH files didn't work well with symbolic links Subject: makefiles now display new shift/reduce expectations Subject: support added to installperl for cross-compilation Subject: a2p was installed unexecutable Subject: installperl didn't warn on failed manpage installation Subject: disabled cpp test if cppstdin not yet installed PORTABILITY Subject: O_PIPE conflicted with Atari Subject: config.H updated to reflect more recent config.h Subject: removed implicit int declarations on functions Subject: added Atari ST portability Subject: some machines don't define ENOTSOCK in errno.h Subject: added explicit time_t support Subject: alternate config.h files upgraded Subject: new OS/2 support COMPILER Subject: various error messages have been clarified Subject: the switch optimizer didn't do anything in subroutines Subject: clarified debugging output for literals and double-quoted strings Subject: new warning for use of x with non-numeric right operand Subject: illegal lvalue message could be followed by core dump Subject: new warning for ambiguous use of unary operators Subject: eval "1 #comment" didn't work Subject: semantic compilation errors didn't abort execution Subject: an expression may now start with a bareword Subject: if {block} {block} didn't work any more Subject: "$var{$foo'bar}" didn't scan subscript correctly Subject: an EXPR may now start with a bareword Subject: print $fh EXPR can now expect term rather than operator in EXPR Subject: new warning on spurious backslash Subject: new warning on missing $ for foreach variable Subject: "foo"x1024 now legal without space after x Subject: new warning on print accidentally used as function Subject: 2. now eats the dot Subject: <@ARGV> now notices @ARGV Subject: tr/// now lets you say \- RUNTIME Subject: an eval block containing a null block or statement could dump core Subject: modulus with highest bit in left operand set didn't always work Subject: join() now pre-extends target string to avoid excessive copying Subject: subroutines didn't localize $`, $&, $', $1 et al correctly Subject: usersub routines didn't reclaim temp values soon enough Subject: ($<,$>) = ... didn't work on some architectures Subject: fixed memory leak on system() for vfork() machines Subject: @ in unpack failed too often Subject: slice on null list in scalar context returned random value Subject: splice with negative offset didn't work with $[ = 1 Subject: fixed some memory leaks in splice Subject: dbmclose(%array) didn't work Subject: delete could cause %array to give too low a count of buckets filled Subject: hash tables now split only if the memory is available to do so Subject: realloc(0, size) now does malloc in case library routines call it Subject: running taintperl explicitly now does checks even if $< == $> Subject: fixed memory leak in doube-quote interpretation Subject: a splice on non-existent array elements could dump core Subject: tr/stuff// wasn't working right I/O Subject: new warnings for failed use of stat operators on filenames with \n Subject: wait failed when STDOUT or STDERR reopened to a pipe Subject: end of file latch not reset on reopen of STDIN Subject: seek(HANDLE, 0, 1) went to eof because of ancient Ultrix workaround Subject: h_errno now accessible via $? REGEXP Subject: pattern modifiers i and o didn't interact right Subject: g pattern modifer sometimes returned extra values Subject: m/$pattern/g didn't work Subject: /^stuff/ wrongly assumed an implicit $* == 1 Subject: /x{0}/ was wrongly interpreted as /x{0,}/ Subject: added \W, \S and \D inside /[...]/ Subject: pattern modifiers i and g didn't interact right Subject: in some cases $` and $' didn't get set by match Subject: made /\$$foo/ look for literal '$foo' LIBRARIES Subject: big*.pl library files upgraded Subject: better support in chat2 for multiple children Subject: &ctime didn't handle $[ != 0 Subject: find.pl got confused by unreadable directories Subject: new version of newgetopt.pl Subject: Tom's famous double-ended pipe opener, open2(), is now included Subject: support added to pwd.pl to strip automounter crud Subject: &shellwords looped on bad input, and used inefficient regular exprs Subject: termcap.pl didn't parse termcap terminal names right Subject: timelocal could loop on bad input Subject: timelocal now calculates DST itself Subject: &getcap eventually dumped core in bsdcurses DEBUGGER Subject: support for MSDOS folded into perldb.pl Subject: perldb couldn't debug file containing '-', such as STDIN designator Subject: the debugger now warns you on lines that can't set a breakpoint Subject: the debugger made perl forget the last pattern used by // Subject: fixed double debug break in foreach with implicit array assignment Subject: debugger sometimes displayed wrong source line INTERSTICES Subject: Perl now distinguishes overlapped copies from non-overlapped Subject: fixed confusion between a *var's real name and its effective name Subject: deleted some minor memory leaks Subject: couldn't require . files Subject: -e 'cmd' no longer fails silently if /tmp runs out of space Subject: function key support added to curses.mus TRANSLATORS Subject: find2perl assumed . in PATH Subject: find2perl didn't output portable startup code Subject: find2perl didn't always stat at the right time Subject: s2p didn't output portable startup code Subject: s2p didn't translate s/pat/\&/ or s/pat/\$/ or s/pat/\\1/ right Subject: in a2p, getline should allow variable to be array element Subject: in a2p, now warns about spurious backslashes Subject: in a2p, now allows [ to be backslashed in pattern Subject: in a2p, now allows numbers of the form 2. Subject: in a2p, simplified the filehandle model Subject: in a2p, made RS="" translate to $/ = "\n\n" Subject: in a2p, do {...} while ... was missing some reconstruction code
* perl 4.0 patch 7: patch #4, continuedLarry Wall1991-06-061-3/+6
| | | | See patch #4.
* perl 4.0.00: (no release announcement available)perl-4.0.00Larry Wall1991-03-2118-103/+1018
| | | | So far, 4.0 is still a beta test version. For the last production version, look in pub/perl.3.0/kits@44.
* perl 3.0 patch #40 patch #38, continuedLarry Wall1990-11-093-3/+54
| | | | See patch #38.
* perl 3.0 patch #39 patch #38, continuedLarry Wall1990-11-095-9/+61
| | | | See patch #38.
* perl 3.0 patch #38 (combined patch)Larry Wall1990-11-093-104/+42
| | | | Forget the description, it's too late at night...
* perl 3.0 patch #34 patch #29, continuedLarry Wall1990-10-152-175/+209
| | | | See patch #29.
* perl 3.0 patch #33 patch #29, continuedLarry Wall1990-10-153-0/+29
| | | | See patch #29.
* perl 3.0 patch #32 patch #29, continuedLarry Wall1990-10-166-0/+447
| | | | See patch #29.
* perl 3.0 patch #30 patch #29, continuedLarry Wall1990-10-155-3/+375
| | | | See patch #29.
* perl 3.0 patch #29 (combined patch)Larry Wall1990-10-151-43/+124
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This set of patches pretty much brings you up to the functionality that version 4.0 will have. The Perl Book documents version 4.0. Perhaps these should be called release notes... :-) Enhancements: Many of the changes relate to making the debugger work better. It now runs your scripts at nearly full speed because it no longer calls a subroutine on every statement. The debugger now doesn't get confused about packages, evals and other filenames. More variables (though still not all) are available within the debugger. Related to this is the fact that every statement now knows which package and filename it was compiled in, so package semantics are now much more straightforward. Every variable also knows which package it was compiled in. So many places that used to print out just the variable name now prefix the variable name with the package name. Notably, if you print *foo it now gives *package'foo. Along with these, there is now a "caller" function which returns the context of the current subroutine call. See the man page for more details. Chip Salzenberg sent the patches for System V IPC (msg, sem and shm) so I dropped them in. There was no way to wait for a specific pid, which was silly, since Perl was already keeping track of the information. So I added the waitpid() call, which uses Unix's wait4() or waitpid() if available, and otherwise emulates them (at least as far as letting you wait for a particular pid--it doesn't emulate non-blocking wait). For use in sorting routines, there are now two new operators, cmp and <=>. These do string and numeric comparison, returning -1, 0 or 1 when the first argument is less than, equal to or greater than the second argument. Occasionally one finds that one wants to evaluate an operator in a scalar context, even though it's part of a LIST. For this purpose, there is now a scalar() operator. For instance, the approved fix for the novice error of using <> in assigning to a local is now: local($var) = scalar(<STDIN>); Perl's ordinary I/O is done using standard I/O routines. Every now and then this gets in your way. You may now access the system calls read() and write() via the Perl functions sysread() and syswrite(). They should not be intermixed with ordinary I/O calls unless you know what you're doing. Along with this, both the sysread() and read() functions allow you an optional 4th argument giving an offset into the string you're reading into, so for instance you can easily finish up partial reads. As a bit of syntactic sugar, you can now use the file tests -M, -A and -C to determine the age of a file in (possibly fractional) days as of the time the script started running. This makes it much easier to write midnight cleanup scripts with precision. The index() and rindex() functions now have an optional 3rd argument which tells it where to start looking, so you can now iterate through a string using these functions. The substr() function's 3rd argument is now optional, and if omitted, the function returns everything to the end of the string. The tr/// translation function now understands c, d and s options, just like the tr program. (Well, almost just like. The d option only deletes characters that aren't in the replacement string.) The c complementes the character class to match and the s option squishes out multiple occurrences of any replacement class characters. The reverse function, used in a scalar context, now reverses its scalar argument as a string. Dale Worley posted a patch to add @###.## type fields to formats. I said, "Neat!" and dropped it in, lock, stock and sinker. Kai Uwe Rommel sent a bunch of MSDOS and OS/2 updates, which I (mostly) incorporated. I can't vouch for them, but they look okay. Any data stored after the __END__ marker can be accesses now via the DATA filehandle, which is automatically opened onto the script at that point. (Well, actually, it's just kept open, since it was already open to read the script.) The taintperl program now checks for world writable PATH components, and complains if any are found (if PATH is used). Bug fixes: It used to be that you could get core dumps by such means as @$foo=(); @foo[42]; (1,2,3)[42]; $#foo = 50; foreach $elem (@foo) { $elem = 1; } This is no longer so. (For those who are up on Perl internals, the stack policy no longer allows Nullstr--all undefined values must be passed as &str_undef.) If you say something like local($foo,$bar); or local($initialized,$foo,$bar) = ('one value'); $foo and $bar are now initialized to the undefined value, rather than the defined null string. Array assignment to special arrays is now better supported. For instance, @ENV = () clears the environment, and %foo = () will now clear any dbm file bound to %foo. On the subject of dbm files, the highly visible bugs at patchlevel 28 have been fixed. You can now open dbm files readonly, and you don't have to do a dummy assignment to make the cache allocate itself. The modulus operator wasn't working right on negative values because of a misplaced cast. For instance, -5 % 5 was returning the value 5, which is clearly wrong. Certain operations coredumped if you didn't supply a value: close; eof; Previously, if the subroutine supplied for a sort operation didn't exist, it failed quietly. Now it produces a fatal error. The bitwise complement operator ~ didn't work on vec() strings longer than one byte because of failure to increment a loop variable. The oct and hex functions returned a negative result if the highest bit was set. They now return an unsigned result, which seems a little less confusing. Likewise, the token 0x80000000 also produces an unsigned value now. Some machines didn't like to see 0x87654321 in an #ifdef because they think of the symbols as signed. The tests have been changed to just look at the lower 4 nybbles of the value, which is sufficient to determine endianness, at least as far as the #ifdefs are concerned. The unshift operator did not return the documented value, which was the number of elements in the new array. Instead it returned the last unshifted argument, more or less by accident. -w sometimes printed spurious warnings about ARGV and ENV when referencing the arrays indirectly through shift or exec. This was because the typo test was misplaced before the code that exempts special variables from the typo test. If you said 'require "./foo.pl"', it would look in someplace like /usr/local/lib/perl/./foo.pl instead of the current directory. This works more like people expect now. The require error messages also referred to wrong file, if they worked at all. The h2ph program didn't translate includes right--it should have changed .h to .ph. Patterns with multiple short literal strings sometimes failed. This was a problem with the code that looks for a maximal literal string to feed to the Boyer-Moore searching routine. The code was gluing together literal strings that weren't continuous. The $* variable controls multi-line pattern matching. When it's 0, patterns are supposed to match as if the string contained a single line. Unfortunately, /^pat/ occasionally matched in middle of string under certain conditions. Recently the regular expression routines were upgraded to do {n,m} more efficiently. In doing this, however, I manufactured a couple of bugs: /.{n,m}$/ could match with fewer than n characters remaining on the line, and patterns like /\d{9}/ could match more than 9 characters. The undefined value has an actual physical location in Perl, and pointers to it are passed around. By certain circuitous routes it was possible to clobber the undefined value so that it was no longer undefined--kind of like making /dev/null into a real file. Hopefully this can't happen any more. op.stat could fail if /bin/0 existed, because of a while (<*>) {... This has been changed to a while (defined($_ = <*>)) {... The length of a search pattern was limited by the length of tokenbuf internally. This restriction has been removed. The null character gave the tokener indigestion when used as a delimiter for m// or s///. There was a bunch of other cleanupish things that are too trivial to mention here.
* perl 3.0 patch #26 patch #19, continuedLarry Wall1990-08-082-0/+162
| | | | See patch #19.
* perl 3.0 patch #25 patch #19, continuedLarry Wall1990-08-081-0/+210
| | | | See patch #19.
* perl 3.0 patch #23 patch #19, continuedLarry Wall1990-08-081-0/+70
| | | | See patch #19.
* perl 3.0 patch #20 patch #19, continuedLarry Wall1990-08-082-0/+843
| | | | See patch #19.
* perl 3.0 patch #19 (combined patch)Larry Wall1990-08-081-0/+124
You now have the capability of linking C subroutines into a special version of perl. See the files in usub/ for an example. There is now an operator to include library modules with duplicate suppression and error checking, called "require". (makelib has been renamed to h2ph, and Tom Christiansen's h2pl stuff has been included too. Perl .h files are now called .ph files to avoid confusion.) It's now possible to truncate files if your machines supports any of ftruncate(fd, size), chsize(fd, size) or fcntl(fd, F_FREESP, size). Added -c switch to do compilation only, that is, to suppress execution. Useful in combination with -D1024. There's now a -x switch to extract a script from the input stream so you can pipe articles containing Perl scripts directly into perl. Previously, the only places you could use bare words in Perl were as filehandles or labels. You can now put bare words (identifiers) anywhere. If they have no interpretation as filehandles or labels, they will be treated as if they had single quotes around them. This works together nicely with the fact that you can use a symbol name indirectly as a filehandle or to assign to *name. It basically means you can write subroutines and pass filehandles without quoting or *-ing them. (It also means the grammar is even more ambiguous now--59 reduce/reduce conflicts!!! But it seems to do the Right Thing.) Added __LINE__ and __FILE__ tokens to let you interpolate the current line number or filename, such as in a call to an error routine, or to help you translate eval linenumbers to real linenumbers. Added __END__ token to let you mark the end of the program in the input stream. (^D and ^Z are allowed synonyms.) Program text and data can now both come from STDIN. `command` in array context now returns array of lines. Previously it would return a single element array holding all the lines. An empty %array now returns 0 in scalar context so that you can use it profitably in a conditional: &blurfl if %seen; The include search path (@INC) now includes . explicity at the end, so you can change it if you wish. Library routines now have precedence by default. Several pattern matching optimizations: I sped up /x+y/ patterns greatly by not retrying on every x, and disabled backoff on patterns anchored to the end like /\s+$/. This made /\s+$/ run 100 times faster on a string containing 70 spaces followed by an X. Actual improvements will generally be less than that. I also sped up {m,n} on simple items by making it a variant of *. And /.*whatever/ is now optimizaed to /^.*whatever/ to avoid retrying at every position in the event of failure. I fixed character classes to allow backslashing hyphen, by popular request. In the past, $ in a pattern would sometimes match in the middle of the string and sometimes not, if $* == 0. Now it will never match except at the end of the string, or just before a terminating newline. When $* == 1 behavior is as before. In the README file, I've expanded on just how I think the GNU General Public License applies to Perl and to things you might want to do with Perl. The interpreter used to set the global variable "line" to be the current line number. Instead, it now sets a global pointer to the current Perl statement, which is no more overhead, but now we will have access to the file name and package name associated with that statement, so that the debugger soon be upgraded to allow debugging of evals and packages. In the past, a conditional construct in an array context passed the array context on to the conditional expression, causing general consternation and confusion. Conditionals now always supply a scalar context to the expression, and if that expression turns out to be the one whose value is returned, the value is coerced to an array value of one element. The switch optimizer was confused by negative fractional values, and truncating them the wrong direction. Configure now checks for chsize, select and truncate functions, and now asks if you want to put scripts into some separate directory from your binaries. More and more people are establishing a common directory across architectures for scripts, so this is getting important. It used to be that a numeric literal ended up being stored both as a string and as a double. This could make for lots of wasted storage if you said things like "$seen{$key} = 1;". So now numeric literals are now stored only in floating point format, which saves space, and generates at most one extra conversion per literal over the life of the script. The % operator had an off-by-one error if the left argument was negative. The pack and unpack functions have been upgraded. You can now convert native float and double fields using f and d. You can specify negative relative positions with X<n>, and absolute positions in the record with @<n>. You can have a length of * on the final field to indicate that it is to gobble all the rest of the available fields. In unpack, if you precede a field spec with %<n>, it does an n-bit checksum on it instead of the value itself. (Thus "%16C*" will checksum just like the Sys V sum program.) One totally wacked out evening I hacked a u format in to pack and unpack uudecode-style strings. A couple bugs were fixed in unpack--it couldn't unpack an A or a format field in a scalar context, which is just supposed to return the first field. The c and C formats were also calling bcopy to copy each character. Yuck. Machines without the setreuid() system call couldn't manipulate $< and $> easily. Now, if you've got setuid(), you can say $< = $> or $> = $< or even ($<, $>) = ($uid, $uid), as long as it's something that can be done with setuid(). Similarly for setgid(). I've included various MSDOS and OS/2 patches that people have sent. There's still more in the hopper... An open on a pipe for output such as 'open(STDOUT,"|command")' left STDOUT attached to the wrong file descriptor. This didn't matter within Perl, but it made subprocesses expecting stdout to be on fd 1 rather irate. The print command could fail to detect errors such as running out room on the disk. Now it checks a little better. Saying "print @foo" might only print out some of the elements if there undefined elements in the middle of the array, due to a reversed bit of logic in the print routine. On machines with vfork the child process would allocate memory in the parent without the parent knowing about it, or having any way to free the memory so allocated. The parent now calls a cleanup routine that knows whether that's what happened. If the getsockname or getpeername functions returned a normal Unix error, perl -w would report that you tried I/O on an unopened socket, even though it was open. MACH doesn't have seekdir or telldir. Who ever uses them anyway? Under certain circumstances, an optimized pattern match could pass a hint into the standard pattern matching routine which the standard routine would then ignore. The next pattern match after that would then get a "panic: hint in do_match" because the hint didn't point into the current string of interest. The $' variable returned a short string if it contained an embedded null. Two common split cases are now special-cased to avoid the regular expression code. One is /\s+/ (and its cousin ' ', which also trims leading whitespace). The other is /^/, which is very useful for splitting a "here-is" quote into lines: @lines = split(/^/, <<END); Element 0 Element 1 Element 2 END You couldn't split on a single case-insensitive letter because the single character split optimization ignore the case folding flag. Sort now handles undefined strings right, and sorts lists a little more efficiently because it weeds them out before sorting so it doesn't have to check for them on every comparison. The each() and keys() functions were returning garbage on null keys in DBM files because the DBM iterator merely returns a pointer into the buffer to a string that's not necessarily null terminated. Internally, Perl keeps a null at the end of every string (though allowing embedded nulls) and some routines make use of this to avoid checking for the end of buffer on every comparison. So this just needed to be treated as a special case. The &, | and ^ operators will do bitwise operations on two strings, but for some reason I hadn't implemented ~ to do a complement. Using an associative array name with a % in dbmopen(%name...) didn't work right, not because it didn't parse, but because the dbm opening routine internally did the wrong thing with it. You can now say dbmopen(name, 'filename', undef) to prevent it from opening the dbm file if it doesn't exist. The die operator simply exited if you didn't give an argument, because that made sense before eval existed. But now it will be equivalent to "die 'Died';". Using the return function outside a subroutine returned a cryptic message about not being able to pop a magical label off the stack. It's now more informative. On systems without the rename() system call, it's emulated with unlink()/link()/unlink(), which could clobber a file if it happened to unlink it before it linked it. Perl now checks to make sure the source and destination filenames aren't in fact the same directory entry. The -s file test now returns size of file. Why not? If you tried to write a general subroutine to open files, passing in the filehandle as *filehandle, it didn't work because nobody took responsibility to allocate the filehandle structure internally. Now, passing *name to subroutine forces filehandle and array creation on that symbol if they're already not created. Reading input via <HANDLE> is now a little more efficient--it does one less string copy. The dumpvar.pl routine now fixes weird chars to be printable, and allows you to specify a list of varables to display. The debugger takes advantage of this. The debugger also now allows \ continuation lines, and has an = command to let you make aliases easily. Line numbers should now be correct even after lines containing only a semicolon. The action code for parsing split; with no arguments didn't pass correct a corrent value of bufend to the scanpat it was using to establish the /\s+/ pattern. The $] variable returned the rcsid string and patchlevel. It still returns that in a string context, but in a numeric context it returns the version number (as in 4.0) + patchlevel / 1000. So these patches are being applied to 3.018. The variables $0, %ENV, @ARGV were retaining incorrect information from the previous incarnation in dumped/undumped scripts. The %ENV array is suppose to be global even inside packages, but and off-by-one error kept it from being so. The $| variable couldn't be set on a filehandle before the file was opened. Now you can. If errno == 0, the $! variable returned "Error 0" in a string context, which is, unfortunately, a true string. It now returns "" in string context if errno == 0, so you can use it reasonable in a conditional without comparing it to 0: &cleanup if $!; On some machines, conversion of a number to a string caused a malloc string to be overrun by 1 character. More memory is now allocated for such a string. The tainting mechanism didn't work right on scripts that were setgid but not setuid. If you had reference to an array such as @name in a program, but didn't invoke any of the usual array operations, the array never got initialized. The FPS compiler doesn't do default in a switch very well if the value can be interpreted as a signed character. There's now a #ifdef BADSWITCH for such machines. Certain combinations of backslashed backslashes weren't correctly parsed inside double-quoted strings. "Here" strings caused warnings about uninitialized variables because the string used internally to accumulate the lines wasn't initialized according to the standards of the -w switch. The a2p translator couldn't parse {foo = (bar == 123)} due to a hangover from the old awk syntax. It also needed to put a chop into a program if the program referenced NF so that the field count would come out right when the split was done. There was a missing semicolon when local($_) was emitted. I also didn't realize that an explicity awk split on ' ' trims leading whitespace just like the implicit split at the beginning of the loop. The awk for..in loop has to be translated in one of two ways in a2p, depending on whether the array was produced by a split or by subscripting. If the array was a normal array, a2p put out code that iterated over the array values rather than the numeric indexes, which was wrong. The s2p didn't translate \n correctly, stripping the backslash.