path: root/pod/perl592delta.pod

=head1 NAME

perldelta - what is new for perl v5.9.2

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document describes differences between the 5.9.1 and the 5.9.2
development releases. See L<perl590delta> and L<perl591delta> for the
differences between 5.8.0 and 5.9.1.

=head1 Incompatible Changes

=head2 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 C<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 C<use bytes>.

To be consistent with pack(), the C<C0> in unpack() templates indicates
that the data is to be processed in character mode, i.e. character by
character; on the contrary, C<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.

Moreover, C<C0> and C<U0> can also be used in pack() templates to specify
respectively character and byte modes.

C<C0> and C<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, C<W>, which is intended to
replace the old C<C>. C<C> is kept for unsigned chars coded as bytes in
the strings internal representation. C<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<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<C>.

For consistency, C<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.

=head2 Miscellaneous

The internal dump output has been improved, so that non-printable characters
such as newline and backspace are output in C<\x> notation, rather than
octal.

The B<-C> option can no longer be used on the C<#!> line. It wasn't
working there anyway.

=head1 Core Enhancements

=head2 Malloc wrapping

Perl can now be built to detect attempts to assign pathologically large chunks
of memory.  Previously such assignments would suffer from integer wrap-around
during size calculations causing a misallocation, which would crash perl, and
could theoretically be used for "stack smashing" attacks.  The wrapping
defaults to enabled on platforms where we know it works (most AIX
configurations, BSDi, Darwin, DEC OSF/1, FreeBSD, HP-UX, GNU Linux, OpenBSD,
Solaris, VMS and most Win32 compilers) and defaults to disabled on other
platforms.

=head2 Unicode Character Database 4.0.1

The copy of the Unicode Character Database included in Perl 5.9 has
been updated to 4.0.1 from 4.0.0.

=head2 suidperl less insecure

Paul Szabo has analysed and patched C<suidperl> to remove existing known
insecurities. Currently there are no known holes in C<suidperl>, but previous
experience shows that we cannot be confident that these were the last. You may
no longer invoke the set uid perl directly, so to preserve backwards
compatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid
binary is now C<sperl5.9.>I<n> (C<sperl5.9.2> for this release). C<suidperl>
is installed as a hard link to C<perl>; both C<suidperl> and C<perl> will
invoke C<sperl5.9.2> automatically the set uid binary, so this change should
be completely transparent.

For new projects the core perl team would strongly recommend that you use
dedicated, single purpose security tools such as C<sudo> in preference to
C<suidperl>.

=head2 PERLIO_DEBUG

The C<PERLIO_DEBUG> environment variable has no longer any effect for
setuid scripts and for scripts run with B<-T>.

Moreover, with a thread-enabled perl, using C<PERLIO_DEBUG> could lead to
an internal buffer overflow. This has been fixed.

=head2 Formats

In addition to bug fixes, C<format>'s features have been enhanced. See
L<perlform>.

=head2 Unicode Character Classes

Perl's regular expression engine now contains support for matching on the
intersection of two Unicode character classes. You can also now refer to
user-defined character classes from within other user defined character
classes.

=head2 Byte-order modifiers for pack() and unpack()

There are two new byte-order modifiers, C<E<gt>> (big-endian) and C<E<lt>>
(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 L<perlfunc/pack> and L<perlpacktut> for details.

=head2 Byte count feature in pack()

A new pack() template character, C<".">, returns the number of characters
read so far.

=head2 New variables

A new variable, ${^RE_DEBUG_FLAGS}, controls what debug flags are in
effect for the regular expression engine when running under C<use re
"debug">. See L<re> for details.

A new variable ${^UTF8LOCALE} indicates where an UTF-8 locale was detected
by perl at startup.

=head1 Modules and Pragmata

=head2 New modules

=over 4

=item *

C<encoding::warnings>, by Autrijus Tang, is a module to emit warnings
whenever an ASCII character string containing high-bit bytes is implicitly
converted into UTF-8.

=item *

C<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, C<corelist>.

=back

=head2 Updated And Improved Modules and Pragmata

Dual-lived modules have been updated to be kept up-to-date with respect to
CPAN.

The dual-lived modules which contain an C<_> in their version number are
actually I<ahead> of the corresponding CPAN release.

=over 4

=item B::Concise

C<B::Concise> was significantly improved.

=item Socket

There is experimental support for Linux abstract Unix domain sockets.

=item Sys::Syslog

C<syslog()> can now use numeric constants for facility names and priorities,
in addition to strings.

=item threads

Detached threads are now also supported on Windows.

=back

=head1 Utility Changes

=over 4

=item *

The C<corelist> utility is now installed with perl (see L</"New modules">
above).

=item *

C<h2ph> and C<h2xs> have been made a bit more robust with regard to
"modern" C code.

=item *

Several bugs have been fixed in C<find2perl>, regarding C<-exec> and
C<-eval>. Also the options C<-path>, C<-ipath> and C<-iname> have been
added.

=item *

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.

Perl has a new -dt command-line flag, which enables threads support in the
debugger.

=back

=head1 Performance Enhancements

=over 4

=item *

Unicode case mappings (C</i>, C<lc>, C<uc>, etc) are faster.

=item *

C<@a = sort @a> was optimized to do in-place sort. Likewise, C<reverse
sort ...> is now optimized to sort in reverse, avoiding the generation of
a temporary intermediate list.

=item *

Unnecessary assignments are optimised away in

  my $s = undef;
  my @a = ();
  my %h = ();

=item *

C<map> in scalar context is now optimized.

=item *

The regexp engine now implements the trie optimization : it's able to
factorize common prefixes and suffixes in regular expressions. A new
special variable, ${^RE_TRIE_MAXBUF}, has been added to fine-tune this
optimization.

=back

=head1 Installation and Configuration Improvements

Run-time customization of @INC can be enabled by passing the
C<-Dusesitecustomize> flag to configure. When enabled, this will make perl
run F<$sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl> before anything else.  This script can
then be set up to add additional entries to @INC.

There is alpha support for relocatable @INC entries.

Perl should build on Interix and on GNU/kFreeBSD.

=head1 Selected Bug Fixes

Most of those bugs were reported in the perl 5.8.x maintenance track.
Notably, quite a few utf8 bugs were fixed, and several memory leaks were
suppressed. The perl58Xdelta manpages have more details on them.

Development-only bug fixes include :

C<$Foo::_> was wrongly forced as C<$main::_>.

=head1 New or Changed Diagnostics

A new warning, C<!=~ should be !~>, is emitted to prevent this misspelling
of the non-matching operator.

The warning I<Newline in left-justified string> has been removed.

The error I<Too late for "-T" option> has been reformulated to be more
descriptive.

There is a new compilation error, I<Illegal declaration of subroutine>,
for an obscure case of syntax errors.

The diagnostic output of Carp has been changed slightly, to add a space after
the comma between arguments. This makes it much easier for tools such as
web browsers to wrap it, but might confuse any automatic tools which perform
detailed parsing of Carp output.

C<perl -V> has several improvements, making it more useable from shell
scripts to get the value of configuration variables. See L<perlrun> for
details.

=head1 Changed Internals

The perl core has been refactored and reorganised in several places.
In short, this release will not be binary compatible with any previous
perl release.

=head1 Known Problems

For threaded builds, F<ext/threads/shared/t/wait.t> has been reported to
fail some tests on HP-UX 10.20.

Net::Ping might fail some tests on HP-UX 11.00 with the latest OS
upgrades.

F<t/io/dup.t>, F<t/io/open.t> and F<lib/ExtUtils/t/Constant.t> fail some
tests on some BSD flavours.

=head1 Plans for the next release

The current plan for perl 5.9.3 is to add CPANPLUS as a core module.
More regular expression optimizations are also in the works.

It is planned to release a development version of perl more frequently,
i.e. each time something major changes.

=head1 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.org/ , the Perl Home Page.

If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B<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 C<perl -V>, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be
analysed by the Perl porting team.

=head1 SEE ALSO

The F<Changes> file for exhaustive details on what changed.

The F<INSTALL> file for how to build Perl.

The F<README> file for general stuff.

The F<Artistic> and F<Copying> files for copyright information.

=cut