| PERL5160DELTA(1) | Perl Programmers Reference Guide | PERL5160DELTA(1) |
perl5160delta - what is new for perl v5.16.0
This document describes differences between the 5.14.0 release and the 5.16.0 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.12.0, first read perl5140delta, which describes differences between 5.12.0 and 5.14.0.
Some bug fixes in this release have been backported to later releases of 5.14.x. Those are indicated with the 5.14.x version in parentheses.
With the release of Perl 5.16.0, the 5.12.x series of releases is now out of its support period. There may be future 5.12.x releases, but only in the event of a critical security issue. Users of Perl 5.12 or earlier should consider upgrading to a more recent release of Perl.
This policy is described in greater detail in perlpolicy.
As of this release, version declarations like "use v5.16" now disable all features before enabling the new feature bundle. This means that the following holds true:
use 5.016;
# only 5.16 features enabled here
use 5.014;
# only 5.14 features enabled here (not 5.16)
"use v5.12" and higher continue to enable strict, but explicit "use strict" and "no strict" now override the version declaration, even when they come first:
no strict;
use 5.012;
# no strict here
There is a new ":default" feature bundle that represents the set of features enabled before any version declaration or "use feature" has been seen. Version declarations below 5.10 now enable the ":default" feature set. This does not actually change the behavior of "use v5.8", because features added to the ":default" set are those that were traditionally enabled by default, before they could be turned off.
"no feature" now resets to the default feature set. To disable all features (which is likely to be a pretty special-purpose request, since it presumably won't match any named set of semantics) you can now write "no feature ':all'".
$[ is now disabled under "use v5.16". It is part of the default feature set and can be turned on or off explicitly with "use feature 'array_base'".
The new "__SUB__" token, available under the "current_sub" feature (see feature) or "use v5.16", returns a reference to the current subroutine, making it easier to write recursive closures.
More consistent "eval"
The "eval" operator sometimes treats a string argument as a sequence of characters and sometimes as a sequence of bytes, depending on the internal encoding. The internal encoding is not supposed to make any difference, but there is code that relies on this inconsistency.
The new "unicode_eval" and "evalbytes" features (enabled under "use 5.16.0") resolve this. The "unicode_eval" feature causes "eval $string" to treat the string always as Unicode. The "evalbytes" features provides a function, itself called "evalbytes", which evaluates its argument always as a string of bytes.
These features also fix oddities with source filters leaking to outer dynamic scopes.
See feature for more detail.
"substr" lvalue revamp
When "substr" is called in lvalue or potential lvalue context with two or three arguments, a special lvalue scalar is returned that modifies the original string (the first argument) when assigned to.
Previously, the offsets (the second and third arguments) passed to "substr" would be converted immediately to match the string, negative offsets being translated to positive and offsets beyond the end of the string being truncated.
Now, the offsets are recorded without modification in the special lvalue scalar that is returned, and the original string is not even looked at by "substr" itself, but only when the returned lvalue is read or modified.
These changes result in an incompatible change:
If the original string changes length after the call to "substr" but before assignment to its return value, negative offsets will remember their position from the end of the string, affecting code like this:
my $string = "string";
my $lvalue = \substr $string, -4, 2;
print $$lvalue, "\n"; # prints "ri"
$string = "bailing twine";
print $$lvalue, "\n"; # prints "wi"; used to print "il"
The same thing happens with an omitted third argument. The returned lvalue will always extend to the end of the string, even if the string becomes longer.
Since this change also allowed many bugs to be fixed (see "The "substr" operator"), and since the behavior of negative offsets has never been specified, the change was deemed acceptable.
Return value of "tied"
The value returned by "tied" on a tied variable is now the actual scalar that holds the object to which the variable is tied. This lets ties be weakened with "Scalar::Util::weaken(tied $tied_variable)".
Supports (almost) Unicode 6.1
Besides the addition of whole new scripts, and new characters in existing scripts, this new version of Unicode, as always, makes some changes to existing characters. One change that may trip up some applications is that the General Category of two characters in the Latin-1 range, PILCROW SIGN and SECTION SIGN, has been changed from Other_Symbol to Other_Punctuation. The same change has been made for a character in each of Tibetan, Ethiopic, and Aegean. The code points U+3248..U+324F (CIRCLED NUMBER TEN ON BLACK SQUARE through CIRCLED NUMBER EIGHTY ON BLACK SQUARE) have had their General Category changed from Other_Symbol to Other_Numeric. The Line Break property has changes for Hebrew and Japanese; and because of other changes in 6.1, the Perl regular expression construct "\X" now works differently for some characters in Thai and Lao.
New aliases (synonyms) have been defined for many property values; these, along with the previously existing ones, are all cross-indexed in perluniprops.
The return value of "charnames::viacode()" is affected by other changes:
Code point Old Name New Name U+000A LINE FEED (LF) LINE FEED U+000C FORM FEED (FF) FORM FEED U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) CARRIAGE RETURN U+0085 NEXT LINE (NEL) NEXT LINE U+008E SINGLE-SHIFT 2 SINGLE-SHIFT-2 U+008F SINGLE-SHIFT 3 SINGLE-SHIFT-3 U+0091 PRIVATE USE 1 PRIVATE USE-1 U+0092 PRIVATE USE 2 PRIVATE USE-2 U+2118 SCRIPT CAPITAL P WEIERSTRASS ELLIPTIC FUNCTION
Perl will accept any of these names as input, but "charnames::viacode()" now returns the new name of each pair. The change for U+2118 is considered by Unicode to be a correction, that is the original name was a mistake (but again, it will remain forever valid to use it to refer to U+2118). But most of these changes are the fallout of the mistake Unicode 6.0 made in naming a character used in Japanese cell phones to be "BELL", which conflicts with the longstanding industry use of (and Unicode's recommendation to use) that name to mean the ASCII control character at U+0007. Therefore, that name has been deprecated in Perl since v5.14, and any use of it will raise a warning message (unless turned off). The name "ALERT" is now the preferred name for this code point, with "BEL" an acceptable short form. The name for the new cell phone character, at code point U+1F514, remains undefined in this version of Perl (hence we don't implement quite all of Unicode 6.1), but starting in v5.18, BELL will mean this character, and not U+0007.
Unicode has taken steps to make sure that this sort of mistake does not happen again. The Standard now includes all generally accepted names and abbreviations for control characters, whereas previously it didn't (though there were recommended names for most of them, which Perl used). This means that most of those recommended names are now officially in the Standard. Unicode did not recommend names for the four code points listed above between U+008E and U+008F, and in standardizing them Unicode subtly changed the names that Perl had previously given them, by replacing the final blank in each name by a hyphen. Unicode also officially accepts names that Perl had deprecated, such as FILE SEPARATOR. Now the only deprecated name is BELL. Finally, Perl now uses the new official names instead of the old (now considered obsolete) names for the first four code points in the list above (the ones which have the parentheses in them).
Now that the names have been placed in the Unicode standard, these kinds of changes should not happen again, though corrections, such as to U+2118, are still possible.
Unicode also added some name abbreviations, which Perl now accepts: SP for SPACE; TAB for CHARACTER TABULATION; NEW LINE, END OF LINE, NL, and EOL for LINE FEED; LOCKING-SHIFT ONE for SHIFT OUT; LOCKING-SHIFT ZERO for SHIFT IN; and ZWNBSP for ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE.
More details on this version of Unicode are provided in <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/>.
"use charnames" is no longer needed for "\N{name}"
When "\N{name}" is encountered, the "charnames" module is now automatically loaded when needed as if the ":full" and ":short" options had been specified. See charnames for more information.
"\N{...}" can now have Unicode loose name matching
This is described in the "charnames" item in "Updated Modules and Pragmata" below.
Unicode Symbol Names
Perl now has proper support for Unicode in symbol names. It used to be that "*{$foo}" would ignore the internal UTF8 flag and use the bytes of the underlying representation to look up the symbol. That meant that "*{"\x{100}"}" and "*{"\xc4\x80"}" would return the same thing. All these parts of Perl have been fixed to account for Unicode:
In addition, a parsing bug has been fixed that prevented "*{e}" from implicitly quoting the name, but instead interpreted it as "*{+e}", which would cause a strict violation.
"*{"*a::b"}" automatically strips off the * if it is followed by an ASCII letter. That has been extended to all Unicode identifier characters.
One-character non-ASCII non-punctuation variables (like "$e") are now subject to "Used only once" warnings. They used to be exempt, as they were treated as punctuation variables.
Also, single-character Unicode punctuation variables (like $X) are now supported [perl #69032].
Improved ability to mix locales and Unicode, including UTF-8 locales
An optional parameter has been added to "use locale"
use locale ':not_characters';
which tells Perl to use all but the "LC_CTYPE" and "LC_COLLATE" portions of the current locale. Instead, the character set is assumed to be Unicode. This lets locales and Unicode be seamlessly mixed, including the increasingly frequent UTF-8 locales. When using this hybrid form of locales, the ":locale" layer to the open pragma can be used to interface with the file system, and there are CPAN modules available for ARGV and environment variable conversions.
Full details are in perllocale.
New function "fc" and corresponding escape sequence "\F" for Unicode foldcase
Unicode foldcase is an extension to lowercase that gives better results when comparing two strings case-insensitively. It has long been used internally in regular expression "/i" matching. Now it is available explicitly through the new "fc" function call (enabled by "use feature 'fc'", or "use v5.16", or explicitly callable via "CORE::fc") or through the new "\F" sequence in double-quotish strings.
Full details are in "fc" in perlfunc.
The Unicode "Script_Extensions" property is now supported.
New in Unicode 6.0, this is an improved "Script" property. Details are in "Scripts" in perlunicode.
Improved typemaps for Some Builtin Types
Most XS authors will know there is a longstanding bug in the OUTPUT typemap for T_AVREF ("AV*"), T_HVREF ("HV*"), T_CVREF ("CV*"), and T_SVREF ("SVREF" or "\$foo") that requires manually decrementing the reference count of the return value instead of the typemap taking care of this. For backwards-compatibility, this cannot be changed in the default typemaps. But we now provide additional typemaps "T_AVREF_REFCOUNT_FIXED", etc. that do not exhibit this bug. Using them in your extension is as simple as having one line in your "TYPEMAP" section:
HV* T_HVREF_REFCOUNT_FIXED
"is_utf8_char()"
The XS-callable function "is_utf8_char()", when presented with malformed UTF-8 input, can read up to 12 bytes beyond the end of the string. This cannot be fixed without changing its API, and so its use is now deprecated. Use "is_utf8_char_buf()" (described just below) instead.
Added "is_utf8_char_buf()"
This function is designed to replace the deprecated "is_utf8_char()" function. It includes an extra parameter to make sure it doesn't read past the end of the input buffer.
Other "is_utf8_foo()" functions, as well as "utf8_to_foo()", etc.
Most other XS-callable functions that take UTF-8 encoded input implicitly assume that the UTF-8 is valid (not malformed) with respect to buffer length. Do not do things such as change a character's case or see if it is alphanumeric without first being sure that it is valid UTF-8. This can be safely done for a whole string by using one of the functions "is_utf8_string()", "is_utf8_string_loc()", and "is_utf8_string_loclen()".
New Pad API
Many new functions have been added to the API for manipulating lexical pads. See "Pad Data Structures" in perlapi for more information.
$$ can be assigned to
$$ was made read-only in Perl 5.8.0. But only sometimes: "local $$" would make it writable again. Some CPAN modules were using "local $$" or XS code to bypass the read-only check, so there is no reason to keep $$ read-only. (This change also allowed a bug to be fixed while maintaining backward compatibility.)
$^X converted to an absolute path on FreeBSD, OS X and Solaris
$^X is now converted to an absolute path on OS X, FreeBSD (without needing /proc mounted) and Solaris 10 and 11. This augments the previous approach of using /proc on Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD (in all cases, where mounted).
This makes relocatable perl installations more useful on these platforms. (See "Relocatable @INC" in INSTALL)
Features inside the debugger
The current Perl's feature bundle is now enabled for commands entered in the interactive debugger.
New option for the debugger's t command
The t command in the debugger, which toggles tracing mode, now accepts a numeric argument that determines how many levels of subroutine calls to trace.
"enable" and "disable"
The debugger now has "disable" and "enable" commands for disabling existing breakpoints and re-enabling them. See perldebug.
Breakpoints with file names
The debugger's "b" command for setting breakpoints now lets a line number be prefixed with a file name. See "b [file]:[line] [condition]" in perldebug.
The "CORE::" prefix
The "CORE::" prefix can now be used on keywords enabled by feature.pm, even outside the scope of "use feature".
Subroutines in the "CORE" namespace
Many Perl keywords are now available as subroutines in the CORE namespace. This lets them be aliased:
BEGIN { *entangle = \&CORE::tie }
entangle $variable, $package, @args;
And for prototypes to be bypassed:
sub mytie(\[%$*@]$@) {
my ($ref, $pack, @args) = @_;
... do something ...
goto &CORE::tie;
}
Some of these cannot be called through references or via &foo syntax, but must be called as barewords.
See CORE for details.
Anonymous handles
Automatically generated file handles are now named __ANONIO__ when the variable name cannot be determined, rather than $__ANONIO__.
Autoloaded sort Subroutines
Custom sort subroutines can now be autoloaded [perl #30661]:
sub AUTOLOAD { ... }
@sorted = sort foo @list; # uses AUTOLOAD
"continue" no longer requires the "switch" feature
The "continue" keyword has two meanings. It can introduce a "continue" block after a loop, or it can exit the current "when" block. Up to now, the latter meaning was valid only with the "switch" feature enabled, and was a syntax error otherwise. Since the main purpose of feature.pm is to avoid conflicts with user-defined subroutines, there is no reason for "continue" to depend on it.
DTrace probes for interpreter phase change
The "phase-change" probes will fire when the interpreter's phase changes, which tracks the "${^GLOBAL_PHASE}" variable. "arg0" is the new phase name; "arg1" is the old one. This is useful for limiting your instrumentation to one or more of: compile time, run time, or destruct time.
"__FILE__()" Syntax
The "__FILE__", "__LINE__" and "__PACKAGE__" tokens can now be written with an empty pair of parentheses after them. This makes them parse the same way as "time", "fork" and other built-in functions.
The "\$" prototype accepts any scalar lvalue
The "\$" and "\[$]" subroutine prototypes now accept any scalar lvalue argument. Previously they accepted only scalars beginning with "$" and hash and array elements. This change makes them consistent with the way the built-in "read" and "recv" functions (among others) parse their arguments. This means that one can override the built-in functions with custom subroutines that parse their arguments the same way.
"_" in subroutine prototypes
The "_" character in subroutine prototypes is now allowed before "@" or "%".
The latter function is now deprecated because its API is insufficient to guarantee that it doesn't read (up to 12 bytes in the worst case) beyond the end of its input string. See is_utf8_char_buf().
Two new XS-accessible functions, "utf8_to_uvchr_buf()" and "utf8_to_uvuni_buf()" are now available to prevent this, and the Perl core has been converted to use them. See "Internal Changes".
Calling "File::Glob::bsd_glob" with the unsupported flag GLOB_ALTDIRFUNC would cause an access violation / segfault. A Perl program that accepts a flags value from an external source could expose itself to denial of service or arbitrary code execution attacks. There are no known exploits in the wild. The problem has been corrected by explicitly disabling all unsupported flags and setting unused function pointers to null. Bug reported by Clement Lecigne. (5.14.2)
A hypothetical bug (probably unexploitable in practice) because the incorrect setting of the effective group ID while setting $( has been fixed. The bug would have affected only systems that have "setresgid()" but not "setregid()", but no such systems are known to exist.
It is now deprecated to directly read the Unicode data base files. These are stored in the lib/unicore directory. Instead, you should use the new functions in Unicode::UCD. These provide a stable API, and give complete information.
Perl may at some point in the future change or remove these files. The file which applications were most likely to have used is lib/unicore/ToDigit.pl. "prop_invmap()" in Unicode::UCD can be used to get at its data instead.
This function is deprecated because it could read beyond the end of the input string. Use the new is_utf8_char_buf(), "utf8_to_uvchr_buf()" and "utf8_to_uvuni_buf()" instead.
This section serves as a notice of features that are likely to be removed or deprecated in the next release of perl (5.18.0). If your code depends on these features, you should contact the Perl 5 Porters via the mailing list <http://lists.perl.org/list/perl5-porters.html> or perlbug to explain your use case and inform the deprecation process.
These modules may be marked as deprecated from the core. This only means that they will no longer be installed by default with the core distribution, but will remain available on the CPAN.
These platforms will probably have their special build support removed during the 5.17.0 development series.
For more information about this future deprecation, see the relevant RT ticket <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/11547>.
Perl supports being built without PerlIO proper, using a stdio or sfio wrapper instead. A perl build like this will not support IO layers and thus Unicode IO, making it rather handicapped.
PerlIO supports a "stdio" layer if stdio use is desired, and similarly a sfio layer could be produced.
Starting with v5.20, it is planned to require a literal "{" to be escaped, for example by preceding it with a backslash. In v5.18, a deprecated warning message will be emitted for all such uses. This affects only patterns that are to match a literal "{". Other uses of this character, such as part of a quantifier or sequence as in those below, are completely unaffected:
/foo{3,5}/
/\p{Alphabetic}/
/\N{DIGIT ZERO}
Removing this will permit extensions to Perl's pattern syntax and better error checking for existing syntax. See "Quantifiers" in perlre for an example.
There are several bugs and inconsistencies involving combinations of "\Q" and escapes like "\x", "\L", etc., within a "\Q...\E" pair. These need to be fixed, and doing so will necessarily change current behavior. The changes have not yet been settled.
Special blocks ("BEGIN", "CHECK", "INIT", "UNITCHECK", "END") are now called in void context. This avoids wasteful copying of the result of the last statement [perl #108794].
With "no overloading", regular expression objects returned by "qr//" are now stringified as "Regexp=REGEXP(0xbe600d)" instead of the regular expression itself [perl #108780].
Two presumably unused XS typemap entries have been removed from the core typemap: T_DATAUNIT and T_CALLBACK. If you are, against all odds, a user of these, please see the instructions on how to restore them in perlxstypemap.
These are detailed in "Supports (almost) Unicode 6.1" above. You can compile this version of Perl to use Unicode 6.0. See "Hacking Perl to work on earlier Unicode versions (for very serious hackers only)" in perlunicode.
All support for the Borland compiler has been dropped. The code had not worked for a long time anyway.
Perl should never have exposed certain Unicode properties that are used by Unicode internally and not meant to be publicly available. Use of these has generated deprecated warning messages since Perl 5.12. The removed properties are Other_Alphabetic, Other_Default_Ignorable_Code_Point, Other_Grapheme_Extend, Other_ID_Continue, Other_ID_Start, Other_Lowercase, Other_Math, and Other_Uppercase.
Perl may be recompiled to include any or all of them; instructions are given in "Unicode character properties that are NOT accepted by Perl" in perluniprops.
The "*{...}" operator, when passed a reference to an IO thingy (as in "*{*STDIN{IO}}"), creates a new typeglob containing just that IO object. Previously, it would stringify as an empty string, but some operators would treat it as undefined, producing an "uninitialized" warning. Now it stringifies as __ANONIO__ [perl #96326].
This feature was deprecated in Perl 5.14, and has now been removed. The CPAN module Unicode::Casing provides better functionality without the drawbacks that this feature had, as are detailed in the 5.14 documentation: <http://perldoc.perl.org/5.14.0/perlunicode.html#User-Defined-Case-Mappings-%28for-serious-hackers-only%29>
XSUB C functions are now 'static', that is, they are not visible from outside the compilation unit. Users can use the new "XS_EXTERNAL(name)" and "XS_INTERNAL(name)" macros to pick the desired linking behavior. The ordinary "XS(name)" declaration for XSUBs will continue to declare non-'static' XSUBs for compatibility, but the XS compiler, ExtUtils::ParseXS ("xsubpp") will emit 'static' XSUBs by default. ExtUtils::ParseXS's behavior can be reconfigured from XS using the "EXPORT_XSUB_SYMBOLS" keyword. See perlxs for details.
Weakening read-only references is no longer permitted. It should never have worked anyway, and could sometimes result in crashes.
Attempting to tie a scalar after a typeglob was assigned to it would instead tie the handle in the typeglob's IO slot. This meant that it was impossible to tie the scalar itself. Similar problems affected "tied" and "untie": "tied $scalar" would return false on a tied scalar if the last thing returned was a typeglob, and "untie $scalar" on such a tied scalar would do nothing.
We fixed this problem before Perl 5.14.0, but it caused problems with some CPAN modules, so we put in a deprecation cycle instead.
Now the deprecation has been removed and this bug has been fixed. So "tie $scalar" will always tie the scalar, not the handle it holds. To tie the handle, use "tie *$scalar" (with an explicit asterisk). The same applies to "tied *$scalar" and "untie *$scalar".
All three functions were private, undocumented, and unexported. They do not appear to be used by any code on CPAN. Two have been inlined and one deleted entirely.
Previously, if one called fork(3) from C, Perl's notion of $$ could go out of sync with what getpid() returns. By always fetching the value of $$ via getpid(), this potential bug is eliminated. Code that depends on the caching behavior will break. As described in Core Enhancements, $$ is now writable, but it will be reset during a fork.
The POSIX emulation of $$ and "getppid()" under the obsolete LinuxThreads implementation has been removed. This only impacts users of Linux 2.4 and users of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD up to and including 6.0, not the vast majority of Linux installations that use NPTL threads.
This means that "getppid()", like $$, is now always guaranteed to return the OS's idea of the current state of the process, not perl's cached version of it.
See the documentation for $$ for details.
Similarly to the changes to $$ and "getppid()", the internal caching of $<, $>, $( and $) has been removed.
When we cached these values our idea of what they were would drift out of sync with reality if someone (e.g., someone embedding perl) called "sete?[ug]id()" without updating "PL_e?[ug]id". Having to deal with this complexity wasn't worth it given how cheap the "gete?[ug]id()" system call is.
This change will break a handful of CPAN modules that use the XS-level "PL_uid", "PL_gid", "PL_euid" or "PL_egid" variables.
The fix for those breakages is to use "PerlProc_gete?[ug]id()" to retrieve them (e.g., "PerlProc_getuid()"), and not to assign to "PL_e?[ug]id" if you change the UID/GID/EUID/EGID. There is no longer any need to do so since perl will always retrieve the up-to-date version of those values from the OS.
This is unlikely to result in a real problem, as Perl does not attach special meaning to any non-ASCII character, so it is currently irrelevant which are quoted or not. This change fixes bug [perl #77654] and brings Perl's behavior more into line with Unicode's recommendations. See "quotemeta" in perlfunc.
Matching a code point against a Unicode property is now done via a binary search instead of linear. This means for example that the worst case for a 1000 item property is 10 probes instead of 1000. This inefficiency has been compensated for in the past by permanently storing in a hash the results of a given probe plus the results for the adjacent 64 code points, under the theory that near-by code points are likely to be searched for. A separate hash was used for each mention of a Unicode property in each regular expression. Thus, "qr/\p{foo}abc\p{foo}/" would generate two hashes. Any probes in one instance would be unknown to the other, and the hashes could expand separately to be quite large if the regular expression were used on many different widely-separated code points. Now, however, there is just one hash shared by all instances of a given property. This means that if "\p{foo}" is matched against "A" in one regular expression in a thread, the result will be known immediately to all regular expressions, and the relentless march of using up memory is slowed considerably.
use constant DEBUG => 1;
sub DESTROY { return unless DEBUG; ... }
Constant-folding will reduce the first statement to "return;" if DEBUG is set to 0, triggering this optimization.
This does not affect "glob" on VMS, as it does not use File::Glob.
The "mmap" PerlIO layer is no longer implemented by perl itself, but has been moved out into the new PerlIO::mmap module.
This is only an overview of selected module updates. For a complete list of updates, run:
$ corelist --diff 5.14.0 5.16.0
You can substitute your favorite version in place of 5.14.0, too.
Includes a fix for FreeBSD to only use "unzip" if it is located in "/usr/local/bin", as FreeBSD 9.0 will ship with a limited "unzip" in "/usr/bin".
Adjustments to handle files >8gb (>0777777777777 octal) and a feature to return the MD5SUM of files in the archive.
"base" no longer sets a module's $VERSION to "-1" when a module it loads does not define a $VERSION. This change has been made because "-1" is not a valid version number under the new "lax" criteria used internally by "UNIVERSAL::VERSION". (See version for more on "lax" version criteria.)
"base" no longer internally skips loading modules it has already loaded and instead relies on "require" to inspect %INC. This fixes a bug when "base" is used with code that clear %INC to force a module to be reloaded.
It now includes last read filehandle info and puts a dot after the file and line number, just like errors from "die" [perl #106538].
"charnames" can now be invoked with a new option, ":loose", which is like the existing ":full" option, but enables Unicode loose name matching. Details are in "LOOSE MATCHES" in charnames.
It uses the public and documented FCGI.pm API in CGI::Fast. CGI::Fast was using an FCGI API that was deprecated and removed from documentation more than ten years ago. Usage of this deprecated API with FCGI >= 0.70 or FCGI <= 0.73 introduces a security issue. <https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=68380> <http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2011-2766>
Things that may break your code:
"url()" was fixed to return "PATH_INFO" when it is explicitly requested with either the "path=>1" or "path_info=>1" flag.
If your code is running under mod_rewrite (or compatible) and you are calling "self_url()" or you are calling "url()" and passing "path_info=>1", these methods will actually be returning "PATH_INFO" now, as you have explicitly requested or "self_url()" has requested on your behalf.
The "PATH_INFO" has been omitted in such URLs since the issue was introduced in the 3.12 release in December, 2005.
This bug is so old your application may have come to depend on it or workaround it. Check for application before upgrading to this release.
Examples of affected method calls:
$q->url(-absolute => 1, -query => 1, -path_info => 1);
$q->url(-path=>1);
$q->url(-full=>1,-path=>1);
$q->url(-rewrite=>1,-path=>1);
$q->self_url();
We no longer read from STDIN when the Content-Length is not set, preventing requests with no Content-Length from sometimes freezing. This is consistent with the CGI RFC 3875, and is also consistent with CGI::Simple. However, the old behavior may have been expected by some command-line uses of CGI.pm.
In addition, the DELETE HTTP verb is now supported.
IO::Compress::Zip and IO::Uncompress::Unzip now have support for LZMA (method 14). There is a fix for a CRC issue in IO::Compress::Unzip and it supports Streamed Stored context now. And fixed a Zip64 issue in IO::Compress::Zip when the content size was exactly 0xFFFFFFFF.
Added BITS mode to the addfile method and shasum. This makes partial-byte inputs possible via files/STDIN and lets shasum check all 8074 NIST Msg vectors, where previously special programming was required to do this.
Missing aliases added, a deep recursion error fixed and various documentation updates.
Addressed 'decode_xs n-byte heap-overflow' security bug in Unicode.xs (CVE-2011-2939). (5.14.2)
The new version appends CFLAGS and LDFLAGS to their Config.pm counterparts.
Much of ExtUtils::ParseXS, the module behind the XS compiler "xsubpp", was rewritten and cleaned up. It has been made somewhat more extensible and now finally uses strictures.
The typemap logic has been moved into a separate module, ExtUtils::Typemaps. See "New Modules and Pragmata", above.
For a complete set of changes, please see the ExtUtils::ParseXS changelog, available on the CPAN.
On Windows, tilde (~) expansion now checks the "USERPROFILE" environment variable, after checking "HOME".
It has a new ":bsd_glob" export tag, intended to replace ":glob". Like ":glob" it overrides "glob" with a function that does not split the glob pattern into words, but, unlike ":glob", it iterates properly in scalar context, instead of returning the last file.
There are other changes affecting Perl's own "glob" operator (which uses File::Glob internally, except on VMS). See "Performance Enhancements" and "Selected Bug Fixes".
It no longer returns a wrong result if a script of the same name as the current one exists in the path and is executable.
Added support for using $ENV{http_proxy} to set the default proxy host.
Adds additional shorthand methods for all common HTTP verbs, a "post_form()" method for POST-ing x-www-form-urlencoded data and a "www_form_urlencode()" utility method.
Together, these upgrades fix a problem with IO::Handle's "getline" and "getlines" methods. When these methods are called on the special ARGV handle, the next file is automatically opened, as happens with the built-in "<>" and "readline" functions. But, unlike the built-ins, these methods were not respecting the caller's use of the open pragma and applying the appropriate I/O layers to the newly-opened file [rt.cpan.org #66474].
Capturing of command output (both "STDOUT" and "STDERR") is now supported using IPC::Open3 on MSWin32 without requiring IPC::Run.
Fixes a bug which prevented use of "open3" on Windows when *STDIN, *STDOUT or *STDERR had been localized.
Fixes a bug which prevented duplicating numeric file descriptors on Windows.
"open3" with "-" for the program name works once more. This was broken in version 1.06 (and hence in Perl 5.14.0) [perl #95748].
Added Language Extension codes (langext) and Language Variation codes (langvar) as defined in the IANA language registry.
Added language codes from ISO 639-5
Added language/script codes from the IANA language subtag registry
Fixed an uninitialized value warning [rt.cpan.org #67438].
Fixed the return value for the all_XXX_codes and all_XXX_names functions [rt.cpan.org #69100].
Reorganized modules to move Locale::MODULE to Locale::Codes::MODULE to allow for cleaner future additions. The original four modules (Locale::Language, Locale::Currency, Locale::Country, Locale::Script) will continue to work, but all new sets of codes will be added in the Locale::Codes namespace.
The code2XXX, XXX2code, all_XXX_codes, and all_XXX_names functions now support retired codes. All codesets may be specified by a constant or by their name now. Previously, they were specified only by a constant.
The alias_code function exists for backward compatibility. It has been replaced by rename_country_code. The alias_code function will be removed some time after September, 2013.
All work is now done in the central module (Locale::Codes). Previously, some was still done in the wrapper modules (Locale::Codes::*). Added Language Family codes (langfam) as defined in ISO 639-5.
The "numify" method has been corrected to return a normalized Perl number (the result of "0 + $thing"), instead of a string [rt.cpan.org #66732].
It provides a new "bsgn" method that complements the "babs" method.
It fixes the internal "objectify" function's handling of "foreign objects" so they are converted to the appropriate class (Math::BigInt or Math::BigFloat).
"int()" on a Math::BigRat object containing -1/2 now creates a Math::BigInt containing 0, rather than -0. Math::BigInt does not even support negative zero, so the resulting object was actually malformed [perl #95530].
Fixes include: correct copy constructor usage; fix polarwise formatting with numeric format specifier; and more stable "great_circle_direction" algorithm.
The "corelist" utility now understands the "-r" option for displaying Perl release dates and the "--diff" option to print the set of modlib changes between two perl distributions.
Adds "provides" method to generate a CPAN META provides data structure correctly; use of "package_versions_from_directory" is discouraged.
The XS code is now compiled with "PERL_NO_GET_CONTEXT", which will aid performance under ithreads.
It no longer turns off layers on standard handles when invoked without the ":std" directive. Similarly, when invoked with the ":std" directive, it now clears layers on STDERR before applying the new ones, and not just on STDIN and STDOUT [perl #92728].
"overload::Overloaded" no longer calls "can" on the class, but uses another means to determine whether the object has overloading. It was never correct for it to call "can", as overloading does not respect AUTOLOAD. So classes that autoload methods and implement "can" no longer have to account for overloading [perl #40333].
A warning is now produced for invalid arguments. See "New Diagnostics".
(This is the module that implements "open $fh, '>', \$scalar".)
It fixes a problem with "open my $fh, ">", \$scalar" not working if $scalar is a copy-on-write scalar. (5.14.2)
It also fixes a hang that occurs with "readline" or "<$fh>" if a typeglob has been assigned to $scalar [perl #92258].
It no longer assumes during "seek" that $scalar is a string internally. If it didn't crash, it was close to doing so [perl #92706]. Also, the internal print routine no longer assumes that the position set by "seek" is valid, but extends the string to that position, filling the intervening bytes (between the old length and the seek position) with nulls [perl #78980].
Printing to an in-memory handle now works if the $scalar holds a reference, stringifying the reference before modifying it. References used to be treated as empty strings.
Printing to an in-memory handle no longer crashes if the $scalar happens to hold a number internally, but no string buffer.
Printing to an in-memory handle no longer creates scalars that confuse the regular expression engine [perl #108398].
Functions.pm is now generated at perl build time from annotations in perlfunc.pod. This will ensure that Pod::Functions and perlfunc remain in synchronisation.
This is an extensive rewrite of Pod::Html to use Pod::Simple under the hood. The output has changed significantly.
It corrects the search paths on VMS [perl #90640]. (5.14.1)
The -v option now fetches the right section for $0.
This upgrade has numerous significant fixes. Consult its changelog on the CPAN for more information.
POSIX no longer uses AutoLoader. Any code which was relying on this implementation detail was buggy, and may fail because of this change. The module's Perl code has been considerably simplified, roughly halving the number of lines, with no change in functionality. The XS code has been refactored to reduce the size of the shared object by about 12%, with no change in functionality. More POSIX functions now have tests.
"sigsuspend" and "pause" now run signal handlers before returning, as the whole point of these two functions is to wait until a signal has arrived, and then return after it has been triggered. Delayed, or "safe", signals were preventing that from happening, possibly resulting in race conditions [perl #107216].
"POSIX::sleep" is now a direct call into the underlying OS "sleep" function, instead of being a Perl wrapper on "CORE::sleep". "POSIX::dup2" now returns the correct value on Win32 (i.e., the file descriptor). "POSIX::SigSet" "sigsuspend" and "sigpending" and "POSIX::pause" now dispatch safe signals immediately before returning to their caller.
"POSIX::Termios::setattr" now defaults the third argument to "TCSANOW", instead of 0. On most platforms "TCSANOW" is defined to be 0, but on some 0 is not a valid parameter, which caused a call with defaults to fail.
It has new functions and constants for handling IPv6 sockets:
pack_ipv6_mreq
unpack_ipv6_mreq
IPV6_ADD_MEMBERSHIP
IPV6_DROP_MEMBERSHIP
IPV6_MTU
IPV6_MTU_DISCOVER
IPV6_MULTICAST_HOPS
IPV6_MULTICAST_IF
IPV6_MULTICAST_LOOP
IPV6_UNICAST_HOPS
IPV6_V6ONLY
It no longer turns copy-on-write scalars into read-only scalars when freezing and thawing.
This upgrade closes many outstanding bugs.
Only interpret an initial array reference as a list of colors, not any initial reference, allowing the colored function to work properly on objects with stringification defined.
Term::ReadLine now supports any event loop, including unpublished ones and simple IO::Select, loops without the need to rewrite existing code for any particular framework [perl #108470].
Destructors on shared objects used to be ignored sometimes if the objects were referenced only by shared data structures. This has been mostly fixed, but destructors may still be ignored if the objects still exist at global destruction time [perl #98204].
Updated to CLDR 1.9.1
Locales updated to CLDR 2.0: mk, mt, nb, nn, ro, ru, sk, sr, sv, uk, zh__pinyin, zh__stroke
Newly supported locales: bn, fa, ml, mr, or, pa, sa, si, si__dictionary, sr_Latn, sv__reformed, ta, te, th, ur, wae.
Tailored compatibility ideographs as well as unified ideographs for the locales: ja, ko, zh__big5han, zh__gb2312han, zh__pinyin, zh__stroke.
Locale/*.pl files are now searched for in @INC.
Fixes for the removal of unicore/CompositionExclusions.txt from core.
This adds four new functions: "prop_aliases()" and "prop_value_aliases()", which are used to find all Unicode-approved synonyms for property names, or to convert from one name to another; "prop_invlist" which returns all code points matching a given Unicode binary property; and "prop_invmap" which returns the complete specification of a given Unicode property.
Added SetStdHandle and GetStdHandle functions
As promised in Perl 5.14.0's release notes, the following modules have been removed from the core distribution, and if needed should be installed from CPAN instead.
abbrev.pl assert.pl bigfloat.pl bigint.pl bigrat.pl cacheout.pl
complete.pl ctime.pl dotsh.pl exceptions.pl fastcwd.pl flush.pl
getcwd.pl getopt.pl getopts.pl hostname.pl importenv.pl
lib/find{,depth}.pl look.pl newgetopt.pl open2.pl open3.pl
pwd.pl shellwords.pl stat.pl tainted.pl termcap.pl timelocal.pl
They can be found on CPAN as Perl4::CoreLibs.
perldtrace
perldtrace describes Perl's DTrace support, listing the provided probes and gives examples of their use.
perlexperiment
This document is intended to provide a list of experimental features in Perl. It is still a work in progress.
perlootut
This a new OO tutorial. It focuses on basic OO concepts, and then recommends that readers choose an OO framework from CPAN.
perlxstypemap
The new manual describes the XS typemapping mechanism in unprecedented detail and combines new documentation with information extracted from perlxs and the previously unofficial list of all core typemaps.
perlapi
perlfunc
perlguts
perlobj
perlop
It has also been corrected for the case of "undef" on the left-hand side. The list of different smart match behaviors had an item in the wrong place.
perlpragma
"Laundering and Detecting Tainted Data" in perlsec
perllol
perlmod
perlpodstyle
perlre
perlrun
perlsub
perltie
perlvar
Other Changes
Old OO Documentation
The old OO tutorials, perltoot, perltooc, and perlboot, have been removed. The perlbot (bag of object tricks) document has been removed as well.
Development Deltas
The perldelta files for development releases are no longer packaged with perl. These can still be found in the perl source code repository.
The following additions or changes have been made to diagnostic output, including warnings and fatal error messages. For the complete list of diagnostic messages, see perldiag.
New Errors
This error occurs when "caller" tries to set @DB::args but finds it tied. Before this error was added, it used to crash instead.
This error is part of a safety check that the "tie" operator does before tying a special array like @_. You should never see this message.
This occurs when a subroutine in the "CORE::" namespace is called with &foo syntax or through a reference. Some subroutines in this package cannot yet be called that way, but must be called as barewords. See "Subroutines in the "CORE" namespace", above.
This new error occurs when you try to activate a source filter (usually by loading a source filter module) within a string passed to "eval" under the "unicode_eval" feature.
New Warnings
The long-deprecated "defined(@array)" now also warns for package variables. Previously it issued a warning for lexical variables only.
This new warning occurs when "length" is used on an array or hash, instead of "scalar(@array)" or "scalar(keys %hash)".
attributes.pm now emits this warning when the :lvalue attribute is applied to a Perl subroutine that has already been defined, as doing so can have unexpected side-effects.
This warning, in the "overload" category, is produced when the overload pragma is given an argument it doesn't recognize, presumably a mistyped operator.
This new warning exists to catch the mistaken use of $[ in version checks. $], not $[, contains the version number.
Assigning to a temporary scalar returned from an lvalue subroutine now produces this warning [perl #31946].
"\E" does nothing unless preceded by "\Q", "\L" or "\U".
This error used to occur when "sort" was called without arguments, followed by ";" or ")". (E.g., "sort;" would die, but "{sort}" was OK.) This error message was added in Perl 3 to catch code like "close(sort)" which would no longer work. More than two decades later, this message is no longer appropriate. Now "sort" without arguments is always allowed, and returns an empty list, as it did in those cases where it was already allowed [perl #90030].
h2ph
unless(defined(&FOO)) {
sub FOO () {42;}
}
But the subroutine is a compile-time declaration, and is hence unaffected by the condition. It has now been corrected to emit a string "eval" around the subroutine [perl #99368].
splain
This:
Uncaught exception from user code:
Cannot fwiddle the fwuddle at -e line 1.
at -e line 1
main::baz() called at -e line 1
main::bar() called at -e line 1
main::foo() called at -e line 1
has become this:
Uncaught exception from user code:
Cannot fwiddle the fwuddle at -e line 1.
main::baz() called at -e line 1
main::bar() called at -e line 1
main::foo() called at -e line 1
zipdetails
zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure of the zip file. It is not concerned with displaying any details of the compressed data stored in the zip file.
As global.sym was never installed, this change should not be visible outside the build process.
Cygwin
HP-UX
A fix to correct the socketsize now makes the test suite pass on HP-UX PA-RISC for 64bitall builds. (5.14.2)
VMS
GNU/Hurd
OpenVOS
SunOS
The CC workshop C++ compiler is now detected and used on systems that ship without cc.
Now it will always croak "Don't know how to handle magic of type \\%o", even on read-only values, or SVs which already have the unknown magic type.
HvNAMELEN
HvNAMEUTF8
HvENAMELEN
HvENAMEUTF8
gv_init_pv
gv_init_pvn
gv_init_pvsv
gv_fetchmeth_pv
gv_fetchmeth_pvn
gv_fetchmeth_sv
gv_fetchmeth_pv_autoload
gv_fetchmeth_pvn_autoload
gv_fetchmeth_sv_autoload
gv_fetchmethod_pv_flags
gv_fetchmethod_pvn_flags
gv_fetchmethod_sv_flags
gv_autoload_pv
gv_autoload_pvn
gv_autoload_sv
newGVgen_flags
sv_derived_from_pv
sv_derived_from_pvn
sv_derived_from_sv
sv_does_pv
sv_does_pvn
sv_does_sv
whichsig_pv
whichsig_pvn
whichsig_sv
newCONSTSUB_flags
The gv_fetchmethod_*_flags functions, like gv_fetchmethod_flags, are experimental and may change in a future release.
GvNAMEUTF8
GvENAMELEN
GvENAME_HEK
CopSTASH_flags
CopSTASH_flags_set
PmopSTASH_flags
PmopSTASH_flags_set
sv_sethek
HEKfARG
There is also a "HEKf" macro corresponding to "SVf", for interpolating HEKs in formatted strings.
The "HINT_FEATURE_MASK" macro is defined in perl.h along with other hints. Other macros for setting and testing features and bundles are in the new feature.h. "FEATURE_IS_ENABLED" (which has moved to feature.h) is no longer used throughout the codebase, but more specific macros, e.g., "FEATURE_SAY_IS_ENABLED", that are defined in feature.h.
$hash{elem} = *foo;
Hash::Util::lock_value %hash, 'elem';
It used to return true.
Copy-on-write or shared hash key scalars were introduced in 5.8.0, but most Perl code did not encounter them (they were used mostly internally). Perl 5.10.0 extended them, such that assigning "__PACKAGE__" or a hash key to a scalar would make it copy-on-write. Several parts of Perl were not updated to account for them, but have now been fixed.
Perl has an internal variable that stores the last filehandle to be accessed. It is used by $. and by "tell" and "eof" without arguments.
my $foo = *STDOUT; # $foo is a glob copy
<$foo>; # $foo is now the last-accessed handle
$foo = 3; # no longer a glob
$foo = *STDERR; # still the last-accessed handle
Now the "$foo = 3" assignment unsets that internal variable, so there is no last-accessed filehandle, just as if "<$foo>" had never happened.
This also prevents some unrelated handle from becoming the last-accessed handle if $foo falls out of scope and the same internal SV gets used for another handle [perl #97988].
my $fh = *STDOUT;
tell $fh;
eof $fh;
seek $fh, 0,0;
tell *$fh;
eof *$fh;
seek *$fh, 0,0;
readline *$fh;
This is now fixed, but "tell *{ *$fh }" still has the problem, and it is not clear how to fix it [perl #106536].
The term "filetests" refers to the operators that consist of a hyphen followed by a single letter: "-r", "-x", "-M", etc. The term "stacked" when applied to filetests means followed by another filetest operator sharing the same operand, as in "-r -x -w $fooo".
There were various cases where these could get out of synch, resulting in inconsistent or erratic behavior in edge cases (every mention of "-T" applies to "-B" as well):
These have all been fixed.
There were several inconsistencies in the way the split was done. Now quotation marks (' and ") are always treated as shell-style word delimiters (that allow whitespace as part of a word) and backslashes are always preserved, unless they exist to escape quotation marks. Before, those would only sometimes be the case, depending on whether the pattern contained whitespace. Also, escaped whitespace at the end of the pattern is no longer stripped [perl #40470].
Non-lvalue sub calls whose subs are visible at compile time exhibited the opposite bug. If the call occurred in the last statement of an lvalue subroutine, there would be no error when the lvalue sub was called in lvalue context. Perl would blindly assign to the temporary value returned by the non-lvalue subroutine.
But the change in 5.12 missed the case where custom attributes are also present: that case still silently and ineffectively applied the attribute. That omission has now been corrected. "sub foo :lvalue :Whatever" (when "foo" is already defined) now warns about the :lvalue attribute, and does not apply it.
"\N{KELVIN SIGN}" =~ /k|foo/iaa;
succeeded inappropriately. This is now fixed.
"s\N{U+DF}" =~ /[\x{DF}foo]/i
is one such case. "\xDF" folds to "ss". (5.14.1)
In the past, three Unicode characters: LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S, GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH DIALYTIKA AND TONOS, and GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH DIALYTIKA AND TONOS, along with the sequences that they fold to (including "ss" for LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S), did not properly match under "/i". 5.14.0 fixed some of these cases, but introduced others, including a panic when one of the characters or sequences was used in the "(?(DEFINE)" regular expression predicate. The known bugs that were introduced in 5.14 have now been fixed; as well as some other edge cases that have never worked until now. These all involve using the characters and sequences outside bracketed character classes under "/i". This closes [perl #98546].
There remain known problems when using certain characters with multi-character folds inside bracketed character classes, including such constructs as "qr/[\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP}a-z]/i". These remaining bugs are addressed in [perl #89774].
for (1..10_000_000) {
if ("foo" =~ /(foo|(?<capture>bar))?/) {
my $capture = $+{capture}
}
}
system "ps -o rss $$"'
Nevertheless, these code blocks are still experimental, as there are still problems with the wrong variables being closed over (in loops for instance) and with abnormal exiting (e.g., "die") causing memory corruption.
The same thing happens with the "substr outside of string" error. If the lvalue is only read from, not written to, it is now just a warning, as with rvalue "substr".
Some parts of Perl did not work correctly with nulls ("chr 0") embedded in strings. That meant that, for instance, "$m = "a\0b"; foo->$m" would call the "a" method, instead of the actual method name contained in $m. These parts of perl have been fixed to support nulls:
One side effect of these changes is that blessing into "\0" no longer causes "ref()" to return false.
"lock &sub" is now a run-time error if threads::shared is loaded (a no-op otherwise), but that may be rectified in a future version.
use warnings;
BEGIN {
no warnings;
some_XS_function_that_calls_new_CONSTSUB();
}
use warnings "uninitialized";
use constant {u => undef, v => undef};
sub foo(){u}
sub foo(){v}
Which of these code points is quoted has changed, based on Unicode's recommendations. See "quotemeta" in perlfunc for details.
If a switch, such as -x, that cannot occur on the "#!" line is used there, perl dies with "Can't emulate...".
It used to produce the same message for switches that perl did not recognize at all, whether on the command line or the "#!" line.
Now it produces the "Unrecognized switch" error message [perl #104288].
It also works now with special lvalue functions like "substr" and with nonexistent hash and array elements [perl #3471, #103492].
package Foo;
BEGIN {*Foo:: = *Bar::}
sub foo;
Now there is an extra pass during global destruction to fire destructors on any objects that might be left after the usual passes that check for objects referenced by scalars [perl #36347].
You can now limit the size of an array using "splice(@a,MAX_LEN)" without worrying about warnings.
If make is Sun's make, we get an error about a badly formed macro assignment in the Makefile. That happens when ./Configure tries to make depends. Configure then exits 0, but further make-ing fails.
If make is gmake, Configure completes, then we get errors related to /usr/include/stdbool.h
sh Configure -Doptimize=-O2
make OPTIMIZE='-O2 -flto'
This fails due to problems in Module::Find 0.10 and File::MMagic 1.27.
Perl 5.16.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl 5.14.0 and contains approximately 590,000 lines of changes across 2,500 files from 139 authors.
Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.16.0:
Aaron Crane, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Alan Haggai Alavi, Alberto Simo~es, Alexandr Ciornii, Andreas Koenig, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Bo Johansson, Bo Lindbergh, Breno G. de Oliveira, brian d foy, Brian Fraser, Brian Greenfield, Carl Hayter, Chas. Owens, Chia-liang Kao, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Christian Hansen, Christopher J. Madsen, chromatic, Claes Jacobsson, Claudio Ramirez, Craig A. Berry, Damian Conway, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Darin McBride, Dave Rolsky, David Cantrell, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Dee Newcum, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Dominic Hargreaves, Douglas Christopher Wilson, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frederic Briere, George Greer, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, H.Merijn Brand, Hojung Youn, Ian Goodacre, James E Keenan, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Luehrs, Jesse Vincent, Jilles Tjoelker, Jim Cromie, Jim Meyering, Joel Berger, Johan Vromans, Johannes Plunien, John Hawkinson, John P. Linderman, John Peacock, Joshua ben Jore, Juerd Waalboer, Karl Williamson, Karthik Rajagopalan, Keith Thompson, Kevin J. Woolley, Kevin Ryde, Laurent Dami, Leo Lapworth, Leon Brocard, Leon Timmermans, Louis Strous, Lukas Mai, Marc Green, Marcel Gruenauer, Mark A. Stratman, Mark Dootson, Mark Jason Dominus, Martin Hasch, Matthew Horsfall, Max Maischein, Michael G Schwern, Michael Witten, Mike Sheldrake, Moritz Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Niko Tyni, Nuno Carvalho, Pau Amma, Paul Evans, Paul Green, Paul Johnson, Perlover, Peter John Acklam, Peter Martini, Peter Scott, Phil Monsen, Pino Toscano, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Robin Barker, Rodolfo Carvalho, Salvador Fandin~o, Sam Kimbrel, Samuel Thibault, Shawn M Moore, Shigeya Suzuki, Shirakata Kentaro, Shlomi Fish, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Spiros Denaxas, Steffen Mueller, Steffen Schwigon, Stephen Bennett, Stephen Oberholtzer, Stevan Little, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Thomas Sibley, Thorsten Glaser, Timothe Litt, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Vadim Konovalov, Vincent Pit, Vladimir Timofeev, Walt Mankowski, Yves Orton, Zefram, Zsban Ambrus, AEvar Arnfjoerd` Bjarmason.
The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically generated from version control history. In particular, it does not include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.
Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.
For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.
If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at <http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/>. There may also be information at <http://www.perl.org/>, the Perl Home Page.
If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug program included with your release. Be sure to trim your bug down to a tiny but sufficient test case. Your bug report, along with the output of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team.
If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all core committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is supported. Please use this address only for security issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details on what changed.
The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.
The README file for general stuff.
The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.
| 2019-10-21 | perl v5.30.3 |