perl5178delta - what is new for perl v5.17.8
This document describes differences between the 5.17.7 release and the 5.17.8 release.
If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.17.6, first read perl5177delta, which describes differences between 5.17.6 and 5.17.7.
This is an experimental feature to allow matching against the union, intersection, etc., of sets of code points, similar to Unicode::Regex::Set. It can also be used to extend /x processing to [bracketed] character classes, and as a replacement of user-defined properties, allowing more complex expressions than they do. See "(?[ ])" in perlre.
/x
The Pod::LaTeX module is now deprecated, and due to be moved out of the Perl core in 5.20. Until then, using the core-installed version will produce a warning. You can suppress the warning by installing the module from CPAN.
A user-defined character name with trailing or multiple spaces in a row is likely a typo. This now generates a warning when defined, on the assumption that uses of it will be unlikely to include the excess whitespace.
All the functions used to classify characters will be removed from a future version of Perl, and should not be used. With participating C compilers (e.g., gcc), compiling any file that uses any of these will generate a warning. These were not intended for public use; there are equivalent, faster, macros for most of them. See "Character classes" in perlapi. The complete list (including some that were deprecated in 5.17.7) is: is_uni_alnum, is_uni_alnumc, is_uni_alnumc_lc, is_uni_alnum_lc, is_uni_alpha, is_uni_alpha_lc, is_uni_ascii, is_uni_ascii_lc, is_uni_blank, is_uni_blank_lc, is_uni_cntrl, is_uni_cntrl_lc, is_uni_digit, is_uni_digit_lc, is_uni_graph, is_uni_graph_lc, is_uni_idfirst, is_uni_idfirst_lc, is_uni_lower, is_uni_lower_lc, is_uni_print, is_uni_print_lc, is_uni_punct, is_uni_punct_lc, is_uni_space, is_uni_space_lc, is_uni_upper, is_uni_upper_lc, is_uni_xdigit, is_uni_xdigit_lc, is_utf8_alnum, is_utf8_alnumc, is_utf8_alpha, is_utf8_ascii, is_utf8_blank, is_utf8_char, is_utf8_cntrl, is_utf8_digit, is_utf8_graph, is_utf8_idcont, is_utf8_idfirst, is_utf8_lower, is_utf8_mark, is_utf8_perl_space, is_utf8_perl_word, is_utf8_posix_digit, is_utf8_print, is_utf8_punct, is_utf8_space, is_utf8_upper, is_utf8_xdigit, is_utf8_xidcont, is_utf8_xidfirst.
is_uni_alnum
is_uni_alnumc
is_uni_alnumc_lc
is_uni_alnum_lc
is_uni_alpha
is_uni_alpha_lc
is_uni_ascii
is_uni_ascii_lc
is_uni_blank
is_uni_blank_lc
is_uni_cntrl
is_uni_cntrl_lc
is_uni_digit
is_uni_digit_lc
is_uni_graph
is_uni_graph_lc
is_uni_idfirst
is_uni_idfirst_lc
is_uni_lower
is_uni_lower_lc
is_uni_print
is_uni_print_lc
is_uni_punct
is_uni_punct_lc
is_uni_space
is_uni_space_lc
is_uni_upper
is_uni_upper_lc
is_uni_xdigit
is_uni_xdigit_lc
is_utf8_alnum
is_utf8_alnumc
is_utf8_alpha
is_utf8_ascii
is_utf8_blank
is_utf8_char
is_utf8_cntrl
is_utf8_digit
is_utf8_graph
is_utf8_idcont
is_utf8_idfirst
is_utf8_lower
is_utf8_mark
is_utf8_perl_space
is_utf8_perl_word
is_utf8_posix_digit
is_utf8_print
is_utf8_punct
is_utf8_space
is_utf8_upper
is_utf8_xdigit
is_utf8_xidcont
is_utf8_xidfirst
In addition these three functions that have never worked properly are deprecated: to_uni_lower_lc, to_uni_title_lc, and to_uni_upper_lc.
to_uni_lower_lc
to_uni_title_lc
to_uni_upper_lc
There are three pairs of characters that Perl recognizes as metacharacters in regular expression patterns: {}, [], and (). These can be used as well to delimit patterns, as in:
{}
[]
()
m{foo} s(foo)(bar)
Since they are metacharacters, they have special meaning to regular expression patterns, and it turns out that you can't turn off that special meaning by the normal means of preceding them with a backslash, if you use them, paired, within a pattern delimitted by them. For example, in
m{foo\{1,3\}}
the backslashes do not change the behavior, and this matches "f o" followed by one to three more occurrences of "o".
"f o"
"o"
Usages like this, where they are interpreted as metacharacters, are exceedingly rare; we think there are none, for example, in all of CPAN. Hence, this deprecation should affect very little code. It does give notice, however, that any such code needs to change, which will in turn allow us to change the behavior in future Perl versions so that the backslashes do have an effect, and without fear that we are silently breaking any existing code.
Several modules have had their version number changed to one with no underscore, since such version numbers are usually interpreted to mean "development-only version". No other changes have been made in these cases. The affected modules are:
I18N::Langinfo was 0.08_02 and is now 0.09
I18N::LangTags::List was 0.35_01 and is now 0.39
IO was 1.25_08 and is now 1.26
Safe was 2.33_01 and is now 2.34
Test was 1.25_02 and is now 1.26.
Digest::SHA has been upgraded from version 5.80 to 5.81. This fixes a double-free bug, which might have caused vulnerabilities in some cases.
Module::CoreList has been upgraded from 2.79 to 2.80.
Socket has been upgraded from 2.006_001 to 2.009. This fixes an uninitialized memory read.
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.
'%s' resolved to '\o{%s}%d'
'Trailing white-space in a charnames alias definition is deprecated'
'A sequence of multiple spaces in a charnames alias definition is deprecated'
'Passing malformed UTF-8 to "%s" is deprecated'
Many more of the core's tests now have descriptions.
Thread stress-tests now adapt to the speed of the machine running the tests, thus reducing the incidence of false failures.
Support for Rhapsody has been removed.
Perl can now be built using Microsoft's Visual C++ 2012 compiler by specifying CCTYPE=MSVC110 (or MSVC110FREE if you are using the free Express edition for Windows Desktop) in win32/Makefile.
Perl should now work out of the box on Haiku R1 Alpha 4.
A synonym for the misleadingly named av_len() has been created: av_top(). Both of these return the number of the highest index in the array, not the number of elements it contains.
av_len()
av_top()
A bug in the core typemap caused any C types that map to the T_BOOL core typemap entry to not be set, updated, or modified when the T_BOOL variable was used in an OUTPUT: section with an exception for RETVAL. T_BOOL in an INPUT: section was not affected. Using a T_BOOL return type for an XSUB (RETVAL) was not affected. A side effect of fixing this bug is, if a T_BOOL is specified in the OUTPUT: section (which previous did nothing to the SV), and a read only SV (literal) is passed to the XSUB, croaks like "Modification of a read-only value attempted" will happen. [perl #115796]
On many platforms, providing a directory name as the script name caused perl to do nothing and report success. It should now universally report an error and exit nonzero. [perl #61362]
Perl 5.17.7 introduced a new internal copy-on-write mechanism, in the interests of speed. An flaw in the implementation means that some regexp matches which previously completed very fast, without invoking the full regexp engine, now run much slower than before. We expect this performance problem to be resolved before 5.18.0 is released.
The POSIX module may yield test failures when building on a ZFS filesystem under FreeBSD.
POSIX
Perl 5.17.8 represents approximately 5 weeks of development since Perl 5.17.7 and contains approximately 18,000 lines of changes across 280 files from 24 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 5.17.8:
Aaron Crane, Andy Dougherty, Augustina Blair, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Dragan, Dave Rolsky, David Mitchell, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, H.Merijn Brand, James E Keenan, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Luehrs, Karl Williamson, Matthew Horsfall, Nicholas Clark, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, Steffen Müller, Steve Hay, Steven Schubiger, Tony Cook.
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.
perl -V
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 the 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 only use this address 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.
To install vars, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm vars
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install vars
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.