PERL573DELTA(1)

NAME
perl573delta - what's new for perl v5.7.3

DESCRIPTION
This document describes differences between the 5.7.2 release and the 5.7.3 release.

(To view the differences between the 5.6.0 release and the 5.7.0 release, see perl570delta. To view the differences between the 5.7.0 release and the 5.7.1 release, see perl571delta. To view the differences between the 5.7.1 release and the 5.7.2 release, see perl572delta.)

Changes
This is just a selected list of some of the more notable changes. The numbers refer to the Perl repository change numbers; see Changes58 (or Changes in Perl 5.8.1). In addition to these changes, lots of work took place in integrating threads, PerlIO, and Unicode; general code cleanup; and last but not least porting to non-UNIX lands such as Win32, VMS, Cygwin, DJGPP, VOS, MacOS Classic, and EBCDIC.

11362
    add LC_MESSAGES to POSIX :locale_h export tag

11371
    add DEL to [:cntrl:]

11375
    make h2ph understand constants like 1234L and 5678LL

11405
    Win32: fix bugs in handling of the virtualized environment

11410
    fix a bug in the security taint checking of open()

11423
    make perl fork() safe even on platforms that don't have pthread_atfork()

11459
    make switching optimization and debugging levels during Perl builds easier via the OPTIMIZE environment variable

11475
    make split()'s unused captures to be undef, not ''

11485
    Search::Dict: allow transforming lines before comparing

11490
    allow installing extra modules or bundles when building Perl

11516
    add -Wall in cflags when compiling with gcc to weed out dubious C practices

11541
    pluggable optimizer

11549
    WinCE: integrate the port

11589
    Win32: 4-arg select was broken

11594
    introduce the perlivp utility for verifying the Perl installation (IVP = Installation Verification Procedure)

11623
    rename lib/unicode to lib/unicore to avoid case-insensitivity problems with lib/Unicode

111631
    remove Time::Piece

11643
    document that use utf8 is not the right way most of the time

11656
    allow building perl with -DUSE_UTF8_SCRIPTS which makes UTF-8 the default script encoding (not the default since that would break all scripts having legacy eight-bit data in them)

11725
    division preserving 64-bit integers

11743
    document the coderef-in-@INC feature

11794
    modulo (%) preserving 64-bit integers

11825
    update to Unicode 3.1.1

11865
    add the \[$@%&*] prototype support

11874
    oct() and hex() in glorious 64 bit

11877
    Class::Struct: allow recursive classes

11993
    fix unpack U to be the reverse of pack U

12056
    VMS: waitpid enhancements

12180
    unpack("Z*Z*", pack("Z*Z*", ..)) was broken

12243
    Devel::Peek: display UTF-8 SVs also also as \x{...}

12288
    Data::Dumper: option to sort hashes

12542
    add perlpodspec

12652
    threadsafe DynaLoader, re, Opcode, File::Glob, and B

12756
    support BeOS better

12874
    read-only hashes (user-level interface is Hash::Util)

13162
    add Devel::PPPort

13179
    add the sort pragma

13326
    VMS: fix perl -P

13358
    add perlpacktut

13452
    SUPER-UX: add hints file

13575
    Win32: non-blocking waitpid(-1,WNOHANG)

13684
    introduce the -t option for gentler taint checking

14694
    add the if pragma

14832
    implement IV/UV/NV/long double un/packing with j/J/F/D

14854
    document the new taint behaviour of exec LIST and system LIST

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.com/, 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.

SEE ALSO
The Changes file for exhaustive details on what changed.

The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

The README file for general stuff.

The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.

HISTORY
Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>, with many contributions from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting feedback and patches.

Send omissions or corrections to <perlbug@perl.org>.