perl5181delta

PERL5181DELTA(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       PERL5181DELTA(1)

NAME
       perl5181delta - what is new for perl v5.18.1

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.18.0 release and the
       5.18.1 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.16.0, first read
       perl5180delta, which describes differences between 5.16.0 and 5.18.0.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes intentionally incompatible with 5.18.0 If any
       exist, they are bugs, and we request that you submit a report.  See
       "Reporting Bugs" below.

Modules and Pragmata
   Updated Modules and Pragmata
       o   B has been upgraded from 1.42 to 1.42_01, fixing bugs related to
           lexical subroutines.

       o   Digest::SHA has been upgraded from 5.84 to 5.84_01, fixing a
           crashing bug.  [RT #118649]

       o   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from 2.89 to 2.96.

Platform Support
   Platform-Specific Notes
       AIX A rarely-encountered configuration bug in the AIX hints file has
           been corrected.

       MidnightBSD
           After a patch to the relevant hints file, perl should now build
           correctly on MidnightBSD 0.4-RELEASE.

Selected Bug Fixes
       o   Starting in v5.18.0, a construct like "/[#](?{})/x" would have its
           "#" incorrectly interpreted as a comment.  The code block would be
           skipped, unparsed.  This has been corrected.

       o   A number of memory leaks related to the new, experimental regexp
           bracketed character class feature have been plugged.

       o   The OP allocation code now returns correctly aligned memory in all
           cases for "struct pmop". Previously it could return memory only
           aligned to a 4-byte boundary, which is not correct for an ithreads
           build with 64 bit IVs on some 32 bit platforms. Notably, this
           caused the build to fail completely on sparc GNU/Linux. [RT
           #118055]

       o   The debugger's "man" command been fixed. It was broken in the
           v5.18.0 release. The "man" command is aliased to the names "doc"
           and "perldoc" - all now work again.

       o   @_ is now correctly visible in the debugger, fixing a regression
           introduced in v5.18.0's debugger. [RT #118169]

       o   Fixed a small number of regexp constructions that could either fail
           to match or crash perl when the string being matched against was
           allocated above the 2GB line on 32-bit systems. [RT #118175]

       o   Perl v5.16 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby calls to XSUBs
           that were not visible at compile time were treated as lvalues and
           could be assigned to, even when the subroutine was not an lvalue
           sub.  This has been fixed.  [perl #117947]

       o   Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby dual-vars (i.e.
           variables with both string and numeric values, such as $! ) where
           the truthness of the variable was determined by the numeric value
           rather than the string value. [RT #118159]

       o   Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby interpolating
           mixed up- and down-graded UTF-8 strings in a regex could result in
           malformed UTF-8 in the pattern: specifically if a downgraded
           character in the range "\x80..\xff" followed a UTF-8 string, e.g.

               utf8::upgrade(  my $u = "\x{e5}");
               utf8::downgrade(my $d = "\x{e5}");
               /$u$d/

           [perl #118297].

       o   Lexical constants ("my sub a() { 42 }") no longer crash when
           inlined.

       o   Parameter prototypes attached to lexical subroutines are now
           respected when compiling sub calls without parentheses.
           Previously, the prototypes were honoured only for calls with
           parentheses. [RT #116735]

       o   Syntax errors in lexical subroutines in combination with calls to
           the same subroutines no longer cause crashes at compile time.

       o   The dtrace sub-entry probe now works with lexical subs, instead of
           crashing [perl #118305].

       o   Undefining an inlinable lexical subroutine ("my sub foo() { 42 }
           undef &foo") would result in a crash if warnings were turned on.

       o   Deep recursion warnings no longer crash lexical subroutines. [RT
           #118521]

Acknowledgements
       Perl 5.18.1 represents approximately 2 months of development since Perl
       5.18.0 and contains approximately 8,400 lines of changes across 60
       files from 12 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 5.18.1:

       Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsaker,
       David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai,
       Nicholas Clark, Peter Martini, Ricardo Signes, Shlomi Fish, 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.

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://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 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.

SEE ALSO
       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.

perl v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                  PERL5181DELTA(1)