PERL586DELTA(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERL586DELTA(1)



NAME
       perldelta - what is new for perl v5.8.6

DESCRIPTION
       This document describes differences between the 5.8.5 release and the
       5.8.6 release.

Incompatible Changes
       There are no changes incompatible with 5.8.5.

Core Enhancements
       The perl interpreter is now more tolerant of UTF-16-encoded scripts.

       On Win32, Perl can now use non-IFS compatible LSPs, which allows Perl
       to work in conjunction with firewalls such as McAfee Guardian. For full
       details see the file README.win32, particularly if you're running
       Win95.

odules and Pragmata
       ]o   With the "base" pragma, an intermediate class with no fields used
           to messes up private fields in the base class. This has been fixed.

       ]o   Cwd upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new PathTools distri-
           bution)

       ]o   Devel::Port upgraded to version 3.03

       ]o   File::Spec upgraded to version 3.01 (as part of the new PathTools
           distribution)

       ]o   Encode upgraded to version 2.08

       ]o   ExtUtils::MakeMaker remains at version 6.17, as later stable
           releases currently available on CPAN have some issues with core
           modules on some core platforms.

       ]o   I18N::LangTags upgraded to version 0.35

       ]o   Math::BigInt upgraded to version 1.73

       ]o   Math::BigRat upgraded to version 0.13

       ]o   MIME::Base64 upgraded to version 3.05

       ]o   POSIX::sigprocmask function can now retrieve the current signal
           mask without also setting it.

       ]o   Time::HiRes upgraded to version 1.65

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

Performance Enhancements
       "reverse sort ..." is now optimized to sort in reverse, avoiding the
       generation of a temporary intermediate list.

       "for (reverse @foo)" now iterates in reverse, avoiding the generation
       of a temporary reversed list.

Selected Bug Fixes
       The regexp engine is now more robust when given invalid utf8 input, as
       is sometimes generated by buggy XS modules.

       "foreach" on threads::shared array used to be able to crash Perl. This
       bug has now been fixed.

       A regexp in "STDOUT"'s destructor used to coredump, because the regexp
       pad was already freed. This has been fixed.

       "goto &" is now more robust - bugs in deep recursion and chained "goto
       &" have been fixed.

       Using "delete" on an array no longer leaks memory. A "pop" of an item
       from a shared array reference no longer causes a leak.

       "evalsv()" failing a taint test could corrupt the stack - this has
       been fixed.

       On platforms with 64 bit pointers numeric comparison operators used to
       erroneously compare the addresses of references that are overloaded,
       rather than using the overloaded values. This has been fixed.

       "read" into a UTF8-encoded buffer with an offset off the end of the
       buffer no longer mis-calculates buffer lengths.

       Although Perl has promised since version 5.8 that "sort()" would be
       stable, the two cases "sort {$b cmp $a}" and "