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perl5140delta(1)       Perl Programmers Reference Guide       perl5140delta(1)



NAME

       perl5140delta - what is new for perl v5.14.0


DESCRIPTION

       This document describes differences between the 5.12.0 release and the
       5.14.0 release.

       If you are upgrading from an earlier release such as 5.10.0, first read
       perl5120delta, which describes differences between 5.10.0 and 5.12.0.

       Some of the bug fixes in this release have been backported to
       subsequent releases of 5.12.x.  Those are indicated with the 5.12.x
       version in parentheses.


Notice

       As described in perlpolicy, the release of Perl 5.14.0 marks the
       official end of support for Perl 5.10.  Users of Perl 5.10 or earlier
       should consider upgrading to a more recent release of Perl.


Core Enhancements

   Unicode
       Unicode Version 6.0 is now supported (mostly)

       Perl comes with the Unicode 6.0 data base updated with Corrigendum #8
       <http://www.unicode.org/versions/corrigendum8.html>, with one exception
       noted below.  See <http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/> for
       details on the new release.  Perl does not support any Unicode
       provisional properties, including the new ones for this release.

       Unicode 6.0 has chosen to use the name "BELL" for the character at
       U+1F514, which is a symbol that looks like a bell, and is used in
       Japanese cell phones.  This conflicts with the long-standing Perl usage
       of having "BELL" mean the ASCII "BEL" character, U+0007.  In Perl 5.14,
       "\N{BELL}" continues to mean U+0007, but its use generates a
       deprecation warning message unless such warnings are turned off.  The
       new name for U+0007 in Perl is "ALERT", which corresponds nicely with
       the existing shorthand sequence for it, "\a".  "\N{BEL}" means U+0007,
       with no warning given.  The character at U+1F514 has no name in 5.14,
       but can be referred to by "\N{U+1F514}".  In Perl 5.16, "\N{BELL}" will
       refer to U+1F514; all code that uses "\N{BELL}" should be converted to
       use "\N{ALERT}", "\N{BEL}", or "\a" before upgrading.

       Full functionality for "use feature 'unicode_strings'"

       This release provides full functionality for use feature
       'unicode_strings'.  Under its scope, all string operations executed and
       regular expressions compiled (even if executed outside its scope) have
       Unicode semantics.  See "the 'unicode_strings' feature" in feature.
       However, see "Inverted bracketed character classes and multi-character
       folds", below.

       This feature avoids most forms of the "Unicode Bug" (see "The "Unicode
       Bug"" in perlunicode for details).  If there is any possibility that
       your code will process Unicode strings, you are strongly encouraged to
       use this subpragma to avoid nasty surprises.

       "\N{NAME}" and "charnames" enhancements

       o   "\N{NAME}" and "charnames::vianame" now know about the abbreviated
           character names listed by Unicode, such as NBSP, SHY, LRO, ZWJ,
           etc.; all customary abbreviations for the C0 and C1 control
           characters (such as ACK, BEL, CAN, etc.); and a few new variants of
           some C1 full names that are in common usage.

       o   Unicode has several named character sequences, in which particular
           sequences of code points are given names.  "\N{NAME}" now
           recognizes these.

       o   "\N{NAME}", "charnames::vianame", and "charnames::viacode" now know
           about every character in Unicode.  In earlier releases of Perl,
           they didn't know about the Hangul syllables nor several CJK
           (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters.

       o   It is now possible to override Perl's abbreviations with your own
           custom aliases.

       o   You can now create a custom alias of the ordinal of a character,
           known by "\N{NAME}", charnames::vianame(), and
           charnames::viacode().  Previously, aliases had to be to official
           Unicode character names.  This made it impossible to create an
           alias for unnamed code points, such as those reserved for private
           use.

       o   The new function charnames::string_vianame() is a run-time version
           of "\N{NAME}}", returning the string of characters whose Unicode
           name is its parameter.  It can handle Unicode named character
           sequences, whereas the pre-existing charnames::vianame() cannot, as
           the latter returns a single code point.

       See charnames for details on all these changes.

       New warnings categories for problematic (non-)Unicode code points.

       Three new warnings subcategories of "utf8" have been added.  These
       allow you to turn off some "utf8" warnings, while allowing other
       warnings to remain on.  The three categories are: "surrogate" when
       UTF-16 surrogates are encountered; "nonchar" when Unicode non-character
       code points are encountered; and "non_unicode" when code points above
       the legal Unicode maximum of 0x10FFFF are encountered.

       Any unsigned value can be encoded as a character

       With this release, Perl is adopting a model that any unsigned value can
       be treated as a code point and encoded internally (as utf8) without
       warnings, not just the code points that are legal in Unicode.  However,
       unless utf8 or the corresponding sub-category (see previous item) of
       lexical warnings have been explicitly turned off, outputting or
       executing a Unicode-defined operation such as upper-casing on such a
       code point generates a warning.  Attempting to input these using strict
       rules (such as with the :encoding(UTF-8) layer) will continue to fail.
       Prior to this release, handling was inconsistent and in places,
       incorrect.

       Unicode non-characters, some of which previously were erroneously
       considered illegal in places by Perl, contrary to the Unicode Standard,
       are now always legal internally.  Inputting or outputting them works
       the same as with the non-legal Unicode code points, because the Unicode
       Standard says they are (only) illegal for "open interchange".

       Unicode database files not installed

       The Unicode database files are no longer installed with Perl.  This
       doesn't affect any functionality in Perl and saves significant disk
       space.  If you need these files, you can download them from
       <http://www.unicode.org/Public/zipped/6.0.0/>.

   Regular Expressions
       "(?^...)" construct signifies default modifiers

       An ASCII caret "^" immediately following a "(?" in a regular expression
       now means that the subexpression does not inherit surrounding modifiers
       such as "/i", but reverts to the Perl defaults.  Any modifiers
       following the caret override the defaults.

       Stringification of regular expressions now uses this notation.  For
       example, "qr/hlagh/i" would previously be stringified as
       "(?i-xsm:hlagh)", but now it's stringified as "(?^i:hlagh)".

       The main purpose of this change is to allow tests that rely on the
       stringification not to have to change whenever new modifiers are added.
       See "Extended Patterns" in perlre.

       This change is likely to break code that compares stringified regular
       expressions with fixed strings containing "?-xism".

       "/d", "/l", "/u", and "/a" modifiers

       Four new regular expression modifiers have been added.  These are
       mutually exclusive: one only can be turned on at a time.

       o   The "/l" modifier says to compile the regular expression as if it
           were in the scope of "use locale", even if it is not.

       o   The "/u" modifier says to compile the regular expression as if it
           were in the scope of a "use feature 'unicode_strings'" pragma.

       o   The "/d" (default) modifier is used to override any "use locale"
           and "use feature 'unicode_strings'" pragmas in effect at the time
           of compiling the regular expression.

       o   The "/a" regular expression modifier restricts "\s", "\d" and "\w"
           and the POSIX ("[[:posix:]]") character classes to the ASCII range.
           Their complements and "\b" and "\B" are correspondingly affected.
           Otherwise, "/a" behaves like the "/u" modifier, in that case-
           insensitive matching uses Unicode semantics.

           If the "/a" modifier is repeated, then additionally in case-
           insensitive matching, no ASCII character can match a non-ASCII
           character.  For example,

               "k"     =~ /\N{KELVIN SIGN}/ai
               "\xDF" =~ /ss/ai

           match but

               "k"    =~ /\N{KELVIN SIGN}/aai
               "\xDF" =~ /ss/aai

           do not match.

       See "Modifiers" in perlre for more detail.

       Non-destructive substitution

       The substitution ("s///") and transliteration ("y///") operators now
       support an "/r" option that copies the input variable, carries out the
       substitution on the copy, and returns the result.  The original remains
       unmodified.

         my $old = "cat";
         my $new = $old =~ s/cat/dog/r;
         # $old is "cat" and $new is "dog"

       This is particularly useful with "map".  See perlop for more examples.

       Re-entrant regular expression engine

       It is now safe to use regular expressions within "(?{...})" and
       "(??{...})" code blocks inside regular expressions.

       These blocks are still experimental, however, and still have problems
       with lexical ("my") variables and abnormal exiting.

       "use re '/flags'"

       The "re" pragma now has the ability to turn on regular expression flags
       till the end of the lexical scope:

           use re "/x";
           "foo" =~ / (.+) /;  # /x implied

       See "'/flags' mode" in re for details.

       \o{...} for octals

       There is a new octal escape sequence, "\o", in doublequote-like
       contexts.  This construct allows large octal ordinals beyond the
       current max of 0777 to be represented.  It also allows you to specify a
       character in octal which can safely be concatenated with other regex
       snippets and which won't be confused with being a backreference to a
       regex capture group.  See "Capture groups" in perlre.

       Add "\p{Titlecase}" as a synonym for "\p{Title}"

       This synonym is added for symmetry with the Unicode property names
       "\p{Uppercase}" and "\p{Lowercase}".

       Regular expression debugging output improvement

       Regular expression debugging output (turned on by "use re 'debug'") now
       uses hexadecimal when escaping non-ASCII characters, instead of octal.

       Return value of "delete $+{...}"

       Custom regular expression engines can now determine the return value of
       "delete" on an entry of "%+" or "%-".

   Syntactical Enhancements
       Array and hash container functions accept references

       Warning: This feature is considered experimental, as the exact
       behaviour may change in a future version of Perl.

       All builtin functions that operate directly on array or hash containers
       now also accept unblessed hard references to arrays or hashes:

         |----------------------------+---------------------------|
         | Traditional syntax         | Terse syntax              |
         |----------------------------+---------------------------|
         | push @$arrayref, @stuff    | push $arrayref, @stuff    |
         | unshift @$arrayref, @stuff | unshift $arrayref, @stuff |
         | pop @$arrayref             | pop $arrayref             |
         | shift @$arrayref           | shift $arrayref           |
         | splice @$arrayref, 0, 2    | splice $arrayref, 0, 2    |
         | keys %$hashref             | keys $hashref             |
         | keys @$arrayref            | keys $arrayref            |
         | values %$hashref           | values $hashref           |
         | values @$arrayref          | values $arrayref          |
         | ($k,$v) = each %$hashref   | ($k,$v) = each $hashref   |
         | ($k,$v) = each @$arrayref  | ($k,$v) = each $arrayref  |
         |----------------------------+---------------------------|

       This allows these builtin functions to act on long dereferencing chains
       or on the return value of subroutines without needing to wrap them in
       "@{}" or "%{}":

         push @{$obj->tags}, $new_tag;  # old way
         push $obj->tags,    $new_tag;  # new way

         for ( keys %{$hoh->{genres}{artists}} ) {...} # old way
         for ( keys $hoh->{genres}{artists}    ) {...} # new way

       Single term prototype

       The "+" prototype is a special alternative to "$" that acts like
       "\[@%]" when given a literal array or hash variable, but will otherwise
       force scalar context on the argument.  See "Prototypes" in perlsub.

       "package" block syntax

       A package declaration can now contain a code block, in which case the
       declaration is in scope inside that block only.  So "package Foo { ...
       }" is precisely equivalent to "{ package Foo; ... }".  It also works
       with a version number in the declaration, as in "package Foo 1.2 { ...
       }", which is its most attractive feature.  See perlfunc.

       Statement labels can appear in more places

       Statement labels can now occur before any type of statement or
       declaration, such as "package".

       Stacked labels

       Multiple statement labels can now appear before a single statement.

       Uppercase X/B allowed in hexadecimal/binary literals

       Literals may now use either upper case "0X..." or "0B..." prefixes, in
       addition to the already supported "0x..." and "0b..." syntax [perl
       #76296].

       C, Ruby, Python, and PHP already support this syntax, and it makes Perl
       more internally consistent: a round-trip with "eval sprintf "%#X",
       0x10" now returns 16, just like "eval sprintf "%#x", 0x10".

       Overridable tie functions

       "tie", "tied" and "untie" can now be overridden [perl #75902].

   Exception Handling
       To make them more reliable and consistent, several changes have been
       made to how "die", "warn", and $@ behave.

       o   When an exception is thrown inside an "eval", the exception is no
           longer at risk of being clobbered by destructor code running during
           unwinding.  Previously, the exception was written into $@ early in
           the throwing process, and would be overwritten if "eval" was used
           internally in the destructor for an object that had to be freed
           while exiting from the outer "eval".  Now the exception is written
           into $@ last thing before exiting the outer "eval", so the code
           running immediately thereafter can rely on the value in $@
           correctly corresponding to that "eval".  ($@ is still also set
           before exiting the "eval", for the sake of destructors that rely on
           this.)

           Likewise, a "local $@" inside an "eval" no longer clobbers any
           exception thrown in its scope.  Previously, the restoration of $@
           upon unwinding would overwrite any exception being thrown.  Now the
           exception gets to the "eval" anyway.  So "local $@" is safe before
           a "die".

           Exceptions thrown from object destructors no longer modify the $@
           of the surrounding context.  (If the surrounding context was
           exception unwinding, this used to be another way to clobber the
           exception being thrown.)  Previously such an exception was
           sometimes emitted as a warning, and then either was string-appended
           to the surrounding $@ or completely replaced the surrounding $@,
           depending on whether that exception and the surrounding $@ were
           strings or objects.  Now, an exception in this situation is always
           emitted as a warning, leaving the surrounding $@ untouched.  In
           addition to object destructors, this also affects any function call
           run by XS code using the "G_KEEPERR" flag.

       o   Warnings for "warn" can now be objects in the same way as
           exceptions for "die".  If an object-based warning gets the default
           handling of writing to standard error, it is stringified as before
           with the filename and line number appended.  But a $SIG{__WARN__}
           handler now receives an object-based warning as an object, where
           previously it was passed the result of stringifying the object.

   Other Enhancements
       Assignment to $0 sets the legacy process name with prctl() on Linux

       On Linux the legacy process name is now set with prctl(2), in addition
       to altering the POSIX name via "argv[0]", as Perl has done since
       version 4.000.  Now system utilities that read the legacy process name
       such as ps, top, and killall recognize the name you set when assigning
       to $0.  The string you supply is truncated at 16 bytes; this limitation
       is imposed by Linux.

       srand() now returns the seed

       This allows programs that need to have repeatable results not to have
       to come up with their own seed-generating mechanism.  Instead, they can
       use srand() and stash the return value for future use.  One example is
       a test program with too many combinations to test comprehensively in
       the time available for each run.  It can test a random subset each time
       and, should there be a failure, log the seed used for that run so this
       can later be used to produce the same results.

       printf-like functions understand post-1980 size modifiers

       Perl's printf and sprintf operators, and Perl's internal printf
       replacement function, now understand the C90 size modifiers "hh"
       ("char"), "z" ("size_t"), and "t" ("ptrdiff_t").  Also, when compiled
       with a C99 compiler, Perl now understands the size modifier "j"
       ("intmax_t") (but this is not portable).

       So, for example, on any modern machine, "sprintf("%hhd", 257)" returns
       "1".

       New global variable "${^GLOBAL_PHASE}"

       A new global variable, "${^GLOBAL_PHASE}", has been added to allow
       introspection of the current phase of the Perl interpreter.  It's
       explained in detail in "${^GLOBAL_PHASE}" in perlvar and in "BEGIN,
       UNITCHECK, CHECK, INIT and END" in perlmod.

       "-d:-foo" calls "Devel::foo::unimport"

       The syntax -d:foo was extended in 5.6.1 to make -d:foo=bar equivalent
       to -MDevel::foo=bar, which expands internally to "use Devel::foo
       'bar'".  Perl now allows prefixing the module name with -, with the
       same semantics as -M; that is:

       "-d:-foo"
           Equivalent to -M-Devel::foo: expands to "no Devel::foo" and calls
           "Devel::foo->unimport()" if that method exists.

       "-d:-foo=bar"
           Equivalent to -M-Devel::foo=bar: expands to "no Devel::foo 'bar'",
           and calls "Devel::foo->unimport("bar")" if that method exists.

       This is particularly useful for suppressing the default actions of a
       "Devel::*" module's "import" method whilst still loading it for
       debugging.

       Filehandle method calls load IO::File on demand

       When a method call on a filehandle would die because the method cannot
       be resolved and IO::File has not been loaded, Perl now loads IO::File
       via "require" and attempts method resolution again:

         open my $fh, ">", $file;
         $fh->binmode(":raw");     # loads IO::File and succeeds

       This also works for globs like "STDOUT", "STDERR", and "STDIN":

         STDOUT->autoflush(1);

       Because this on-demand load happens only if method resolution fails,
       the legacy approach of manually loading an IO::File parent class for
       partial method support still works as expected:

         use IO::Handle;
         open my $fh, ">", $file;
         $fh->autoflush(1);        # IO::File not loaded

       Improved IPv6 support

       The "Socket" module provides new affordances for IPv6, including
       implementations of the Socket::getaddrinfo() and Socket::getnameinfo()
       functions, along with related constants and a handful of new functions.
       See Socket.

       DTrace probes now include package name

       The "DTrace" probes now include an additional argument, "arg3", which
       contains the package the subroutine being entered or left was compiled
       in.

       For example, using the following DTrace script:

         perl$target:::sub-entry
         {
             printf("%s::%s\n", copyinstr(arg0), copyinstr(arg3));
         }

       and then running:

         $ perl -e 'sub test { }; test'

       "DTrace" will print:

         main::test

   New C APIs
       See "Internal Changes".


Security

   User-defined regular expression properties
       "User-Defined Character Properties" in perlunicode documented that you
       can create custom properties by defining subroutines whose names begin
       with "In" or "Is".  However, Perl did not actually enforce that naming
       restriction, so "\p{foo::bar}" could call foo::bar() if it existed.
       The documented convention is now enforced.

       Also, Perl no longer allows tainted regular expressions to invoke a
       user-defined property.  It simply dies instead [perl #82616].


Incompatible Changes

       Perl 5.14.0 is not binary-compatible with any previous stable release.

       In addition to the sections that follow, see "C API Changes".

   Regular Expressions and String Escapes
       Inverted bracketed character classes and multi-character folds

       Some characters match a sequence of two or three characters in "/i"
       regular expression matching under Unicode rules.  One example is "LATIN
       SMALL LETTER SHARP S" which matches the sequence "ss".

        'ss' =~ /\A[\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S}]\z/i  # Matches

       This, however, can lead to very counter-intuitive results, especially
       when inverted.  Because of this, Perl 5.14 does not use multi-character
       "/i" matching in inverted character classes.

        'ss' =~ /\A[^\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S}]+\z/i  # ???

       This should match any sequences of characters that aren't the "SHARP S"
       nor what "SHARP S" matches under "/i".  "s" isn't "SHARP S", but
       Unicode says that "ss" is what "SHARP S" matches under "/i".  So which
       one "wins"? Do you fail the match because the string has "ss" or accept
       it because it has an "s" followed by another "s"?

       Earlier releases of Perl did allow this multi-character matching, but
       due to bugs, it mostly did not work.

       \400-\777

       In certain circumstances, "\400"-"\777" in regexes have behaved
       differently than they behave in all other doublequote-like contexts.
       Since 5.10.1, Perl has issued a deprecation warning when this happens.
       Now, these literals behave the same in all doublequote-like contexts,
       namely to be equivalent to "\x{100}"-"\x{1FF}", with no deprecation
       warning.

       Use of "\400"-"\777" in the command-line option -0 retain their
       conventional meaning.  They slurp whole input files; previously, this
       was documented only for -0777.

       Because of various ambiguities, you should use the new "\o{...}"
       construct to represent characters in octal instead.

       Most "\p{}" properties are now immune to case-insensitive matching

       For most Unicode properties, it doesn't make sense to have them match
       differently under "/i" case-insensitive matching.  Doing so can lead to
       unexpected results and potential security holes.  For example

        m/\p{ASCII_Hex_Digit}+/i

       could previously match non-ASCII characters because of the Unicode
       matching rules (although there were several bugs with this).  Now
       matching under "/i" gives the same results as non-"/i" matching except
       for those few properties where people have come to expect differences,
       namely the ones where casing is an integral part of their meaning, such
       as "m/\p{Uppercase}/i" and "m/\p{Lowercase}/i", both of which match the
       same code points as matched by "m/\p{Cased}/i".  Details are in
       "Unicode Properties" in perlrecharclass.

       User-defined property handlers that need to match differently under
       "/i" must be changed to read the new boolean parameter passed to them,
       which is non-zero if case-insensitive matching is in effect and 0
       otherwise.  See "User-Defined Character Properties" in perlunicode.

       \p{} implies Unicode semantics

       Specifying a Unicode property in the pattern indicates that the pattern
       is meant for matching according to Unicode rules, the way "\N{NAME}"
       does.

       Regular expressions retain their localeness when interpolated

       Regular expressions compiled under "use locale" now retain this when
       interpolated into a new regular expression compiled outside a "use
       locale", and vice-versa.

       Previously, one regular expression interpolated into another inherited
       the localeness of the surrounding regex, losing whatever state it
       originally had.  This is considered a bug fix, but may trip up code
       that has come to rely on the incorrect behaviour.

       Stringification of regexes has changed

       Default regular expression modifiers are now notated using "(?^...)".
       Code relying on the old stringification will fail.  This is so that
       when new modifiers are added, such code won't have to keep changing
       each time this happens, because the stringification will automatically
       incorporate the new modifiers.

       Code that needs to work properly with both old- and new-style regexes
       can avoid the whole issue by using (for perls since 5.9.5; see re):

        use re qw(regexp_pattern);
        my ($pat, $mods) = regexp_pattern($re_ref);

       If the actual stringification is important or older Perls need to be
       supported, you can use something like the following:

           # Accept both old and new-style stringification
           my $modifiers = (qr/foobar/ =~ /\Q(?^/) ? "^" : "-xism";

       And then use $modifiers instead of "-xism".

       Run-time code blocks in regular expressions inherit pragmata

       Code blocks in regular expressions ("(?{...})" and "(??{...})")
       previously did not inherit pragmata (strict, warnings, etc.) if the
       regular expression was compiled at run time as happens in cases like
       these two:

         use re "eval";
         $foo =~ $bar; # when $bar contains (?{...})
         $foo =~ /$bar(?{ $finished = 1 })/;

       This bug has now been fixed, but code that relied on the buggy
       behaviour may need to be fixed to account for the correct behaviour.

   Stashes and Package Variables
       Localised tied hashes and arrays are no longed tied

       In the following:

           tie @a, ...;
           {
                   local @a;
                   # here, @a is a now a new, untied array
           }
           # here, @a refers again to the old, tied array

       Earlier versions of Perl incorrectly tied the new local array.  This
       has now been fixed.  This fix could however potentially cause a change
       in behaviour of some code.

       Stashes are now always defined

       "defined %Foo::" now always returns true, even when no symbols have yet
       been defined in that package.

       This is a side-effect of removing a special-case kludge in the
       tokeniser, added for 5.10.0, to hide side-effects of changes to the
       internal storage of hashes.  The fix drastically reduces hashes' memory
       overhead.

       Calling defined on a stash has been deprecated since 5.6.0, warned on
       lexicals since 5.6.0, and warned for stashes and other package
       variables since 5.12.0.  "defined %hash" has always exposed an
       implementation detail: emptying a hash by deleting all entries from it
       does not make "defined %hash" false.  Hence "defined %hash" is not
       valid code to determine whether an arbitrary hash is empty.  Instead,
       use the behaviour of an empty %hash always returning false in scalar
       context.

       Clearing stashes

       Stash list assignment "%foo:: = ()" used to make the stash temporarily
       anonymous while it was being emptied.  Consequently, any of its
       subroutines referenced elsewhere would become anonymous,  showing up as
       "(unknown)" in "caller".  They now retain their package names such that
       "caller" returns the original sub name if there is still a reference to
       its typeglob and "foo::__ANON__" otherwise [perl #79208].

       Dereferencing typeglobs

       If you assign a typeglob to a scalar variable:

           $glob = *foo;

       the glob that is copied to $glob is marked with a special flag
       indicating that the glob is just a copy.  This allows subsequent
       assignments to $glob to overwrite the glob.  The original glob,
       however, is immutable.

       Some Perl operators did not distinguish between these two types of
       globs.  This would result in strange behaviour in edge cases: "untie
       $scalar" would not untie the scalar if the last thing assigned to it
       was a glob (because it treated it as "untie *$scalar", which unties a
       handle).  Assignment to a glob slot (such as "*$glob = \@some_array")
       would simply assign "\@some_array" to $glob.

       To fix this, the "*{}" operator (including its *foo and *$foo forms)
       has been modified to make a new immutable glob if its operand is a glob
       copy.  This allows operators that make a distinction between globs and
       scalars to be modified to treat only immutable globs as globs.  ("tie",
       "tied" and "untie" have been left as they are for compatibility's sake,
       but will warn.  See "Deprecations".)

       This causes an incompatible change in code that assigns a glob to the
       return value of "*{}" when that operator was passed a glob copy.  Take
       the following code, for instance:

           $glob = *foo;
           *$glob = *bar;

       The *$glob on the second line returns a new immutable glob.  That new
       glob is made an alias to *bar.  Then it is discarded.  So the second
       assignment has no effect.

       See <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/10625> for more detail.

       Magic variables outside the main package

       In previous versions of Perl, magic variables like $!, %SIG, etc. would
       "leak" into other packages.  So %foo::SIG could be used to access
       signals, "${"foo::!"}" (with strict mode off) to access C's "errno",
       etc.

       This was a bug, or an "unintentional" feature, which caused various ill
       effects, such as signal handlers being wiped when modules were loaded,
       etc.

       This has been fixed (or the feature has been removed, depending on how
       you see it).

       local($_) strips all magic from $_

       local() on scalar variables gives them a new value but keeps all their
       magic intact.  This has proven problematic for the default scalar
       variable $_, where perlsub recommends that any subroutine that assigns
       to $_ should first localize it.  This would throw an exception if $_ is
       aliased to a read-only variable, and could in general have various
       unintentional side-effects.

       Therefore, as an exception to the general rule, local($_) will not only
       assign a new value to $_, but also remove all existing magic from it as
       well.

       Parsing of package and variable names

       Parsing the names of packages and package variables has changed:
       multiple adjacent pairs of colons, as in "foo::::bar", are now all
       treated as package separators.

       Regardless of this change, the exact parsing of package separators has
       never been guaranteed and is subject to change in future Perl versions.

   Changes to Syntax or to Perl Operators
       "given" return values

       "given" blocks now return the last evaluated expression, or an empty
       list if the block was exited by "break".  Thus you can now write:

           my $type = do {
            given ($num) {
             break     when undef;
             "integer" when /^[+-]?[0-9]+$/;
             "float"   when /^[+-]?[0-9]+(?:\.[0-9]+)?$/;
             "unknown";
            }
           };

       See "Return value" in perlsyn for details.

       Change in parsing of certain prototypes

       Functions declared with the following prototypes now behave correctly
       as unary functions:

         *
         \$ \% \@ \* \&
         \[...]
         ;$ ;*
         ;\$ ;\% etc.
         ;\[...]

       Due to this bug fix [perl #75904], functions using the "(*)", "(;$)"
       and "(;*)" prototypes are parsed with higher precedence than before.
       So in the following example:

         sub foo(;$);
         foo $a < $b;

       the second line is now parsed correctly as "foo($a) < $b", rather than
       "foo($a < $b)".  This happens when one of these operators is used in an
       unparenthesised argument:

         < > <= >= lt gt le ge
         == != <=> eq ne cmp ~~
         &
         | ^
         &&
         || //
         .. ...
         ?:
         = += -= *= etc.
         , =>

       Smart-matching against array slices

       Previously, the following code resulted in a successful match:

           my @a = qw(a y0 z);
           my @b = qw(a x0 z);
           @a[0 .. $#b] ~~ @b;

       This odd behaviour has now been fixed [perl #77468].

       Negation treats strings differently from before

       The unary negation operator, "-", now treats strings that look like
       numbers as numbers [perl #57706].

       Negative zero

       Negative zero (-0.0), when converted to a string, now becomes "0" on
       all platforms.  It used to become "-0" on some, but "0" on others.

       If you still need to determine whether a zero is negative, use
       "sprintf("%g", $zero) =~ /^-/" or the Data::Float module on CPAN.

       ":=" is now a syntax error

       Previously "my $pi := 4" was exactly equivalent to "my $pi : = 4", with
       the ":" being treated as the start of an attribute list, ending before
       the "=".  The use of ":=" to mean ": =" was deprecated in 5.12.0, and
       is now a syntax error.  This allows future use of ":=" as a new token.

       Outside the core's tests for it, we find no Perl 5 code on CPAN using
       this construction, so we believe that this change will have little
       impact on real-world codebases.

       If it is absolutely necessary to have empty attribute lists (for
       example, because of a code generator), simply avoid the error by adding
       a space before the "=".

       Change in the parsing of identifiers

       Characters outside the Unicode "XIDStart" set are no longer allowed at
       the beginning of an identifier.  This means that certain accents and
       marks that normally follow an alphabetic character may no longer be the
       first character of an identifier.

   Threads and Processes
       Directory handles not copied to threads

       On systems other than Windows that do not have a "fchdir" function,
       newly-created threads no longer inherit directory handles from their
       parent threads.  Such programs would usually have crashed anyway [perl
       #75154].

       "close" on shared pipes

       To avoid deadlocks, the "close" function no longer waits for the child
       process to exit if the underlying file descriptor is still in use by
       another thread.  It returns true in such cases.

       fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children

       On Windows parent processes would not terminate until all forked
       children had terminated first.  However, "kill("KILL", ...)" is
       inherently unstable on pseudo-processes, and "kill("TERM", ...)" might
       not get delivered if the child is blocked in a system call.

       To avoid the deadlock and still provide a safe mechanism to terminate
       the hosting process, Perl now no longer waits for children that have
       been sent a SIGTERM signal.  It is up to the parent process to
       waitpid() for these children if child-cleanup processing must be
       allowed to finish.  However, it is also then the responsibility of the
       parent to avoid the deadlock by making sure the child process can't be
       blocked on I/O.

       See perlfork for more information about the fork() emulation on
       Windows.

   Configuration
       Naming fixes in Policy_sh.SH may invalidate Policy.sh

       Several long-standing typos and naming confusions in Policy_sh.SH have
       been fixed, standardizing on the variable names used in config.sh.

       This will change the behaviour of Policy.sh if you happen to have been
       accidentally relying on its incorrect behaviour.

       Perl source code is read in text mode on Windows

       Perl scripts used to be read in binary mode on Windows for the benefit
       of the ByteLoader module (which is no longer part of core Perl).  This
       had the side-effect of breaking various operations on the "DATA"
       filehandle, including seek()/tell(), and even simply reading from
       "DATA" after filehandles have been flushed by a call to system(),
       backticks, fork() etc.

       The default build options for Windows have been changed to read Perl
       source code on Windows in text mode now.  ByteLoader will (hopefully)
       be updated on CPAN to automatically handle this situation [perl
       #28106].


Deprecations

       See also "Deprecated C APIs".

   Omitting a space between a regular expression and subsequent word
       Omitting the space between a regular expression operator or its
       modifiers and the following word is deprecated.  For example,
       "m/foo/sand $bar" is for now still parsed as "m/foo/s and $bar", but
       will now issue a warning.

   "\cX"
       The backslash-c construct was designed as a way of specifying non-
       printable characters, but there were no restrictions (on ASCII
       platforms) on what the character following the "c" could be.  Now, a
       deprecation warning is raised if that character isn't an ASCII
       character.  Also, a deprecation warning is raised for "\c{" (which is
       the same as simply saying ";").

   "\b{" and "\B{"
       In regular expressions, a literal "{" immediately following a "\b" (not
       in a bracketed character class) or a "\B{" is now deprecated to allow
       for its future use by Perl itself.

   Perl 4-era .pl libraries
       Perl bundles a handful of library files that predate Perl 5.  This
       bundling is now deprecated for most of these files, which are now
       available from CPAN.  The affected files now warn when run, if they
       were installed as part of the core.

       This is a mandatory warning, not obeying -X or lexical warning bits.
       The warning is modelled on that supplied by deprecate.pm for
       deprecated-in-core .pm libraries.  It points to the specific CPAN
       distribution that contains the .pl libraries.  The CPAN versions, of
       course, do not generate the warning.

   List assignment to $[
       Assignment to $[ was deprecated and started to give warnings in Perl
       version 5.12.0.  This version of Perl (5.14) now also emits a warning
       when assigning to $[ in list context.  This fixes an oversight in
       5.12.0.

   Use of qw(...) as parentheses
       Historically the parser fooled itself into thinking that qw(...)
       literals were always enclosed in parentheses, and as a result you could
       sometimes omit parentheses around them:

           for $x qw(a b c) { ... }

       The parser no longer lies to itself in this way.  Wrap the list literal
       in parentheses like this:

           for $x (qw(a b c)) { ... }

       This is being deprecated because the parentheses in "for $i (1,2,3) {
       ... }" are not part of expression syntax.  They are part of the
       statement syntax, with the "for" statement wanting literal parentheses.
       The synthetic parentheses that a "qw" expression acquired were only
       intended to be treated as part of expression syntax.

       Note that this does not change the behaviour of cases like:

           use POSIX qw(setlocale localeconv);
           our @EXPORT = qw(foo bar baz);

       where parentheses were never required around the expression.

   "\N{BELL}"
       This is because Unicode is using that name for a different character.
       See "Unicode Version 6.0 is now supported (mostly)" for more
       explanation.

   "?PATTERN?"
       "?PATTERN?" (without the initial "m") has been deprecated and now
       produces a warning.  This is to allow future use of "?" in new
       operators.  The match-once functionality is still available as
       "m?PATTERN?".

   Tie functions on scalars holding typeglobs
       Calling a tie function ("tie", "tied", "untie") with a scalar argument
       acts on a filehandle if the scalar happens to hold a typeglob.

       This is a long-standing bug that will be removed in Perl 5.16, as there
       is currently no way to tie the scalar itself when it holds a typeglob,
       and no way to untie a scalar that has had a typeglob assigned to it.

       Now there is a deprecation warning whenever a tie function is used on a
       handle without an explicit "*".

   User-defined case-mapping
       This feature is being deprecated due to its many issues, as documented
       in "User-Defined Case Mappings (for serious hackers only)" in
       perlunicode.  This feature will be removed in Perl 5.16.  Instead use
       the CPAN module Unicode::Casing, which provides improved functionality.

   Deprecated modules
       The following module will be removed from the core distribution in a
       future release, and should be installed from CPAN instead.
       Distributions on CPAN that require this should add it to their
       prerequisites.  The core version of these module now issues a
       deprecation warning.

       If you ship a packaged version of Perl, either alone or as part of a
       larger system, then you should carefully consider the repercussions of
       core module deprecations.  You may want to consider shipping your
       default build of Perl with a package for the deprecated module that
       installs into "vendor" or "site" Perl library directories.  This will
       inhibit the deprecation warnings.

       Alternatively, you may want to consider patching lib/deprecate.pm to
       provide deprecation warnings specific to your packaging system or
       distribution of Perl, consistent with how your packaging system or
       distribution manages a staged transition from a release where the
       installation of a single package provides the given functionality, to a
       later release where the system administrator needs to know to install
       multiple packages to get that same functionality.

       You can silence these deprecation warnings by installing the module in
       question from CPAN.  To install the latest version of it by role rather
       than by name, just install "Task::Deprecations::5_14".

       Devel::DProf
           We strongly recommend that you install and use Devel::NYTProf
           instead of Devel::DProf, as Devel::NYTProf offers significantly
           improved profiling and reporting.


Performance Enhancements

   "Safe signals" optimisation
       Signal dispatch has been moved from the runloop into control ops.  This
       should give a few percent speed increase, and eliminates nearly all the
       speed penalty caused by the introduction of "safe signals" in 5.8.0.
       Signals should still be dispatched within the same statement as they
       were previously.  If this does not happen, or if you find it possible
       to create uninterruptible loops, this is a bug, and reports are
       encouraged of how to recreate such issues.

   Optimisation of shift() and pop() calls without arguments
       Two fewer OPs are used for shift() and pop() calls with no argument
       (with implicit @_).  This change makes shift() 5% faster than "shift
       @_" on non-threaded perls, and 25% faster on threaded ones.

   Optimisation of regexp engine string comparison work
       The "foldEQ_utf8" API function for case-insensitive comparison of
       strings (which is used heavily by the regexp engine) was substantially
       refactored and optimised -- and its documentation much improved as a
       free bonus.

   Regular expression compilation speed-up
       Compiling regular expressions has been made faster when upgrading the
       regex to utf8 is necessary but this isn't known when the compilation
       begins.

   String appending is 100 times faster
       When doing a lot of string appending, perls built to use the system's
       "malloc" could end up allocating a lot more memory than needed in a
       inefficient way.

       "sv_grow", the function used to allocate more memory if necessary when
       appending to a string, has been taught to round up the memory it
       requests to a certain geometric progression, making it much faster on
       certain platforms and configurations.  On Win32, it's now about 100
       times faster.

   Eliminate "PL_*" accessor functions under ithreads
       When "MULTIPLICITY" was first developed, and interpreter state moved
       into an interpreter struct, thread- and interpreter-local "PL_*"
       variables were defined as macros that called accessor functions
       (returning the address of the value) outside the Perl core.  The intent
       was to allow members within the interpreter struct to change size
       without breaking binary compatibility, so that bug fixes could be
       merged to a maintenance branch that necessitated such a size change.
       This mechanism was redundant and penalised well-behaved code.  It has
       been removed.

   Freeing weak references
       When there are many weak references to an object, freeing that object
       can under some circumstances take O(N*N) time to free, where N is the
       number of references.  The circumstances in which this can happen have
       been reduced [perl #75254]

   Lexical array and hash assignments
       An earlier optimisation to speed up "my @array = ..." and "my %hash =
       ..." assignments caused a bug and was disabled in Perl 5.12.0.

       Now we have found another way to speed up these assignments [perl
       #82110].

   @_ uses less memory
       Previously, @_ was allocated for every subroutine at compile time with
       enough space for four entries.  Now this allocation is done on demand
       when the subroutine is called [perl #72416].

   Size optimisations to SV and HV structures
       "xhv_fill" has been eliminated from "struct xpvhv", saving 1 IV per
       hash and on some systems will cause "struct xpvhv" to become cache-
       aligned.  To avoid this memory saving causing a slowdown elsewhere,
       boolean use of "HvFILL" now calls "HvTOTALKEYS" instead (which is
       equivalent), so while the fill data when actually required are now
       calculated on demand, cases when this needs to be done should be rare.

       The order of structure elements in SV bodies has changed.  Effectively,
       the NV slot has swapped location with STASH and MAGIC.  As all access
       to SV members is via macros, this should be completely transparent.
       This change allows the space saving for PVHVs documented above, and may
       reduce the memory allocation needed for PVIVs on some architectures.

       "XPV", "XPVIV", and "XPVNV" now allocate only the parts of the "SV"
       body they actually use, saving some space.

       Scalars containing regular expressions now allocate only the part of
       the "SV" body they actually use, saving some space.

   Memory consumption improvements to Exporter
       The @EXPORT_FAIL AV is no longer created unless needed, hence neither
       is the typeglob backing it.  This saves about 200 bytes for every
       package that uses Exporter but doesn't use this functionality.

   Memory savings for weak references
       For weak references, the common case of just a single weak reference
       per referent has been optimised to reduce the storage required.  In
       this case it saves the equivalent of one small Perl array per referent.

   "%+" and "%-" use less memory
       The bulk of the "Tie::Hash::NamedCapture" module used to be in the Perl
       core.  It has now been moved to an XS module to reduce overhead for
       programs that do not use "%+" or "%-".

   Multiple small improvements to threads
       The internal structures of threading now make fewer API calls and fewer
       allocations, resulting in noticeably smaller object code.
       Additionally, many thread context checks have been deferred so they're
       done only as needed (although this is only possible for non-debugging
       builds).

   Adjacent pairs of nextstate opcodes are now optimized away
       Previously, in code such as

           use constant DEBUG => 0;

           sub GAK {
               warn if DEBUG;
               print "stuff\n";
           }

       the ops for "warn if DEBUG" would be folded to a "null" op
       ("ex-const"), but the "nextstate" op would remain, resulting in a
       runtime op dispatch of "nextstate", "nextstate", etc.

       The execution of a sequence of "nextstate" ops is indistinguishable
       from just the last "nextstate" op so the peephole optimizer now
       eliminates the first of a pair of "nextstate" ops except when the first
       carries a label, since labels must not be eliminated by the optimizer,
       and label usage isn't conclusively known at compile time.


Modules and Pragmata

   New Modules and Pragmata
       o   CPAN::Meta::YAML 0.003 has been added as a dual-life module.  It
           supports a subset of YAML sufficient for reading and writing
           META.yml and MYMETA.yml files included with CPAN distributions or
           generated by the module installation toolchain.  It should not be
           used for any other general YAML parsing or generation task.

       o   CPAN::Meta version 2.110440 has been added as a dual-life module.
           It provides a standard library to read, interpret and write CPAN
           distribution metadata files (like META.json and META.yml) that
           describe a distribution, its contents, and the requirements for
           building it and installing it.  The latest CPAN distribution
           metadata specification is included as CPAN::Meta::Spec and notes on
           changes in the specification over time are given in
           CPAN::Meta::History.

       o   HTTP::Tiny 0.012 has been added as a dual-life module.  It is a
           very small, simple HTTP/1.1 client designed for simple GET requests
           and file mirroring.  It has been added so that CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS
           can "bootstrap" HTTP access to CPAN using pure Perl without relying
           on external binaries like curl(1) or wget(1).

       o   JSON::PP 2.27105 has been added as a dual-life module to allow CPAN
           clients to read META.json files in CPAN distributions.

       o   Module::Metadata 1.000004 has been added as a dual-life module.  It
           gathers package and POD information from Perl module files.  It is
           a standalone module based on Module::Build::ModuleInfo for use by
           other module installation toolchain components.
           Module::Build::ModuleInfo has been deprecated in favor of this
           module instead.

       o   Perl::OSType 1.002 has been added as a dual-life module.  It maps
           Perl operating system names (like "dragonfly" or "MSWin32") to more
           generic types with standardized names (like "Unix" or "Windows").
           It has been refactored out of Module::Build and ExtUtils::CBuilder
           and consolidates such mappings into a single location for easier
           maintenance.

       o   The following modules were added by the Unicode::Collate upgrade.
           See below for details.

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Big5

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::GB2312

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::JISX0208

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Korean

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Pinyin

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Stroke

       o   Version::Requirements version 0.101020 has been added as a dual-
           life module.  It provides a standard library to model and
           manipulates module prerequisites and version constraints defined in
           CPAN::Meta::Spec.

   Updated Modules and Pragma
       o   attributes has been upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.14.

       o   Archive::Extract has been upgraded from version 0.38 to 0.48.

           Updates since 0.38 include: a safe print method that guards
           Archive::Extract from changes to "$\"; a fix to the tests when run
           in core Perl; support for TZ files; a modification for the lzma
           logic to favour IO::Uncompress::Unlzma; and a fix for an issue with
           NetBSD-current and its new unzip(1) executable.

       o   Archive::Tar has been upgraded from version 1.54 to 1.76.

           Important changes since 1.54 include the following:

           o   Compatibility with busybox implementations of tar(1).

           o   A fix so that write() and create_archive() close only
               filehandles they themselves opened.

           o   A bug was fixed regarding the exit code of extract_archive.

           o   The ptar(1) utility has a new option to allow safe creation of
               tarballs without world-writable files on Windows, allowing
               those archives to be uploaded to CPAN.

           o   A new ptargrep(1) utility for using regular expressions against
               the contents of files in a tar archive.

           o   pax extended headers are now skipped.

       o   Attribute::Handlers has been upgraded from version 0.87 to 0.89.

       o   autodie has been upgraded from version 2.06_01 to 2.1001.

       o   AutoLoader has been upgraded from version 5.70 to 5.71.

       o   The B module has been upgraded from version 1.23 to 1.29.

           It no longer crashes when taking apart a "y///" containing
           characters outside the octet range or compiled in a "use utf8"
           scope.

           The size of the shared object has been reduced by about 40%, with
           no reduction in functionality.

       o   B::Concise has been upgraded from version 0.78 to 0.83.

           B::Concise marks rv2sv(), rv2av(), and rv2hv() ops with the new
           "OPpDEREF" flag as "DREFed".

           It no longer produces mangled output with the -tree option [perl
           #80632].

       o   B::Debug has been upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.16.

       o   B::Deparse has been upgraded from version 0.96 to 1.03.

           The deparsing of a "nextstate" op has changed when it has both a
           change of package relative to the previous nextstate, or a change
           of "%^H" or other state and a label.  The label was previously
           emitted first, but is now emitted last (5.12.1).

           The "no 5.13.2" or similar form is now correctly handled by
           B::Deparse (5.12.3).

           B::Deparse now properly handles the code that applies a conditional
           pattern match against implicit $_ as it was fixed in [perl #20444].

           Deparsing of "our" followed by a variable with funny characters (as
           permitted under the "use utf8" pragma) has also been fixed [perl
           #33752].

       o   B::Lint has been upgraded from version 1.11_01 to 1.13.

       o   base has been upgraded from version 2.15 to 2.16.

       o   Benchmark has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.12.

       o   bignum has been upgraded from version 0.23 to 0.27.

       o   Carp has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.20.

           Carp now detects incomplete caller() overrides and avoids using
           bogus @DB::args.  To provide backtraces, Carp relies on particular
           behaviour of the caller() builtin.  Carp now detects if other code
           has overridden this with an incomplete implementation, and modifies
           its backtrace accordingly.  Previously incomplete overrides would
           cause incorrect values in backtraces (best case), or obscure fatal
           errors (worst case).

           This fixes certain cases of "Bizarre copy of ARRAY" caused by
           modules overriding caller() incorrectly (5.12.2).

           It now also avoids using regular expressions that cause Perl to
           load its Unicode tables, so as to avoid the "BEGIN not safe after
           errors" error that ensue if there has been a syntax error [perl
           #82854].

       o   CGI has been upgraded from version 3.48 to 3.52.

           This provides the following security fixes: the MIME boundary in
           multipart_init() is now random and the handling of newlines
           embedded in header values has been improved.

       o   Compress::Raw::Bzip2 has been upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.033.

           It has been updated to use bzip2(1) 1.0.6.

       o   Compress::Raw::Zlib has been upgraded from version 2.024 to 2.033.

       o   constant has been upgraded from version 1.20 to 1.21.

           Unicode constants work once more.  They have been broken since Perl
           5.10.0 [CPAN RT #67525].

       o   CPAN has been upgraded from version 1.94_56 to 1.9600.

           Major highlights:

           o   much less configuration dialog hassle

           o   support for META/MYMETA.json

           o   support for local::lib

           o   support for HTTP::Tiny to reduce the dependency on FTP sites

           o   automatic mirror selection

           o   iron out all known bugs in configure_requires

           o   support for distributions compressed with bzip2(1)

           o   allow Foo/Bar.pm on the command line to mean "Foo::Bar"

       o   CPANPLUS has been upgraded from version 0.90 to 0.9103.

           A change to cpanp-run-perl resolves RT #55964
           <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=55964> and RT #57106
           <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=57106>, both of
           which related to failures to install distributions that use
           "Module::Install::DSL" (5.12.2).

           A dependency on Config was not recognised as a core module
           dependency.  This has been fixed.

           CPANPLUS now includes support for META.json and MYMETA.json.

       o   CPANPLUS::Dist::Build has been upgraded from version 0.46 to 0.54.

       o   Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.125 to 2.130_02.

           The indentation used to be off when $Data::Dumper::Terse was set.
           This has been fixed [perl #73604].

           This upgrade also fixes a crash when using custom sort functions
           that might cause the stack to change [perl #74170].

           Dumpxs no longer crashes with globs returned by *$io_ref [perl
           #72332].

       o   DB_File has been upgraded from version 1.820 to 1.821.

       o   DBM_Filter has been upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.04.

       o   Devel::DProf has been upgraded from version 20080331.00 to
           20110228.00.

           Merely loading Devel::DProf now no longer triggers profiling to
           start.  Both "use Devel::DProf" and "perl -d:DProf ..." behave as
           before and start the profiler.

           NOTE: Devel::DProf is deprecated and will be removed from a future
           version of Perl.  We strongly recommend that you install and use
           Devel::NYTProf instead, as it offers significantly improved
           profiling and reporting.

       o   Devel::Peek has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.07.

       o   Devel::SelfStubber has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.05.

       o   diagnostics has been upgraded from version 1.19 to 1.22.

           It now renders pod links slightly better, and has been taught to
           find descriptions for messages that share their descriptions with
           other messages.

       o   Digest::MD5 has been upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.51.

           It is now safe to use this module in combination with threads.

       o   Digest::SHA has been upgraded from version 5.47 to 5.61.

           "shasum" now more closely mimics sha1sum(1)/md5sum(1).

           "addfile" accepts all POSIX filenames.

           New SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 transforms (ref. NIST Draft FIPS
           180-4 [February 2011])

       o   DirHandle has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.

       o   Dumpvalue has been upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.16.

       o   DynaLoader has been upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.13.

           It fixes a buffer overflow when passed a very long file name.

           It no longer inherits from AutoLoader; hence it no longer produces
           weird error messages for unsuccessful method calls on classes that
           inherit from DynaLoader [perl #84358].

       o   Encode has been upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.42.

           Now, all 66 Unicode non-characters are treated the same way U+FFFF
           has always been treated: in cases when it was disallowed, all 66
           are disallowed, and in cases where it warned, all 66 warn.

       o   Env has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.

       o   Errno has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.13.

           The implementation of Errno has been refactored to use about 55%
           less memory.

           On some platforms with unusual header files, like Win32 gcc(1)
           using "mingw64" headers, some constants that weren't actually error
           numbers have been exposed by Errno.  This has been fixed [perl
           #77416].

       o   Exporter has been upgraded from version 5.64_01 to 5.64_03.

           Exporter no longer overrides $SIG{__WARN__} [perl #74472]

       o   ExtUtils::CBuilder has been upgraded from version 0.27 to 0.280203.

       o   ExtUtils::Command has been upgraded from version 1.16 to 1.17.

       o   ExtUtils::Constant has been upgraded from 0.22 to 0.23.

           The AUTOLOAD helper code generated by
           "ExtUtils::Constant::ProxySubs" can now croak() for missing
           constants, or generate a complete "AUTOLOAD" subroutine in XS,
           allowing simplification of many modules that use it (Fcntl,
           File::Glob, GDBM_File, I18N::Langinfo, POSIX, Socket).

           ExtUtils::Constant::ProxySubs can now optionally push the names of
           all constants onto the package's @EXPORT_OK.

       o   ExtUtils::Install has been upgraded from version 1.55 to 1.56.

       o   ExtUtils::MakeMaker has been upgraded from version 6.56 to 6.57_05.

       o   ExtUtils::Manifest has been upgraded from version 1.57 to 1.58.

       o   ExtUtils::ParseXS has been upgraded from version 2.21 to 2.2210.

       o   Fcntl has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.11.

       o   File::Basename has been upgraded from version 2.78 to 2.82.

       o   File::CheckTree has been upgraded from version 4.4 to 4.41.

       o   File::Copy has been upgraded from version 2.17 to 2.21.

       o   File::DosGlob has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.04.

           It allows patterns containing literal parentheses: they no longer
           need to be escaped.  On Windows, it no longer adds an extra ./ to
           file names returned when the pattern is a relative glob with a
           drive specification, like C:*.pl [perl #71712].

       o   File::Fetch has been upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.32.

           HTTP::Lite is now supported for the "http" scheme.

           The fetch(1) utility is supported on FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Dragonfly
           BSD for the "http" and "ftp" schemes.

       o   File::Find has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.19.

           It improves handling of backslashes on Windows, so that paths like
           C:\dir\/file are no longer generated [perl #71710].

       o   File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.12.

       o   File::Spec has been upgraded from version 3.31 to 3.33.

           Several portability fixes were made in File::Spec::VMS: a colon is
           now recognized as a delimiter in native filespecs; caret-escaped
           delimiters are recognized for better handling of extended
           filespecs; catpath() returns an empty directory rather than the
           current directory if the input directory name is empty; and
           abs2rel() properly handles Unix-style input (5.12.2).

       o   File::stat has been upgraded from 1.02 to 1.05.

           The "-x" and "-X" file test operators now work correctly when run
           by the superuser.

       o   Filter::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.84 to 0.86.

       o   GDBM_File has been upgraded from 1.10 to 1.14.

           This fixes a memory leak when DBM filters are used.

       o   Hash::Util has been upgraded from 0.07 to 0.11.

           Hash::Util no longer emits spurious "uninitialized" warnings when
           recursively locking hashes that have undefined values [perl
           #74280].

       o   Hash::Util::FieldHash has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.09.

       o   I18N::Collate has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.

       o   I18N::Langinfo has been upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.08.

           langinfo() now defaults to using $_ if there is no argument given,
           just as the documentation has always claimed.

       o   I18N::LangTags has been upgraded from version 0.35 to 0.35_01.

       o   if has been upgraded from version 0.05 to 0.0601.

       o   IO has been upgraded from version 1.25_02 to 1.25_04.

           This version of IO includes a new IO::Select, which now allows
           IO::Handle objects (and objects in derived classes) to be removed
           from an IO::Select set even if the underlying file descriptor is
           closed or invalid.

       o   IPC::Cmd has been upgraded from version 0.54 to 0.70.

           Resolves an issue with splitting Win32 command lines.  An argument
           consisting of the single character "0" used to be omitted (CPAN RT
           #62961).

       o   IPC::Open3 has been upgraded from 1.05 to 1.09.

           open3() now produces an error if the "exec" call fails, allowing
           this condition to be distinguished from a child process that exited
           with a non-zero status [perl #72016].

           The internal xclose() routine now knows how to handle file
           descriptors as documented, so duplicating "STDIN" in a child
           process using its file descriptor now works [perl #76474].

       o   IPC::SysV has been upgraded from version 2.01 to 2.03.

       o   lib has been upgraded from version 0.62 to 0.63.

       o   Locale::Maketext has been upgraded from version 1.14 to 1.19.

           Locale::Maketext now supports external caches.

           This upgrade also fixes an infinite loop in
           Locale::Maketext::Guts::_compile() when working with tainted values
           (CPAN RT #40727).

           "->maketext" calls now back up and restore $@ so error messages are
           not suppressed (CPAN RT #34182).

       o   Log::Message has been upgraded from version 0.02 to 0.04.

       o   Log::Message::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.06 to 0.08.

       o   Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.89_01 to 1.994.

           This fixes, among other things, incorrect results when computing
           binomial coefficients [perl #77640].

           It also prevents sqrt($int) from crashing under "use bigrat".
           [perl #73534].

       o   Math::BigInt::FastCalc has been upgraded from version 0.19 to 0.28.

       o   Math::BigRat has been upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.26_02.

       o   Memoize has been upgraded from version 1.01_03 to 1.02.

       o   MIME::Base64 has been upgraded from 3.08 to 3.13.

           Includes new functions to calculate the length of encoded and
           decoded base64 strings.

           Now provides encode_base64url() and decode_base64url() functions to
           process the base64 scheme for "URL applications".

       o   Module::Build has been upgraded from version 0.3603 to 0.3800.

           A notable change is the deprecation of several modules.
           Module::Build::Version has been deprecated and Module::Build now
           relies on the version pragma directly.  Module::Build::ModuleInfo
           has been deprecated in favor of a standalone copy called
           Module::Metadata.  Module::Build::YAML has been deprecated in favor
           of CPAN::Meta::YAML.

           Module::Build now also generates META.json and MYMETA.json files in
           accordance with version 2 of the CPAN distribution metadata
           specification, CPAN::Meta::Spec.  The older format META.yml and
           MYMETA.yml files are still generated.

       o   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 2.29 to 2.47.

           Besides listing the updated core modules of this release, it also
           stops listing the "Filespec" module.  That module never existed in
           core.  The scripts generating Module::CoreList confused it with
           VMS::Filespec, which actually is a core module as of Perl 5.8.7.

       o   Module::Load has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.18.

       o   Module::Load::Conditional has been upgraded from version 0.34 to
           0.44.

       o   The mro pragma has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.07.

       o   NDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.12.

           This fixes a memory leak when DBM filters are used.

       o   Net::Ping has been upgraded from version 2.36 to 2.38.

       o   NEXT has been upgraded from version 0.64 to 0.65.

       o   Object::Accessor has been upgraded from version 0.36 to 0.38.

       o   ODBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.10.

           This fixes a memory leak when DBM filters are used.

       o   Opcode has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.18.

       o   The overload pragma has been upgraded from 1.10 to 1.13.

           "overload::Method" can now handle subroutines that are themselves
           blessed into overloaded classes [perl #71998].

           The documentation has greatly improved.  See "Documentation" below.

       o   Params::Check has been upgraded from version 0.26 to 0.28.

       o   The parent pragma has been upgraded from version 0.223 to 0.225.

       o   Parse::CPAN::Meta has been upgraded from version 1.40 to 1.4401.

           The latest Parse::CPAN::Meta can now read YAML and JSON files using
           CPAN::Meta::YAML and JSON::PP, which are now part of the Perl core.

       o   PerlIO::encoding has been upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.14.

       o   PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from 0.07 to 0.11.

           A read() after a seek() beyond the end of the string no longer
           thinks it has data to read [perl #78716].

       o   PerlIO::via has been upgraded from version 0.09 to 0.11.

       o   Pod::Html has been upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.11.

       o   Pod::LaTeX has been upgraded from version 0.58 to 0.59.

       o   Pod::Perldoc has been upgraded from version 3.15_02 to 3.15_03.

       o   Pod::Simple has been upgraded from version 3.13 to 3.16.

       o   POSIX has been upgraded from 1.19 to 1.24.

           It now includes constants for POSIX signal constants.

       o   The re pragma has been upgraded from version 0.11 to 0.18.

           The "use re '/flags'" subpragma is new.

           The regmust() function used to crash when called on a regular
           expression belonging to a pluggable engine.  Now it croaks instead.

           regmust() no longer leaks memory.

       o   Safe has been upgraded from version 2.25 to 2.29.

           Coderefs returned by reval() and rdo() are now wrapped via
           wrap_code_refs() (5.12.1).

           This fixes a possible infinite loop when looking for coderefs.

           It adds several "version::vxs::*" routines to the default share.

       o   SDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.09.

       o   SelfLoader has been upgraded from 1.17 to 1.18.

           It now works in taint mode [perl #72062].

       o   The sigtrap pragma has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.

           It no longer tries to modify read-only arguments when generating a
           backtrace [perl #72340].

       o   Socket has been upgraded from version 1.87 to 1.94.

           See "Improved IPv6 support" above.

       o   Storable has been upgraded from version 2.22 to 2.27.

           Includes performance improvement for overloaded classes.

           This adds support for serialising code references that contain
           UTF-8 strings correctly.  The Storable minor version number changed
           as a result, meaning that Storable users who set
           $Storable::accept_future_minor to a "FALSE" value will see errors
           (see "FORWARD COMPATIBILITY" in Storable for more details).

           Freezing no longer gets confused if the Perl stack gets reallocated
           during freezing [perl #80074].

       o   Sys::Hostname has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.16.

       o   Term::ANSIColor has been upgraded from version 2.02 to 3.00.

       o   Term::UI has been upgraded from version 0.20 to 0.26.

       o   Test::Harness has been upgraded from version 3.17 to 3.23.

       o   Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.94 to 0.98.

           Among many other things, subtests without a "plan" or "no_plan" now
           have an implicit done_testing() added to them.

       o   Thread::Semaphore has been upgraded from version 2.09 to 2.12.

           It provides two new methods that give more control over the
           decrementing of semaphores: "down_nb" and "down_force".

       o   Thread::Queue has been upgraded from version 2.11 to 2.12.

       o   The threads pragma has been upgraded from version 1.75 to 1.83.

       o   The threads::shared pragma has been upgraded from version 1.32 to
           1.37.

       o   Tie::Hash has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.

           Calling "Tie::Hash->TIEHASH()" used to loop forever.  Now it
           "croak"s.

       o   Tie::Hash::NamedCapture has been upgraded from version 0.06 to
           0.08.

       o   Tie::RefHash has been upgraded from version 1.38 to 1.39.

       o   Time::HiRes has been upgraded from version 1.9719 to 1.9721_01.

       o   Time::Local has been upgraded from version 1.1901_01 to 1.2000.

       o   Time::Piece has been upgraded from version 1.15_01 to 1.20_01.

       o   Unicode::Collate has been upgraded from version 0.52_01 to 0.73.

           Unicode::Collate has been updated to use Unicode 6.0.0.

           Unicode::Collate::Locale now supports a plethora of new locales:
           ar, be, bg, de__phonebook, hu, hy, kk, mk, nso, om, tn, vi, hr, ig,
           ja, ko, ru, sq, se, sr, to, uk, zh, zh__big5han, zh__gb2312han,
           zh__pinyin, and zh__stroke.

           The following modules have been added:

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Big5 for "zh__big5han" which makes tailoring
           of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's big5han ordering.

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::GB2312 for "zh__gb2312han" which makes
           tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's
           gb2312han ordering.

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::JISX0208 which makes tailoring of 6355 kanji
           (CJK Unified Ideographs) in the JIS X 0208 order.

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Korean which makes tailoring of CJK Unified
           Ideographs in the order of CLDR's Korean ordering.

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Pinyin for "zh__pinyin" which makes
           tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's pinyin
           ordering.

           Unicode::Collate::CJK::Stroke for "zh__stroke" which makes
           tailoring of CJK Unified Ideographs in the order of CLDR's stroke
           ordering.

           This also sees the switch from using the pure-Perl version of this
           module to the XS version.

       o   Unicode::Normalize has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.10.

       o   Unicode::UCD has been upgraded from version 0.27 to 0.32.

           A new function, Unicode::UCD::num(), has been added.  This function
           returns the numeric value of the string passed it or "undef" if the
           string in its entirety has no "safe" numeric value.  (For more
           detail, and for the definition of "safe", see "num()" in
           Unicode::UCD.)

           This upgrade also includes several bug fixes:

           charinfo()
               o   It is now updated to Unicode Version 6.0.0 with Corrigendum
                   #8, excepting that, just as with Perl 5.14, the code point
                   at U+1F514 has no name.

               o   Hangul syllable code points have the correct names, and
                   their decompositions are always output without requiring
                   Lingua::KO::Hangul::Util to be installed.

               o   CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) code points U+2A700 to
                   U+2B734 and U+2B740 to U+2B81D are now properly handled.

               o   Numeric values are now output for those CJK code points
                   that have them.

               o   Names output for code points with multiple aliases are now
                   the corrected ones.

           charscript()
               This now correctly returns "Unknown" instead of "undef" for the
               script of a code point that hasn't been assigned another one.

           charblock()
               This now correctly returns "No_Block" instead of "undef" for
               the block of a code point that hasn't been assigned to another
               one.

       o   The version pragma has been upgraded from 0.82 to 0.88.

           Because of a bug, now fixed, the is_strict() and is_lax() functions
           did not work when exported (5.12.1).

       o   The warnings pragma has been upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.12.

           Calling "use warnings" without arguments is now significantly more
           efficient.

       o   The warnings::register pragma has been upgraded from version 1.01
           to 1.02.

           It is now possible to register warning categories other than the
           names of packages using warnings::register.  See perllexwarn(1) for
           more information.

       o   XSLoader has been upgraded from version 0.10 to 0.13.

       o   VMS::DCLsym has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.05.

           Two bugs have been fixed [perl #84086]:

           The symbol table name was lost when tying a hash, due to a thinko
           in "TIEHASH".  The result was that all tied hashes interacted with
           the local symbol table.

           Unless a symbol table name had been explicitly specified in the
           call to the constructor, querying the special key ":LOCAL" failed
           to identify objects connected to the local symbol table.

       o   The Win32 module has been upgraded from version 0.39 to 0.44.

           This release has several new functions: Win32::GetSystemMetrics(),
           Win32::GetProductInfo(), Win32::GetOSDisplayName().

           The names returned by Win32::GetOSName() and
           Win32::GetOSDisplayName() have been corrected.

       o   XS::Typemap has been upgraded from version 0.03 to 0.05.

   Removed Modules and Pragmata
       As promised in Perl 5.12.0's release notes, the following modules have
       been removed from the core distribution, and if needed should be
       installed from CPAN instead.

       o   Class::ISA has been removed from the Perl core.  Prior version was
           0.36.

       o   Pod::Plainer has been removed from the Perl core.  Prior version
           was 1.02.

       o   Switch has been removed from the Perl core.  Prior version was
           2.16.

       The removal of Shell has been deferred until after 5.14, as the
       implementation of Shell shipped with 5.12.0 did not correctly issue the
       warning that it was to be removed from core.


Documentation

   New Documentation
       perlgpl

       perlgpl has been updated to contain GPL version 1, as is included in
       the README distributed with Perl (5.12.1).

       Perl 5.12.x delta files

       The perldelta files for Perl 5.12.1 to 5.12.3 have been added from the
       maintenance branch: perl5121delta, perl5122delta, perl5123delta.

       perlpodstyle

       New style guide for POD documentation, split mostly from the NOTES
       section of the pod2man(1) manpage.

       perlsource, perlinterp, perlhacktut, and perlhacktips

       See "perlhack and perlrepository revamp", below.

   Changes to Existing Documentation
       perlmodlib is now complete

       The perlmodlib manpage that came with Perl 5.12.0 was missing several
       modules due to a bug in the script that generates the list.  This has
       been fixed [perl #74332] (5.12.1).

       Replace incorrect tr/// table in perlebcdic

       perlebcdic contains a helpful table to use in "tr///" to convert
       between EBCDIC and Latin1/ASCII.  The table was the inverse of the one
       it describes, though the code that used the table worked correctly for
       the specific example given.

       The table has been corrected and the sample code changed to correspond.

       The table has also been changed to hex from octal, and the recipes in
       the pod have been altered to print out leading zeros to make all values
       the same length.

       Tricks for user-defined casing

       perlunicode now contains an explanation of how to override, mangle and
       otherwise tweak the way Perl handles upper-, lower- and other-case
       conversions on Unicode data, and how to provide scoped changes to alter
       one's own code's behaviour without stomping on anybody else's.

       INSTALL explicitly states that Perl requires a C89 compiler

       This was already true, but it's now Officially Stated For The Record
       (5.12.2).

       Explanation of "\xHH" and "\oOOO" escapes

       perlop has been updated with more detailed explanation of these two
       character escapes.

       -0NNN switch

       In perlrun, the behaviour of the -0NNN switch for -0400 or higher has
       been clarified (5.12.2).

       Maintenance policy

       perlpolicy now contains the policy on what patches are acceptable for
       maintenance branches (5.12.1).

       Deprecation policy

       perlpolicy now contains the policy on compatibility and deprecation
       along with definitions of terms like "deprecation" (5.12.2).

       New descriptions in perldiag

       The following existing diagnostics are now documented:

       o   Ambiguous use of %c resolved as operator %c

       o   Ambiguous use of %c{%s} resolved to %c%s

       o   Ambiguous use of %c{%s[...]} resolved to %c%s[...]

       o   Ambiguous use of %c{%s{...}} resolved to %c%s{...}

       o   Ambiguous use of -%s resolved as -&%s()

       o   Invalid strict version format (%s)

       o   Invalid version format (%s)

       o   Invalid version object

       perlbook

       perlbook has been expanded to cover many more popular books.

       "SvTRUE" macro

       The documentation for the "SvTRUE" macro in perlapi was simply wrong in
       stating that get-magic is not processed.  It has been corrected.

       op manipulation functions

       Several API functions that process optrees have been newly documented.

       perlvar revamp

       perlvar reorders the variables and groups them by topic.  Each variable
       introduced after Perl 5.000 notes the first version in which it is
       available.  perlvar also has a new section for deprecated variables to
       note when they were removed.

       Array and hash slices in scalar context

       These are now documented in perldata.

       "use locale" and formats

       perlform and perllocale have been corrected to state that "use locale"
       affects formats.

       overload

       overload's documentation has practically undergone a rewrite.  It is
       now much more straightforward and clear.

       perlhack and perlrepository revamp

       The perlhack document is now much shorter, and focuses on the Perl 5
       development process and submitting patches to Perl.  The technical
       content has been moved to several new documents, perlsource,
       perlinterp, perlhacktut, and perlhacktips.  This technical content has
       been only lightly edited.

       The perlrepository document has been renamed to perlgit.  This new
       document is just a how-to on using git with the Perl source code.  Any
       other content that used to be in perlrepository has been moved to
       perlhack.

       Time::Piece examples

       Examples in perlfaq4 have been updated to show the use of Time::Piece.


Diagnostics

       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 Diagnostics
       New Errors

       Closure prototype called
           This error occurs when a subroutine reference passed to an
           attribute handler is called, if the subroutine is a closure [perl
           #68560].

       Insecure user-defined property %s
           Perl detected tainted data when trying to compile a regular
           expression that contains a call to a user-defined character
           property function, meaning "\p{IsFoo}" or "\p{InFoo}".  See "User-
           Defined Character Properties" in perlunicode and perlsec.

       panic: gp_free failed to free glob pointer - something is repeatedly
       re-creating entries
           This new error is triggered if a destructor called on an object in
           a typeglob that is being freed creates a new typeglob entry
           containing an object with a destructor that creates a new entry
           containing an object etc.

       Parsing code internal error (%s)
           This new fatal error is produced when parsing code supplied by an
           extension violates the parser's API in a detectable way.

       refcnt: fd %d%s
           This new error only occurs if an internal consistency check fails
           when a pipe is about to be closed.

       Regexp modifier "/%c" may not appear twice
           The regular expression pattern has one of the mutually exclusive
           modifiers repeated.

       Regexp modifiers "/%c" and "/%c" are mutually exclusive
           The regular expression pattern has more than one of the mutually
           exclusive modifiers.

       Using !~ with %s doesn't make sense
           This error occurs when "!~" is used with "s///r" or "y///r".

       New Warnings

       "\b{" is deprecated; use "\b\{" instead
       "\B{" is deprecated; use "\B\{" instead
           Use of an unescaped "{" immediately following a "\b" or "\B" is now
           deprecated in order to reserve its use for Perl itself in a future
           release.

       Operation "%s" returns its argument for ...
           Performing an operation requiring Unicode semantics (such as case-
           folding) on a Unicode surrogate or a non-Unicode character now
           triggers this warning.

       Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated
           See "Use of qw(...) as parentheses", above, for details.

   Changes to Existing Diagnostics
       o   The "Variable $foo is not imported" warning that precedes a "strict
           'vars'" error has now been assigned the "misc" category, so that
           "no warnings" will suppress it [perl #73712].

       o   warn() and die() now produce "Wide character" warnings when fed a
           character outside the byte range if "STDERR" is a byte-sized
           handle.

       o   The "Layer does not match this perl" error message has been
           replaced with these more helpful messages [perl #73754]:

           o   PerlIO layer function table size (%d) does not match size
               expected by this perl (%d)

           o   PerlIO layer instance size (%d) does not match size expected by
               this perl (%d)

       o   The "Found = in conditional" warning that is emitted when a
           constant is assigned to a variable in a condition is now withheld
           if the constant is actually a subroutine or one generated by "use
           constant", since the value of the constant may not be known at the
           time the program is written [perl #77762].

       o   Previously, if none of the gethostbyaddr(), gethostbyname() and
           gethostent() functions were implemented on a given platform, they
           would all die with the message "Unsupported socket function
           'gethostent' called", with analogous messages for getnet*() and
           getserv*().  This has been corrected.

       o   The warning message about unrecognized regular expression escapes
           passed through has been changed to include any literal "{"
           following the two-character escape.  For example, "\q{" is now
           emitted instead of "\q".


Utility Changes

       perlbug(1)

       o   perlbug now looks in the EMAIL environment variable for a return
           address if the REPLY-TO and REPLYTO variables are empty.

       o   perlbug did not previously generate a "From:" header, potentially
           resulting in dropped mail; it now includes that header.

       o   The user's address is now used as the Return-Path.

           Many systems these days don't have a valid Internet domain name,
           and perlbug@perl.org does not accept email with a return-path that
           does not resolve.  So the user's address is now passed to sendmail
           so it's less likely to get stuck in a mail queue somewhere [perl
           #82996].

       o   perlbug now always gives the reporter a chance to change the email
           address it guesses for them (5.12.2).

       o   perlbug should no longer warn about uninitialized values when using
           the -d and -v options (5.12.2).

       perl5db.pl

       o   The remote terminal works after forking and spawns new sessions,
           one per forked process.

       ptargrep

       o   ptargrep is a new utility to apply pattern matching to the contents
           of files  in a tar archive.  It comes with "Archive::Tar".


Configuration and Compilation

       See also "Naming fixes in Policy_sh.SH may invalidate Policy.sh",
       above.

       o   CCINCDIR and CCLIBDIR for the mingw64 cross-compiler are now
           correctly under $(CCHOME)\mingw\include and \lib rather than
           immediately below $(CCHOME).

           This means the "incpath", "libpth", "ldflags", "lddlflags" and
           "ldflags_nolargefiles" values in Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl are
           now set correctly.

       o   "make test.valgrind" has been adjusted to account for cpan/dist/ext
           separation.

       o   On compilers that support it, -Wwrite-strings is now added to
           cflags by default.

       o   The Encode module can now (once again) be included in a static Perl
           build.  The special-case handling for this situation got broken in
           Perl 5.11.0, and has now been repaired.

       o   The previous default size of a PerlIO buffer (4096 bytes) has been
           increased to the larger of 8192 bytes and your local BUFSIZ.
           Benchmarks show that doubling this decade-old default increases
           read and write performance by around 25% to 50% when using the
           default layers of perlio on top of unix.  To choose a non-default
           size, such as to get back the old value or to obtain an even larger
           value, configure with:

                ./Configure -Accflags=-DPERLIOBUF_DEFAULT_BUFSIZ=N

           where N is the desired size in bytes; it should probably be a
           multiple of your page size.

       o   An "incompatible operand types" error in ternary expressions when
           building with "clang" has been fixed (5.12.2).

       o   Perl now skips setuid File::Copy tests on partitions it detects
           mounted as "nosuid" (5.12.2).


Platform Support

   New Platforms
       AIX Perl now builds on AIX 4.2 (5.12.1).

   Discontinued Platforms
       Apollo DomainOS
           The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised
           from the Perl distribution.  It was officially discontinued in
           version 5.12.0.  It had not worked for years before that.

       MacOS Classic
           The last vestiges of support for this platform have been excised
           from the Perl distribution.  It was officially discontinued in an
           earlier version.

   Platform-Specific Notes
       AIX

       o   README.aix has been updated with information about the XL C/C++ V11
           compiler suite (5.12.2).

       ARM

       o   The "d_u32align" configuration probe on ARM has been fixed
           (5.12.2).

       Cygwin

       o   MakeMaker has been updated to build manpages on cygwin.

       o   Improved rebase behaviour

           If a DLL is updated on cygwin the old imagebase address is reused.
           This solves most rebase errors, especially when updating on core
           DLL's.  See
           <http://www.tishler.net/jason/software/rebase/rebase-2.4.2.README>
           for more information.

       o   Support for the standard cygwin dll prefix (needed for FFIs)

       o   Updated build hints file

       FreeBSD 7

       o   FreeBSD 7 no longer contains /usr/bin/objformat.  At build time,
           Perl now skips the objformat check for versions 7 and higher and
           assumes ELF (5.12.1).

       HP-UX

       o   Perl now allows -Duse64bitint without promoting to "use64bitall" on
           HP-UX (5.12.1).

       IRIX

       o   Conversion of strings to floating-point numbers is now more
           accurate on IRIX systems [perl #32380].

       Mac OS X

       o   Early versions of Mac OS X (Darwin) had buggy implementations of
           the setregid(), setreuid(), setrgid(,) and setruid() functions, so
           Perl would pretend they did not exist.

           These functions are now recognised on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard; Darwin
           9) and higher, as they have been fixed [perl #72990].

       MirBSD

       o   Previously if you built Perl with a shared libperl.so on MirBSD
           (the default config), it would work up to the installation;
           however, once installed, it would be unable to find libperl.  Path
           handling is now treated as in the other BSD dialects.

       NetBSD

       o   The NetBSD hints file has been changed to make the system malloc
           the default.

       OpenBSD

       o   OpenBSD > 3.7 has a new malloc implementation which is mmap-based,
           and as such can release memory back to the OS; however, Perl's use
           of this malloc causes a substantial slowdown, so we now default to
           using Perl's malloc instead [perl #75742].

       OpenVOS

       o   Perl now builds again with OpenVOS (formerly known as Stratus VOS)
           [perl #78132] (5.12.3).

       Solaris

       o   DTrace is now supported on Solaris.  There used to be build
           failures, but these have been fixed [perl #73630] (5.12.3).

       VMS

       o   Extension building on older (pre 7.3-2) VMS systems was broken
           because configure.com hit the DCL symbol length limit of 1K.  We
           now work within this limit when assembling the list of extensions
           in the core build (5.12.1).

       o   We fixed configuring and building Perl with -Uuseperlio (5.12.1).

       o   "PerlIOUnix_open" now honours the default permissions on VMS.

           When "perlio" became the default and "unix" became the default
           bottom layer, the most common path for creating files from Perl
           became "PerlIOUnix_open", which has always explicitly used 0666 as
           the permission mask.  This prevents inheriting permissions from RMS
           defaults and ACLs, so to avoid that problem, we now pass 0777 to
           open().  In the VMS CRTL, 0777 has a special meaning over and above
           intersecting with the current umask; specifically, it allows Unix
           syscalls to preserve native default permissions (5.12.3).

       o   The shortening of symbols longer than 31 characters in the core C
           sources and in extensions is now by default done by the C compiler
           rather than by xsubpp (which could only do so for generated symbols
           in XS code).  You can reenable xsubpp's symbol shortening by
           configuring with -Uuseshortenedsymbols, but you'll have some work
           to do to get the core sources to compile.

       o   Record-oriented files (record format variable or variable with
           fixed control) opened for write by the "perlio" layer will now be
           line-buffered to prevent the introduction of spurious line breaks
           whenever the perlio buffer fills up.

       o   git_version.h is now installed on VMS.  This was an oversight in
           v5.12.0 which caused some extensions to fail to build (5.12.2).

       o   Several memory leaks in stat() have been fixed (5.12.2).

       o   A memory leak in Perl_rename() due to a double allocation has been
           fixed (5.12.2).

       o   A memory leak in vms_fid_to_name() (used by realpath() and
           realname()> has been fixed (5.12.2).

       Windows

       See also "fork() emulation will not wait for signalled children" and
       "Perl source code is read in text mode on Windows", above.

       o   Fixed build process for SDK2003SP1 compilers.

       o   Compilation with Visual Studio 2010 is now supported.

       o   When using old 32-bit compilers, the define "_USE_32BIT_TIME_T" is
           now set in $Config{ccflags}.  This improves portability when
           compiling XS extensions using new compilers, but for a Perl
           compiled with old 32-bit compilers.

       o   $Config{gccversion} is now set correctly when Perl is built using
           the mingw64 compiler from <http://mingw64.org> [perl #73754].

       o   When building Perl with the mingw64 x64 cross-compiler "incpath",
           "libpth", "ldflags", "lddlflags" and "ldflags_nolargefiles" values
           in Config.pm and Config_heavy.pl were not previously being set
           correctly because, with that compiler, the include and lib
           directories are not immediately below "$(CCHOME)" (5.12.2).

       o   The build process proceeds more smoothly with mingw and dmake when
           C:\MSYS\bin is in the PATH, due to a "Cwd" fix.

       o   Support for building with Visual C++ 2010 is now underway, but is
           not yet complete.  See README.win32 or perlwin32 for more details.

       o   The option to use an externally-supplied crypt(), or to build with
           no crypt() at all, has been removed.  Perl supplies its own crypt()
           implementation for Windows, and the political situation that
           required this part of the distribution to sometimes be omitted is
           long gone.


Internal Changes

   New APIs
       CLONE_PARAMS structure added to ease correct thread creation

       Modules that create threads should now create "CLONE_PARAMS" structures
       by calling the new function Perl_clone_params_new(), and free them with
       Perl_clone_params_del().  This will ensure compatibility with any
       future changes to the internals of the "CLONE_PARAMS" structure layout,
       and that it is correctly allocated and initialised.

       New parsing functions

       Several functions have been added for parsing Perl statements and
       expressions.  These functions are meant to be used by XS code invoked
       during Perl parsing, in a recursive-descent manner, to allow modules to
       augment the standard Perl syntax.

       o   parse_stmtseq() parses a sequence of statements, up to closing
           brace or EOF.

       o   parse_fullstmt() parses a complete Perl statement, including
           optional label.

       o   parse_barestmt() parses a statement without a label.

       o   parse_block() parses a code block.

       o   parse_label() parses a statement label, separate from statements.

       o   parse_fullexpr(), parse_listexpr(), parse_termexpr(), and
           parse_arithexpr() parse expressions at various precedence levels.

       Hints hash API

       A new C API for introspecting the hinthash "%^H" at runtime has been
       added.  See "cop_hints_2hv", "cop_hints_fetchpvn",
       "cop_hints_fetchpvs", "cop_hints_fetchsv", and "hv_copy_hints_hv" in
       perlapi for details.

       A new, experimental API has been added for accessing the internal
       structure that Perl uses for "%^H".  See the functions beginning with
       "cophh_" in perlapi.

       C interface to caller()

       The "caller_cx" function has been added as an XSUB-writer's equivalent
       of caller().  See perlapi for details.

       Custom per-subroutine check hooks

       XS code in an extension module can now annotate a subroutine (whether
       implemented in XS or in Perl) so that nominated XS code will be called
       at compile time (specifically as part of op checking) to change the op
       tree of that subroutine.  The compile-time check function (supplied by
       the extension module) can implement argument processing that can't be
       expressed as a prototype, generate customised compile-time warnings,
       perform constant folding for a pure function, inline a subroutine
       consisting of sufficiently simple ops, replace the whole call with a
       custom op, and so on.  This was previously all possible by hooking the
       "entersub" op checker, but the new mechanism makes it easy to tie the
       hook to a specific subroutine.  See "cv_set_call_checker" in perlapi.

       To help in writing custom check hooks, several subtasks within standard
       "entersub" op checking have been separated out and exposed in the API.

       Improved support for custom OPs

       Custom ops can now be registered with the new "custom_op_register" C
       function and the "XOP" structure.  This will make it easier to add new
       properties of custom ops in the future.  Two new properties have been
       added already, "xop_class" and "xop_peep".

       "xop_class" is one of the OA_*OP constants.  It allows B and other
       introspection mechanisms to work with custom ops that aren't BASEOPs.
       "xop_peep" is a pointer to a function that will be called for ops of
       this type from "Perl_rpeep".

       See "Custom Operators" in perlguts and "Custom Operators" in perlapi
       for more detail.

       The old "PL_custom_op_names"/"PL_custom_op_descs" interface is still
       supported but discouraged.

       Scope hooks

       It is now possible for XS code to hook into Perl's lexical scope
       mechanism at compile time, using the new "Perl_blockhook_register"
       function.  See "Compile-time scope hooks" in perlguts.

       The recursive part of the peephole optimizer is now hookable

       In addition to "PL_peepp", for hooking into the toplevel peephole
       optimizer, a "PL_rpeepp" is now available to hook into the optimizer
       recursing into side-chains of the optree.

       New non-magical variants of existing functions

       The following functions/macros have been added to the API.  The *_nomg
       macros are equivalent to their non-"_nomg" variants, except that they
       ignore get-magic.  Those ending in "_flags" allow one to specify
       whether get-magic is processed.

         sv_2bool_flags
         SvTRUE_nomg
         sv_2nv_flags
         SvNV_nomg
         sv_cmp_flags
         sv_cmp_locale_flags
         sv_eq_flags
         sv_collxfrm_flags

       In some of these cases, the non-"_flags" functions have been replaced
       with wrappers around the new functions.

       pv/pvs/sv versions of existing functions

       Many functions ending with pvn now have equivalent "pv/pvs/sv"
       versions.

       List op-building functions

       List op-building functions have been added to the API.  See
       op_append_elem, op_append_list, and op_prepend_elem in perlapi.

       "LINKLIST"

       The LINKLIST macro, part of op building that constructs the execution-
       order op chain, has been added to the API.

       Localisation functions

       The "save_freeop", "save_op", "save_pushi32ptr" and "save_pushptrptr"
       functions have been added to the API.

       Stash names

       A stash can now have a list of effective names in addition to its usual
       name.  The first effective name can be accessed via the "HvENAME"
       macro, which is now the recommended name to use in MRO linearisations
       ("HvNAME" being a fallback if there is no "HvENAME").

       These names are added and deleted via "hv_ename_add" and
       "hv_ename_delete".  These two functions are not part of the API.

       New functions for finding and removing magic

       The mg_findext() and sv_unmagicext() functions have been added to the
       API.  They allow extension authors to find and remove magic attached to
       scalars based on both the magic type and the magic virtual table,
       similar to how sv_magicext() attaches magic of a certain type and with
       a given virtual table to a scalar.  This eliminates the need for
       extensions to walk the list of "MAGIC" pointers of an "SV" to find the
       magic that belongs to them.

       "find_rundefsv"

       This function returns the SV representing $_, whether it's lexical or
       dynamic.

       "Perl_croak_no_modify"

       Perl_croak_no_modify() is short-hand for "Perl_croak("%s",
       PL_no_modify)".

       "PERL_STATIC_INLINE" define

       The "PERL_STATIC_INLINE" define has been added to provide the best-
       guess incantation to use for static inline functions, if the C compiler
       supports C99-style static inline.  If it doesn't, it'll give a plain
       "static".

       "HAS_STATIC_INLINE" can be used to check if the compiler actually
       supports inline functions.

       New "pv_escape" option for hexadecimal escapes

       A new option, "PERL_PV_ESCAPE_NONASCII", has been added to "pv_escape"
       to dump all characters above ASCII in hexadecimal.  Before, one could
       get all characters as hexadecimal or the Latin1 non-ASCII as octal.

       "lex_start"

       "lex_start" has been added to the API, but is considered experimental.

       op_scope() and op_lvalue()

       The op_scope() and op_lvalue() functions have been added to the API,
       but are considered experimental.

   C API Changes
       "PERL_POLLUTE" has been removed

       The option to define "PERL_POLLUTE" to expose older 5.005 symbols for
       backwards compatibility has been removed.  Its use was always
       discouraged, and MakeMaker contains a more specific escape hatch:

           perl Makefile.PL POLLUTE=1

       This can be used for modules that have not been upgraded to 5.6 naming
       conventions (and really should be completely obsolete by now).

       Check API compatibility when loading XS modules

       When Perl's API changes in incompatible ways (which usually happens
       between major releases), XS modules compiled for previous versions of
       Perl will no longer work.  They need to be recompiled against the new
       Perl.

       The "XS_APIVERSION_BOOTCHECK" macro has been added to ensure that
       modules are recompiled and to prevent users from accidentally loading
       modules compiled for old perls into newer perls.  That macro, which is
       called when loading every newly compiled extension, compares the API
       version of the running perl with the version a module has been compiled
       for and raises an exception if they don't match.

       Perl_fetch_cop_label

       The first argument of the C API function "Perl_fetch_cop_label" has
       changed from "struct refcounted_he *" to "COP *", to insulate the user
       from implementation details.

       This API function was marked as "may change", and likely isn't in use
       outside the core.  (Neither an unpacked CPAN nor Google's codesearch
       finds any other references to it.)

       GvCV() and GvGP() are no longer lvalues

       The new GvCV_set() and GvGP_set() macros are now provided to replace
       assignment to those two macros.

       This allows a future commit to eliminate some backref magic between GV
       and CVs, which will require complete control over assignment to the
       "gp_cv" slot.

       CvGV() is no longer an lvalue

       Under some circumstances, the CvGV() field of a CV is now reference-
       counted.  To ensure consistent behaviour, direct assignment to it, for
       example "CvGV(cv) = gv" is now a compile-time error.  A new macro,
       "CvGV_set(cv,gv)" has been introduced to run this operation safely.
       Note that modification of this field is not part of the public API,
       regardless of this new macro (and despite its being listed in this
       section).

       CvSTASH() is no longer an lvalue

       The CvSTASH() macro can now only be used as an rvalue.  CvSTASH_set()
       has been added to replace assignment to CvSTASH().  This is to ensure
       that backreferences are handled properly.  These macros are not part of
       the API.

       Calling conventions for "newFOROP" and "newWHILEOP"

       The way the parser handles labels has been cleaned up and refactored.
       As a result, the newFOROP() constructor function no longer takes a
       parameter stating what label is to go in the state op.

       The newWHILEOP() and newFOROP() functions no longer accept a line
       number as a parameter.

       Flags passed to "uvuni_to_utf8_flags" and "utf8n_to_uvuni"

       Some of the flags parameters to uvuni_to_utf8_flags() and
       utf8n_to_uvuni() have changed.  This is a result of Perl's now allowing
       internal storage and manipulation of code points that are problematic
       in some situations.  Hence, the default actions for these functions has
       been complemented to allow these code points.  The new flags are
       documented in perlapi.  Code that requires the problematic code points
       to be rejected needs to change to use the new flags.  Some flag names
       are retained for backward source compatibility, though they do nothing,
       as they are now the default.  However the flags "UNICODE_ALLOW_FDD0",
       "UNICODE_ALLOW_FFFF", "UNICODE_ILLEGAL", and "UNICODE_IS_ILLEGAL" have
       been removed, as they stem from a fundamentally broken model of how the
       Unicode non-character code points should be handled, which is now
       described in "Non-character code points" in perlunicode.  See also the
       Unicode section under "Selected Bug Fixes".

   Deprecated C APIs
       "Perl_ptr_table_clear"
           "Perl_ptr_table_clear" is no longer part of Perl's public API.
           Calling it now generates a deprecation warning, and it will be
           removed in a future release.

       "sv_compile_2op"
           The sv_compile_2op() API function is now deprecated.  Searches
           suggest that nothing on CPAN is using it, so this should have zero
           impact.

           It attempted to provide an API to compile code down to an optree,
           but failed to bind correctly to lexicals in the enclosing scope.
           It's not possible to fix this problem within the constraints of its
           parameters and return value.

       "find_rundefsvoffset"
           The "find_rundefsvoffset" function has been deprecated.  It
           appeared that its design was insufficient for reliably getting the
           lexical $_ at run-time.

           Use the new "find_rundefsv" function or the "UNDERBAR" macro
           instead.  They directly return the right SV representing $_,
           whether it's lexical or dynamic.

       "CALL_FPTR" and "CPERLscope"
           Those are left from an old implementation of "MULTIPLICITY" using
           C++ objects, which was removed in Perl 5.8.  Nowadays these macros
           do exactly nothing, so they shouldn't be used anymore.

           For compatibility, they are still defined for external "XS" code.
           Only extensions defining "PERL_CORE" must be updated now.

   Other Internal Changes
       Stack unwinding

       The protocol for unwinding the C stack at the last stage of a "die" has
       changed how it identifies the target stack frame.  This now uses a
       separate variable "PL_restartjmpenv", where previously it relied on the
       "blk_eval.cur_top_env" pointer in the "eval" context frame that has
       nominally just been discarded.  This change means that code running
       during various stages of Perl-level unwinding no longer needs to take
       care to avoid destroying the ghost frame.

       Scope stack entries

       The format of entries on the scope stack has been changed, resulting in
       a reduction of memory usage of about 10%.  In particular, the memory
       used by the scope stack to record each active lexical variable has been
       halved.

       Memory allocation for pointer tables

       Memory allocation for pointer tables has been changed.  Previously
       "Perl_ptr_table_store" allocated memory from the same arena system as
       "SV" bodies and "HE"s, with freed memory remaining bound to those
       arenas until interpreter exit.  Now it allocates memory from arenas
       private to the specific pointer table, and that memory is returned to
       the system when "Perl_ptr_table_free" is called.  Additionally,
       allocation and release are both less CPU intensive.

       "UNDERBAR"

       The "UNDERBAR" macro now calls "find_rundefsv".  "dUNDERBAR" is now a
       noop but should still be used to ensure past and future compatibility.

       String comparison routines renamed

       The "ibcmp_*" functions have been renamed and are now called "foldEQ",
       "foldEQ_locale", and "foldEQ_utf8".  The old names are still available
       as macros.

       "chop" and "chomp" implementations merged

       The opcode bodies for "chop" and "chomp" and for "schop" and "schomp"
       have been merged.  The implementation functions Perl_do_chop() and
       Perl_do_chomp(), never part of the public API, have been merged and
       moved to a static function in pp.c.  This shrinks the Perl binary
       slightly, and should not affect any code outside the core (unless it is
       relying on the order of side-effects when "chomp" is passed a list of
       values).


Selected Bug Fixes

   I/O
       o   Perl no longer produces this warning:

               $ perl -we 'open(my $f, ">", \my $x); binmode($f, "scalar")'
               Use of uninitialized value in binmode at -e line 1.

       o   Opening a glob reference via "open($fh, ">", \*glob)" no longer
           causes the glob to be corrupted when the filehandle is printed to.
           This would cause Perl to crash whenever the glob's contents were
           accessed [perl #77492].

       o   PerlIO no longer crashes when called recursively, such as from a
           signal handler.  Now it just leaks memory [perl #75556].

       o   Most I/O functions were not warning for unopened handles unless the
           "closed" and "unopened" warnings categories were both enabled.  Now
           only "use warnings 'unopened'" is necessary to trigger these
           warnings, as had always been the intention.

       o   There have been several fixes to PerlIO layers:

           When "binmode(FH, ":crlf")" pushes the ":crlf" layer on top of the
           stack, it no longer enables crlf layers lower in the stack so as to
           avoid unexpected results [perl #38456].

           Opening a file in ":raw" mode now does what it advertises to do
           (first open the file, then "binmode" it), instead of simply leaving
           off the top layer [perl #80764].

           The three layers ":pop", ":utf8", and ":bytes" didn't allow
           stacking when opening a file.  For example this:

               open(FH, ">:pop:perlio", "some.file") or die $!;

           would throw an "Invalid argument" error.  This has been fixed in
           this release [perl #82484].

   Regular Expression Bug Fixes
       o   The regular expression engine no longer loops when matching
           ""\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FF}" =~ /f+/i" and similar expressions
           [perl #72998] (5.12.1).

       o   The trie runtime code should no longer allocate massive amounts of
           memory, fixing #74484.

       o   Syntax errors in "(?{...})" blocks no longer cause panic messages
           [perl #2353].

       o   A pattern like "(?:(o){2})?" no longer causes a "panic" error [perl
           #39233].

       o   A fatal error in regular expressions containing "(.*?)" when
           processing UTF-8 data has been fixed [perl #75680] (5.12.2).

       o   An erroneous regular expression engine optimisation that caused
           regex verbs like *COMMIT sometimes to be ignored has been removed.

       o   The regular expression bracketed character class "[\8\9]" was
           effectively the same as "[89\000]", incorrectly matching a NULL
           character.  It also gave incorrect warnings that the 8 and 9 were
           ignored.  Now "[\8\9]" is the same as "[89]" and gives legitimate
           warnings that "\8" and "\9" are unrecognized escape sequences,
           passed-through.

       o   A regular expression match in the right-hand side of a global
           substitution ("s///g") that is in the same scope will no longer
           cause match variables to have the wrong values on subsequent
           iterations.  This can happen when an array or hash subscript is
           interpolated in the right-hand side, as in "s|(.)|@a{ print($1),
           /./ }|g" [perl #19078].

       o   Several cases in which characters in the Latin-1 non-ASCII range
           (0x80 to 0xFF) used not to match themselves, or used to match both
           a character class and its complement, have been fixed.  For
           instance, U+00E2 could match both "\w" and "\W" [perl #78464] [perl
           #18281] [perl #60156].

       o   Matching a Unicode character against an alternation containing
           characters that happened to match continuation bytes in the
           former's UTF8 representation (like "qq{\x{30ab}} =~ /\xab|\xa9/")
           would cause erroneous warnings [perl #70998].

       o   The trie optimisation was not taking empty groups into account,
           preventing "foo" from matching "/\A(?:(?:)foo|bar|zot)\z/" [perl
           #78356].

       o   A pattern containing a "+" inside a lookahead would sometimes cause
           an incorrect match failure in a global match (for example,
           "/(?=(\S+))/g") [perl #68564].

       o   A regular expression optimisation would sometimes cause a match
           with a "{n,m}" quantifier to fail when it should have matched [perl
           #79152].

       o   Case-insensitive matching in regular expressions compiled under
           "use locale" now works much more sanely when the pattern or target
           string is internally encoded in UTF8.  Previously, under these
           conditions the localeness was completely lost.  Now, code points
           above 255 are treated as Unicode, but code points between 0 and 255
           are treated using the current locale rules, regardless of whether
           the pattern or the string is encoded in UTF8.  The few case-
           insensitive matches that cross the 255/256 boundary are not
           allowed.  For example, 0xFF does not caselessly match the character
           at 0x178, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS, because 0xFF may
           not be LATIN SMALL LETTER Y in the current locale, and Perl has no
           way of knowing if that character even exists in the locale, much
           less what code point it is.

       o   The "(?|...)" regular expression construct no longer crashes if the
           final branch has more sets of capturing parentheses than any other
           branch.  This was fixed in Perl 5.10.1 for the case of a single
           branch, but that fix did not take multiple branches into account
           [perl #84746].

       o   A bug has been fixed in the implementation of "{...}" quantifiers
           in regular expressions that prevented the code block in "/((\w+)(?{
           print $2 })){2}/" from seeing the $2 sometimes [perl #84294].

   Syntax/Parsing Bugs
       o   "when (scalar) {...}" no longer crashes, but produces a syntax
           error [perl #74114] (5.12.1).

       o   A label right before a string eval ("foo: eval $string") no longer
           causes the label to be associated also with the first statement
           inside the eval [perl #74290] (5.12.1).

       o   The "no 5.13.2" form of "no" no longer tries to turn on features or
           pragmata (like strict) [perl #70075] (5.12.2).

       o   "BEGIN {require 5.12.0}" now behaves as documented, rather than
           behaving identically to "use 5.12.0".  Previously, "require" in a
           "BEGIN" block was erroneously executing the "use feature ':5.12.0'"
           and "use strict" behaviour, which only "use" was documented to
           provide [perl #69050].

       o   A regression introduced in Perl 5.12.0, making "my $x = 3; $x =
           length(undef)" result in $x set to 3 has been fixed.  $x will now
           be "undef" [perl #85508] (5.12.2).

       o   When strict "refs" mode is off, "%{...}" in rvalue context returns
           "undef" if its argument is undefined.  An optimisation introduced
           in Perl 5.12.0 to make "keys %{...}" faster when used as a boolean
           did not take this into account, causing "keys %{+undef}" (and "keys
           %$foo" when $foo is undefined) to be an error, which it should be
           so in strict mode only [perl #81750].

       o   Constant-folding used to cause

             $text =~ ( 1 ? /phoo/ : /bear/)

           to turn into

             $text =~ /phoo/

           at compile time.  Now it correctly matches against $_ [perl
           #20444].

       o   Parsing Perl code (either with string "eval" or by loading modules)
           from within a "UNITCHECK" block no longer causes the interpreter to
           crash [perl #70614].

       o   String "eval"s no longer fail after 2 billion scopes have been
           compiled [perl #83364].

       o   The parser no longer hangs when encountering certain Unicode
           characters, such as U+387 [perl #74022].

       o   Defining a constant with the same name as one of Perl's special
           blocks (like "INIT") stopped working in 5.12.0, but has now been
           fixed [perl #78634].

       o   A reference to a literal value used as a hash key ($hash{\"foo"})
           used to be stringified, even if the hash was tied [perl #79178].

       o   A closure containing an "if" statement followed by a constant or
           variable is no longer treated as a constant [perl #63540].

       o   "state" can now be used with attributes.  It used to mean the same
           thing as "my" if any attributes were present [perl #68658].

       o   Expressions like "@$a > 3" no longer cause $a to be mentioned in
           the "Use of uninitialized value in numeric gt" warning when $a is
           undefined (since it is not part of the ">" expression, but the
           operand of the "@") [perl #72090].

       o   Accessing an element of a package array with a hard-coded number
           (as opposed to an arbitrary expression) would crash if the array
           did not exist.  Usually the array would be autovivified during
           compilation, but typeglob manipulation could remove it, as in these
           two cases which used to crash:

             *d = *a;  print $d[0];
             undef *d; print $d[0];

       o   The -C command-line option, when used on the shebang line, can now
           be followed by other options [perl #72434].

       o   The "B" module was returning "B::OP"s instead of "B::LOGOP"s for
           "entertry" [perl #80622].  This was due to a bug in the Perl core,
           not in "B" itself.

   Stashes, Globs and Method Lookup
       Perl 5.10.0 introduced a new internal mechanism for caching MROs
       (method resolution orders, or lists of parent classes; aka "isa"
       caches) to make method lookup faster (so @ISA arrays would not have to
       be searched repeatedly).  Unfortunately, this brought with it quite a
       few bugs.  Almost all of these have been fixed now, along with a few
       MRO-related bugs that existed before 5.10.0:

       o   The following used to have erratic effects on method resolution,
           because the "isa" caches were not reset or otherwise ended up
           listing the wrong classes.  These have been fixed.

           Aliasing packages by assigning to globs [perl #77358]
           Deleting packages by deleting their containing stash elements
           Undefining the glob containing a package ("undef *Foo::")
           Undefining an ISA glob ("undef *Foo::ISA")
           Deleting an ISA stash element ("delete $Foo::{ISA}")
           Sharing @ISA arrays between classes (via "*Foo::ISA = \@Bar::ISA"
           or "*Foo::ISA = *Bar::ISA") [perl #77238]

           "undef *Foo::ISA" would even stop a new @Foo::ISA array from
           updating caches.

       o   Typeglob assignments would crash if the glob's stash no longer
           existed, so long as the glob assigned to were named "ISA" or the
           glob on either side of the assignment contained a subroutine.

       o   "PL_isarev", which is accessible to Perl via "mro::get_isarev" is
           now updated properly when packages are deleted or removed from the
           @ISA of other classes.  This allows many packages to be created and
           deleted without causing a memory leak [perl #75176].

       In addition, various other bugs related to typeglobs and stashes have
       been fixed:

       o   Some work has been done on the internal pointers that link between
           symbol tables (stashes), typeglobs, and subroutines.  This has the
           effect that various edge cases related to deleting stashes or stash
           entries (for example, <%FOO:: = ()>), and complex typeglob or code-
           reference aliasing, will no longer crash the interpreter.

       o   Assigning a reference to a glob copy now assigns to a glob slot
           instead of overwriting the glob with a scalar [perl #1804] [perl
           #77508].

       o   A bug when replacing the glob of a loop variable within the loop
           has been fixed [perl #21469].  This means the following code will
           no longer crash:

               for $x (...) {
                   *x = *y;
               }

       o   Assigning a glob to a PVLV used to convert it to a plain string.
           Now it works correctly, and a PVLV can hold a glob.  This would
           happen when a nonexistent hash or array element was passed to a
           subroutine:

             sub { $_[0] = *foo }->($hash{key});
             # $_[0] would have been the string "*main::foo"

           It also happened when a glob was assigned to, or returned from, an
           element of a tied array or hash [perl #36051].

       o   When trying to report "Use of uninitialized value $Foo::BAR",
           crashes could occur if the glob holding the global variable in
           question had been detached from its original stash by, for example,
           "delete $::{"Foo::"}".  This has been fixed by disabling the
           reporting of variable names in those cases.

       o   During the restoration of a localised typeglob on scope exit, any
           destructors called as a result would be able to see the typeglob in
           an inconsistent state, containing freed entries, which could result
           in a crash.  This would affect code like this:

             local *@;
             eval { die bless [] }; # puts an object in $@
             sub DESTROY {
               local $@; # boom
             }

           Now the glob entries are cleared before any destructors are called.
           This also means that destructors can vivify entries in the glob.
           So Perl tries again and, if the entries are re-created too many
           times, dies with a "panic: gp_free ..." error message.

       o   If a typeglob is freed while a subroutine attached to it is still
           referenced elsewhere, the subroutine is renamed to "__ANON__" in
           the same package, unless the package has been undefined, in which
           case the "__ANON__" package is used.  This could cause packages to
           be sometimes autovivified, such as if the package had been deleted.
           Now this no longer occurs.  The "__ANON__" package is also now used
           when the original package is no longer attached to the symbol
           table.  This avoids memory leaks in some cases [perl #87664].

       o   Subroutines and package variables inside a package whose name ends
           with "::" can now be accessed with a fully qualified name.

   Unicode
       o   What has become known as "the Unicode Bug" is almost completely
           resolved in this release.  Under "use feature 'unicode_strings'"
           (which is automatically selected by "use 5.012" and above), the
           internal storage format of a string no longer affects the external
           semantics.  [perl #58182].

           There are two known exceptions:

           1.  The now-deprecated, user-defined case-changing functions
               require utf8-encoded strings to operate.  The CPAN module
               Unicode::Casing has been written to replace this feature
               without its drawbacks, and the feature is scheduled to be
               removed in 5.16.

           2.  quotemeta() (and its in-line equivalent "\Q") can also give
               different results depending on whether a string is encoded in
               UTF-8.  See "The "Unicode Bug"" in perlunicode.

       o   Handling of Unicode non-character code points has changed.
           Previously they were mostly considered illegal, except that in some
           place only one of the 66 of them was known.  The Unicode Standard
           considers them all legal, but forbids their "open interchange".
           This is part of the change to allow internal use of any code point
           (see "Core Enhancements").  Together, these changes resolve [perl
           #38722], [perl #51918], [perl #51936], and [perl #63446].

       o   Case-insensitive "/i" regular expression matching of Unicode
           characters that match multiple characters now works much more as
           intended.  For example

            "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /ffi/ui

           and

            "ffi" =~ /\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}/ui

           are both true.  Previously, there were many bugs with this feature.
           What hasn't been fixed are the places where the pattern contains
           the multiple characters, but the characters are split up by other
           things, such as in

            "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /(f)(f)i/ui

           or

            "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /ffi*/ui

           or

            "\N{LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI}" =~ /[a-f][f-m][g-z]/ui

           None of these match.

           Also, this matching doesn't fully conform to the current Unicode
           Standard, which asks that the matching be made upon the NFD
           (Normalization Form Decomposed) of the text.  However, as of this
           writing (April 2010), the Unicode Standard is currently in flux
           about what they will recommend doing with regard in such scenarios.
           It may be that they will throw out the whole concept of multi-
           character matches.  [perl #71736].

       o   Naming a deprecated character in "\N{NAME}" no longer leaks memory.

       o   We fixed a bug that could cause "\N{NAME}" constructs followed by a
           single "." to be parsed incorrectly [perl #74978] (5.12.1).

       o   "chop" now correctly handles characters above "\x{7fffffff}" [perl
           #73246].

       o   Passing to "index" an offset beyond the end of the string when the
           string is encoded internally in UTF8 no longer causes panics [perl
           #75898].

       o   warn() and die() now respect utf8-encoded scalars [perl #45549].

       o   Sometimes the UTF8 length cache would not be reset on a value
           returned by substr, causing "length(substr($uni_string, ...))" to
           give wrong answers.  With "${^UTF8CACHE}" set to -1, it would also
           produce a "panic" error message [perl #77692].

   Ties, Overloading and Other Magic
       o   Overloading now works properly in conjunction with tied variables.
           What formerly happened was that most ops checked their arguments
           for overloading before checking for magic, so for example an
           overloaded object returned by a tied array access would usually be
           treated as not overloaded [RT #57012].

       o   Various instances of magic (like tie methods) being called on tied
           variables too many or too few times have been fixed:

           o   $tied->() did not always call FETCH [perl #8438].

           o   Filetest operators and "y///" and "tr///" were calling FETCH
               too many times.

           o   The "=" operator used to ignore magic on its right-hand side if
               the scalar happened to hold a typeglob (if a typeglob was the
               last thing returned from or assigned to a tied scalar) [perl
               #77498].

           o   Dereference operators used to ignore magic if the argument was
               a reference already (such as from a previous FETCH) [perl
               #72144].

           o   "splice" now calls set-magic (so changes made by "splice @ISA"
               are respected by method calls) [perl #78400].

           o   In-memory files created by "open($fh, ">", \$buffer)" were not
               calling FETCH/STORE at all [perl #43789] (5.12.2).

           o   utf8::is_utf8() now respects get-magic (like $1) (5.12.1).

       o   Non-commutative binary operators used to swap their operands if the
           same tied scalar was used for both operands and returned a
           different value for each FETCH.  For instance, if $t returned 2 the
           first time and 3 the second, then "$t/$t" would evaluate to 1.5.
           This has been fixed [perl #87708].

       o   String "eval" now detects taintedness of overloaded or tied
           arguments [perl #75716].

       o   String "eval" and regular expression matches against objects with
           string overloading no longer cause memory corruption or crashes
           [perl #77084].

       o   readline now honors "<>" overloading on tied arguments.

       o   "<expr>" always respects overloading now if the expression is
           overloaded.

           Because "<> as glob" was parsed differently from "<> as filehandle"
           from 5.6 onwards, something like "<$foo[0]>" did not handle
           overloading, even if $foo[0] was an overloaded object.  This was
           contrary to the documentation for overload, and meant that "<>"
           could not be used as a general overloaded iterator operator.

       o   The fallback behaviour of overloading on binary operators was
           asymmetric [perl #71286].

       o   Magic applied to variables in the main package no longer affects
           other packages.  See "Magic variables outside the main package"
           above [perl #76138].

       o   Sometimes magic (ties, taintedness, etc.) attached to variables
           could cause an object to last longer than it should, or cause a
           crash if a tied variable were freed from within a tie method.
           These have been fixed [perl #81230].

       o   DESTROY methods of objects implementing ties are no longer able to
           crash by accessing the tied variable through a weak reference [perl
           #86328].

       o   Fixed a regression of kill() when a match variable is used for the
           process ID to kill [perl #75812].

       o   $AUTOLOAD used to remain tainted forever if it ever became tainted.
           Now it is correctly untainted if an autoloaded method is called and
           the method name was not tainted.

       o   "sprintf" now dies when passed a tainted scalar for the format.  It
           did already die for arbitrary expressions, but not for simple
           scalars [perl #82250].

       o   "lc", "uc", "lcfirst", and "ucfirst" no longer return untainted
           strings when the argument is tainted.  This has been broken since
           perl 5.8.9 [perl #87336].

   The Debugger
       o   The Perl debugger now also works in taint mode [perl #76872].

       o   Subroutine redefinition works once more in the debugger [perl
           #48332].

       o   When -d is used on the shebang ("#!") line, the debugger now has
           access to the lines of the main program.  In the past, this
           sometimes worked and sometimes did not, depending on the order in
           which things happened to be arranged in memory [perl #71806].

       o   A possible memory leak when using caller() to set @DB::args has
           been fixed (5.12.2).

       o   Perl no longer stomps on $DB::single, $DB::trace, and $DB::signal
           if these variables already have values when $^P is assigned to
           [perl #72422].

       o   "#line" directives in string evals were not properly updating the
           arrays of lines of code ("@{"_< ..."}") that the debugger (or any
           debugging or profiling module) uses.  In threaded builds, they were
           not being updated at all.  In non-threaded builds, the line number
           was ignored, so any change to the existing line number would cause
           the lines to be misnumbered [perl #79442].

   Threads
       o   Perl no longer accidentally clones lexicals in scope within active
           stack frames in the parent when creating a child thread [perl
           #73086].

       o   Several memory leaks in cloning and freeing threaded Perl
           interpreters have been fixed [perl #77352].

       o   Creating a new thread when directory handles were open used to
           cause a crash, because the handles were not cloned, but simply
           passed to the new thread, resulting in a double free.

           Now directory handles are cloned properly on Windows and on systems
           that have a "fchdir" function.  On other systems, new threads
           simply do not inherit directory handles from their parent threads
           [perl #75154].

       o   The typeglob "*,", which holds the scalar variable $, (output field
           separator), had the wrong reference count in child threads.

       o   [perl #78494] When pipes are shared between threads, the "close"
           function (and any implicit close, such as on thread exit) no longer
           blocks.

       o   Perl now does a timely cleanup of SVs that are cloned into a new
           thread but then discovered to be orphaned (that is, their owners
           are not cloned).  This eliminates several "scalars leaked" warnings
           when joining threads.

   Scoping and Subroutines
       o   Lvalue subroutines are again able to return copy-on-write scalars.
           This had been broken since version 5.10.0 [perl #75656] (5.12.3).

       o   "require" no longer causes "caller" to return the wrong file name
           for the scope that called "require" and other scopes higher up that
           had the same file name [perl #68712].

       o   "sort" with a "($$)"-prototyped comparison routine used to cause
           the value of @_ to leak out of the sort.  Taking a reference to @_
           within the sorting routine could cause a crash [perl #72334].

       o   Match variables (like $1) no longer persist between calls to a sort
           subroutine [perl #76026].

       o   Iterating with "foreach" over an array returned by an lvalue sub
           now works [perl #23790].

       o   $@ is now localised during calls to "binmode" to prevent action at
           a distance [perl #78844].

       o   Calling a closure prototype (what is passed to an attribute handler
           for a closure) now results in a "Closure prototype called" error
           message instead of a crash [perl #68560].

       o   Mentioning a read-only lexical variable from the enclosing scope in
           a string "eval" no longer causes the variable to become writable
           [perl #19135].

   Signals
       o   Within signal handlers, $! is now implicitly localized.

       o   CHLD signals are no longer unblocked after a signal handler is
           called if they were blocked before by "POSIX::sigprocmask" [perl
           #82040].

       o   A signal handler called within a signal handler could cause leaks
           or double-frees.  Now fixed [perl #76248].

   Miscellaneous Memory Leaks
       o   Several memory leaks when loading XS modules were fixed (5.12.2).

       o   substr(), pos(), keys(), and vec() could, when used in combination
           with lvalues, result in leaking the scalar value they operate on,
           and cause its destruction to happen too late.  This has now been
           fixed.

       o   The postincrement and postdecrement operators, "++" and "--", used
           to cause leaks when used on references.  This has now been fixed.

       o   Nested "map" and "grep" blocks no longer leak memory when
           processing large lists [perl #48004].

       o   "use VERSION" and "no VERSION" no longer leak memory [perl #78436]
           [perl #69050].

       o   ".=" followed by "<>" or "readline" would leak memory if $/
           contained characters beyond the octet range and the scalar assigned
           to happened to be encoded as UTF8 internally [perl #72246].

       o   "eval 'BEGIN{die}'" no longer leaks memory on non-threaded builds.

   Memory Corruption and Crashes
       o   glob() no longer crashes when %File::Glob:: is empty and
           "CORE::GLOBAL::glob" isn't present [perl #75464] (5.12.2).

       o   readline() has been fixed when interrupted by signals so it no
           longer returns the "same thing" as before or random memory.

       o   When assigning a list with duplicated keys to a hash, the
           assignment used to return garbage and/or freed values:

               @a = %h = (list with some duplicate keys);

           This has now been fixed [perl #31865].

       o   The mechanism for freeing objects in globs used to leave dangling
           pointers to freed SVs, meaning Perl users could see corrupted state
           during destruction.

           Perl now frees only the affected slots of the GV, rather than
           freeing the GV itself.  This makes sure that there are no dangling
           refs or corrupted state during destruction.

       o   The interpreter no longer crashes when freeing deeply-nested arrays
           of arrays.  Hashes have not been fixed yet [perl #44225].

       o   Concatenating long strings under "use encoding" no longer causes
           Perl to crash [perl #78674].

       o   Calling "->import" on a class lacking an import method could
           corrupt the stack, resulting in strange behaviour.  For instance,

             push @a, "foo", $b = bar->import;

           would assign "foo" to $b [perl #63790].

       o   The "recv" function could crash when called with the MSG_TRUNC flag
           [perl #75082].

       o   "formline" no longer crashes when passed a tainted format picture.
           It also taints $^A now if its arguments are tainted [perl #79138].

       o   A bug in how we process filetest operations could cause a segfault.
           Filetests don't always expect an op on the stack, so we now use
           TOPs only if we're sure that we're not "stat"ing the "_"
           filehandle.  This is indicated by "OPf_KIDS" (as checked in
           ck_ftst) [perl #74542] (5.12.1).

       o   unpack() now handles scalar context correctly for %32H and %32u,
           fixing a potential crash.  split() would crash because the third
           item on the stack wasn't the regular expression it expected.
           "unpack("%2H", ...)" would return both the unpacked result and the
           checksum on the stack, as would "unpack("%2u", ...)" [perl #73814]
           (5.12.2).

   Fixes to Various Perl Operators
       o   The "&", "|", and "^" bitwise operators no longer coerce read-only
           arguments [perl #20661].

       o   Stringifying a scalar containing "-0.0" no longer has the effect of
           turning false into true [perl #45133].

       o   Some numeric operators were converting integers to floating point,
           resulting in loss of precision on 64-bit platforms [perl #77456].

       o   sprintf() was ignoring locales when called with constant arguments
           [perl #78632].

       o   Combining the vector (%v) flag and dynamic precision would cause
           "sprintf" to confuse the order of its arguments, making it treat
           the string as the precision and vice-versa [perl #83194].

   Bugs Relating to the C API
       o   The C-level "lex_stuff_pvn" function would sometimes cause a
           spurious syntax error on the last line of the file if it lacked a
           final semicolon [perl #74006] (5.12.1).

       o   The "eval_sv" and "eval_pv" C functions now set $@ correctly when
           there is a syntax error and no "G_KEEPERR" flag, and never set it
           if the "G_KEEPERR" flag is present [perl #3719].

       o   The XS multicall API no longer causes subroutines to lose reference
           counts if called via the multicall interface from within those very
           subroutines.  This affects modules like List::Util.  Calling one of
           its functions with an active subroutine as the first argument could
           cause a crash [perl #78070].

       o   The "SvPVbyte" function available to XS modules now calls magic
           before downgrading the SV, to avoid warnings about wide characters
           [perl #72398].

       o   The ref types in the typemap for XS bindings now support magical
           variables [perl #72684].

       o   "sv_catsv_flags" no longer calls "mg_get" on its second argument
           (the source string) if the flags passed to it do not include
           SV_GMAGIC.  So it now matches the documentation.

       o   "my_strftime" no longer leaks memory.  This fixes a memory leak in
           "POSIX::strftime" [perl #73520].

       o   XSUB.h now correctly redefines fgets under PERL_IMPLICIT_SYS [perl
           #55049] (5.12.1).

       o   XS code using fputc() or fputs() on Windows could cause an error
           due to their arguments being swapped [perl #72704] (5.12.1).

       o   A possible segfault in the "T_PTROBJ" default typemap has been
           fixed (5.12.2).

       o   A bug that could cause "Unknown error" messages when "call_sv(code,
           G_EVAL)" is called from an XS destructor has been fixed (5.12.2).


Known Problems

       This is a list of significant unresolved issues which are regressions
       from earlier versions of Perl or which affect widely-used CPAN modules.

       o   "List::Util::first" misbehaves in the presence of a lexical $_
           (typically introduced by "my $_" or implicitly by "given").  The
           variable that gets set for each iteration is the package variable
           $_, not the lexical $_.

           A similar issue may occur in other modules that provide functions
           which take a block as their first argument, like

               foo { ... $_ ...} list

           See also: <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/9798>

       o   readline() returns an empty string instead of a cached previous
           value when it is interrupted by a signal

       o   The changes in prototype handling break Switch.  A patch has been
           sent upstream and will hopefully appear on CPAN soon.

       o   The upgrade to ExtUtils-MakeMaker-6.57_05 has caused some tests in
           the Module-Install distribution on CPAN to fail. (Specifically,
           02_mymeta.t tests 5 and 21; 18_all_from.t tests 6 and 15;
           19_authors.t tests 5, 13, 21, and 29; and
           20_authors_with_special_characters.t tests 6, 15, and 23 in version
           1.00 of that distribution now fail.)

       o   On VMS, "Time::HiRes" tests will fail due to a bug in the CRTL's
           implementation of "setitimer": previous timer values would be
           cleared if a timer expired but not if the timer was reset before
           expiring.  HP OpenVMS Engineering have corrected the problem and
           will release a patch in due course (Quix case # QXCM1001115136).

       o   On VMS, there were a handful of "Module::Build" test failures we
           didn't get to before the release; please watch CPAN for updates.


Errata

   keys(), values(), and each() work on arrays
       You can now use the keys(), values(), and each() builtins on arrays;
       previously you could use them only on hashes.  See perlfunc for
       details.  This is actually a change introduced in perl 5.12.0, but it
       was missed from that release's perl5120delta.

   split() and @_
       split() no longer modifies @_ when called in scalar or void context.
       In void context it now produces a "Useless use of split" warning.  This
       was also a perl 5.12.0 change that missed the perldelta.


Obituary

       Randy Kobes, creator of http://kobesearch.cpan.org/ and
       contributor/maintainer to several core Perl toolchain modules, passed
       away on September 18, 2010 after a battle with lung cancer.  The
       community was richer for his involvement.  He will be missed.


Acknowledgements

       Perl 5.14.0 represents one year of development since Perl 5.12.0 and
       contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes across nearly 3,000 files from
       150 authors and committers.

       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 5.14.0:

       Aaron Crane, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, AEvar Arnfjordh Bjarmason,
       Alastair Douglas, Alexander Alekseev, Alexander Hartmaier, Alexandr
       Ciornii, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Ali Polatel, Allen Smith, Andreas
       Konig, Andrew Rodland, Andy Armstrong, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle
       Pagaltzis, Arkturuz, Arvan, A. Sinan Unur, Ben Morrow, Bo Lindbergh,
       Boris Ratner, Brad Gilbert, Bram, brian d foy, Brian Phillips, Casey
       West, Charles Bailey, Chas. Owens, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs'
       Williams, chromatic, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dagfinn Ilmari
       Mannsaker, Dan Dascalescu, Dave Rolsky, David Caldwell, David Cantrell,
       David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, David Wheeler, Eric
       Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Fingle Nark, Florian Ragwitz, Frank
       Wiegand, Franz Fasching, Gene Sullivan, George Greer, Gerard Goossen,
       Gisle Aas, Goro Fuji, Grant McLean, gregor herrmann, H.Merijn Brand,
       Hongwen Qiu, Hugo van der Sanden, Ian Goodacre, James E Keenan, James
       Mastros, Jan Dubois, Jay Hannah, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim
       Cromie, Jirka Hruska, John Peacock, Joshua ben Jore, Joshua Pritikin,
       Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, kmx, Lars D<?><?><?><?><?><?> <?><?><?>,
       Larwan Berke, Leon Brocard, Leon Timmermans, Lubomir Rintel, Lukas Mai,
       Maik Hentsche, Marty Pauley, Marvin Humphrey, Matt Johnson, Matt S
       Trout, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael Fig, Michael G Schwern,
       Michael Parker, Michael Stevens, Michael Witten, Mike Kelly, Moritz
       Lenz, Nicholas Clark, Nick Cleaton, Nick Johnston, Nicolas Kaiser, Niko
       Tyni, Noirin Shirley, Nuno Carvalho, Paul Evans, Paul Green, Paul
       Johnson, Paul Marquess, Peter J. Holzer, Peter John Acklam, Peter
       Martini, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Piotr Fusik, Rafael Garcia-Suarez,
       Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes, Richard
       Mohn, Richard Soderberg, Rob Hoelz, Robin Barker, Ruslan Zakirov,
       Salvador Fandino, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Shlomi Fish, Sinan Unur,
       Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Muller, Steve Hay, Steven Schubiger,
       Steve Peters, Sullivan Beck, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, Tim Bunce, Todd
       Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Tye McQueen, Vadim
       Konovalov, Vernon Lyon, Vincent Pit, Walt Mankowski, Wolfram Humann,
       Yves Orton, Zefram, and Zsban Ambrus.

       This is woefully incomplete as it's automatically generated from
       version control history.  In particular, it doesn't include the names
       of the (very much appreciated) contributors who reported issues in
       previous versions of Perl that helped make Perl 5.14.0 better. For a
       more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors, please see
       the "AUTHORS" file in the Perl 5.14.0 distribution.

       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.


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 are 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 for security issues in the Perl
       core only, 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 v5.38.2                      2023-11-28                  perl5140delta(1)

perl 5.38.2 - Generated Thu Nov 28 09:23:15 CST 2024
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