=head1 NAME perl573delta - what's new for perl v5.7.3 =head1 DESCRIPTION This document describes differences between the 5.7.2 release and the 5.7.3 release. (To view the differences between the 5.6.0 release and the 5.7.0 release, see L. To view the differences between the 5.7.0 release and the 5.7.1 release, see L. To view the differences between the 5.7.1 release and the 5.7.2 release, see L.) =head1 Changes This is just a selected list of some of the more notable changes. The numbers refer to the Perl repository change numbers; see L (or L in Perl 5.8.1). In addition to these changes, lots of work took place in integrating threads, PerlIO, and Unicode; general code cleanup; and last but not least porting to non-UNIX lands such as Win32, VMS, Cygwin, DJGPP, VOS, MacOS Classic, and EBCDIC. =over 4 =item 11362 add LC_MESSAGES to POSIX :locale_h export tag =item 11371 add DEL to [:cntrl:] =item 11375 make h2ph understand constants like 1234L and 5678LL =item 11405 Win32: fix bugs in handling of the virtualized environment =item 11410 fix a bug in the security taint checking of open() =item 11423 make perl fork() safe even on platforms that don't have pthread_atfork() =item 11459 make switching optimization and debugging levels during Perl builds easier via the OPTIMIZE environment variable =item 11475 make split()'s unused captures to be undef, not '' =item 11485 Search::Dict: allow transforming lines before comparing =item 11490 allow installing extra modules or bundles when building Perl =item 11516 add -Wall in cflags when compiling with gcc to weed out dubious C practices =item 11541 pluggable optimizer =item 11549 WinCE: integrate the port =item 11589 Win32: 4-arg select was broken =item 11594 introduce the perlivp utility for verifying the Perl installation (IVP = Installation Verification Procedure) =item 11623 rename lib/unicode to lib/unicore to avoid case-insensitivity problems with lib/Unicode =item 111631 remove Time::Piece =item 11643 document that use utf8 is not the right way most of the time =item 11656 allow building perl with -DUSE_UTF8_SCRIPTS which makes UTF-8 the default script encoding (not the default since that would break all scripts having legacy eight-bit data in them) =item 11725 division preserving 64-bit integers =item 11743 document the coderef-in-@INC feature =item 11794 modulo (%) preserving 64-bit integers =item 11825 update to Unicode 3.1.1 =item 11865 add the \[$@%&*] prototype support =item 11874 oct() and hex() in glorious 64 bit =item 11877 Class::Struct: allow recursive classes =item 11993 fix unpack U to be the reverse of pack U =item 12056 VMS: waitpid enhancements =item 12180 unpack("Z*Z*", pack("Z*Z*", ..)) was broken =item 12243 Devel::Peek: display UTF-8 SVs also as \x{...} =item 12288 Data::Dumper: option to sort hashes =item 12542 add perlpodspec =item 12652 threadsafe DynaLoader, re, Opcode, File::Glob, and B =item 12756 support BeOS better =item 12874 read-only hashes (user-level interface is Hash::Util) =item 13162 add Devel::PPPort =item 13179 add the sort pragma =item 13326 VMS: fix perl -P =item 13358 add perlpacktut =item 13452 SUPER-UX: add hints file =item 13575 Win32: non-blocking waitpid(-1,WNOHANG) =item 13684 introduce the -t option for gentler taint checking =item 14694 add the if pragma =item 14832 implement IV/UV/NV/long double un/packing with j/J/F/D =item 14854 document the new taint behaviour of exec LIST and system LIST =back =head1 Reporting Bugs If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug database at http://bugs.perl.org. There may also be information at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page. If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the B 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 C, will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by the Perl porting team. =head1 SEE ALSO The F file for exhaustive details on what changed. The F file for how to build Perl. The F file for general stuff. The F and F files for copyright information. =head1 HISTORY Written by Jarkko Hietaniemi >, with many contributions from The Perl Porters and Perl Users submitting feedback and patches. Send omissions or corrections to >. =cut