perl5200delta(1)


NAME

   perl5200delta - what is new for perl v5.20.0

DESCRIPTION

   This document describes differences between the 5.18.0 release and the
   5.20.0 release.

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

Core Enhancements

   Experimental Subroutine signatures
   Declarative syntax to unwrap argument list into lexical variables.
   "sub foo ($a,$b) {...}" checks the number of arguments and puts the
   arguments into lexical variables.  Signatures are not equivalent to the
   existing idiom of "sub foo { my($a,$b) = @_; ... }".  Signatures are
   only available by enabling a non-default feature, and generate warnings
   about being experimental.  The syntactic clash with prototypes is
   managed by disabling the short prototype syntax when signatures are
   enabled.

   See "Signatures" in perlsub for details.

   "sub"s now take a "prototype" attribute
   When declaring or defining a "sub", the prototype can now be specified
   inside of a "prototype" attribute instead of in parens following the
   name.

   For example, "sub foo($$){}" could be rewritten as "sub foo :
   prototype($$){}".

   More consistent prototype parsing
   Multiple semicolons in subroutine prototypes have long been tolerated
   and treated as a single semicolon.  There was one case where this did
   not happen.  A subroutine whose prototype begins with "*" or ";*" can
   affect whether a bareword is considered a method name or sub call.
   This now applies also to ";;;*".

   Whitespace has long been allowed inside subroutine prototypes, so "sub(
   $ $ )" is equivalent to "sub($$)", but until now it was stripped when
   the subroutine was parsed.  Hence, whitespace was not allowed in
   prototypes set by "Scalar::Util::set_prototype".  Now it is permitted,
   and the parser no longer strips whitespace.  This means "prototype
   &mysub" returns the original prototype, whitespace and all.

   "rand" now uses a consistent random number generator
   Previously perl would use a platform specific random number generator,
   varying between the libc rand(), random() or drand48().

   This meant that the quality of perl's random numbers would vary from
   platform to platform, from the 15 bits of rand() on Windows to 48-bits
   on POSIX platforms such as Linux with drand48().

   Perl now uses its own internal drand48() implementation on all
   platforms.  This does not make perl's "rand" cryptographically secure.
   [perl #115928]

   New slice syntax
   The new %hash{...} and %array[...] syntax returns a list of key/value
   (or index/value) pairs.  See "Key/Value Hash Slices" in perldata.

   Experimental Postfix Dereferencing
   When the "postderef" feature is in effect, the following syntactical
   equivalencies are set up:

     $sref->$*;  # same as ${ $sref }  # interpolates
     $aref->@*;  # same as @{ $aref }  # interpolates
     $href->%*;  # same as %{ $href }
     $cref->&*;  # same as &{ $cref }
     $gref->**;  # same as *{ $gref }

     $aref->$#*; # same as $#{ $aref }

     $gref->*{ $slot }; # same as *{ $gref }{ $slot }

     $aref->@[ ... ];  # same as @$aref[ ... ]  # interpolates
     $href->@{ ... };  # same as @$href{ ... }  # interpolates
     $aref->%[ ... ];  # same as %$aref[ ... ]
     $href->%{ ... };  # same as %$href{ ... }

   Those marked as interpolating only interpolate if the associated
   "postderef_qq" feature is also enabled.  This feature is experimental
   and will trigger "experimental::postderef"-category warnings when used,
   unless they are suppressed.

   For more information, consult the Postfix Dereference Syntax section of
   perlref.

   Unicode 6.3 now supported
   Perl now supports and is shipped with Unicode 6.3 (though Perl may be
   recompiled with any previous Unicode release as well).  A detailed list
   of Unicode 6.3 changes is at
   <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.3.0/>.

   New "\p{Unicode}" regular expression pattern property
   This is a synonym for "\p{Any}" and matches the set of Unicode-defined
   code points 0 - 0x10FFFF.

   Better 64-bit support
   On 64-bit platforms, the internal array functions now use 64-bit
   offsets, allowing Perl arrays to hold more than 2**31 elements, if you
   have the memory available.

   The regular expression engine now supports strings longer than 2**31
   characters.  [perl #112790, #116907]

   The functions PerlIO_get_bufsiz, PerlIO_get_cnt, PerlIO_set_cnt and
   PerlIO_set_ptrcnt now have SSize_t, rather than int, return values and
   parameters.

   "uselocale" now works on UTF-8 locales
   Until this release, only single-byte locales, such as the ISO 8859
   series were supported.  Now, the increasingly common multi-byte UTF-8
   locales are also supported.  A UTF-8 locale is one in which the
   character set is Unicode and the encoding is UTF-8.  The POSIX
   "LC_CTYPE" category operations (case changing (like "lc()", "\U"), and
   character classification ("\w", "\D", "qr/[[:punct:]]/")) under such a
   locale work just as if not under locale, but instead as if under
   "usefeature'unicode_strings'", except taint rules are followed.
   Sorting remains by code point order in this release.  [perl #56820].

   "uselocale" now compiles on systems without locale ability
   Previously doing this caused the program to not compile.  Within its
   scope the program behaves as if in the "C" locale.  Thus programs
   written for platforms that support locales can run on locale-less
   platforms without change.  Attempts to change the locale away from the
   "C" locale will, of course, fail.

   More locale initialization fallback options
   If there was an error with locales during Perl start-up, it immediately
   gave up and tried to use the "C" locale.  Now it first tries using
   other locales given by the environment variables, as detailed in
   "ENVIRONMENT" in perllocale.  For example, if "LC_ALL" and "LANG" are
   both set, and using the "LC_ALL" locale fails, Perl will now try the
   "LANG" locale, and only if that fails, will it fall back to "C".  On
   Windows machines, Perl will try, ahead of using "C", the system default
   locale if all the locales given by environment variables fail.

   "-DL" runtime option now added for tracing locale setting
   This is designed for Perl core developers to aid in field debugging
   bugs regarding locales.

   -F now implies -a and -a implies -n
   Previously -F without -a was a no-op, and -a without -n or -p was a no-
   op, with this change, if you supply -F then both -a and -n are implied
   and if you supply -a then -n is implied.

   You can still use -p for its extra behaviour. [perl #116190]

   $a and $b warnings exemption
   The special variables $a and $b, used in "sort", are now exempt from
   "used once" warnings, even where "sort" is not used.  This makes it
   easier for CPAN modules to provide functions using $a and $b for
   similar purposes.  [perl #120462]

Security

   Avoid possible read of free()d memory during parsing
   It was possible that free()d memory could be read during parsing in the
   unusual circumstance of the Perl program ending with a heredoc and the
   last line of the file on disk having no terminating newline character.
   This has now been fixed.

Incompatible Changes

   "do" can no longer be used to call subroutines
   The "do SUBROUTINE(LIST)" form has resulted in a deprecation warning
   since Perl v5.0.0, and is now a syntax error.

   Quote-like escape changes
   The character after "\c" in a double-quoted string ("..." or qq(...))
   or regular expression must now be a printable character and may not be
   "{".

   A literal "{" after "\B" or "	" is now fatal.

   These were deprecated in perl v5.14.0.

   Tainting happens under more circumstances; now conforms to documentation
   This affects regular expression matching and changing the case of a
   string ("lc", "\U", etc.) within the scope of "use locale".  The result
   is now tainted based on the operation, no matter what the contents of
   the string were, as the documentation (perlsec, "SECURITY" in
   perllocale) indicates it should.  Previously, for the case change
   operation, if the string contained no characters whose case change
   could be affected by the locale, the result would not be tainted.  For
   example, the result of "uc()" on an empty string or one containing only
   above-Latin1 code points is now tainted, and wasn't before.  This leads
   to more consistent tainting results.  Regular expression patterns taint
   their non-binary results (like $&, $2) if and only if the pattern
   contains elements whose matching depends on the current (potentially
   tainted) locale.  Like the case changing functions, the actual contents
   of the string being matched now do not matter, whereas formerly it did.
   For example, if the pattern contains a "\w", the results will be
   tainted even if the match did not have to use that portion of the
   pattern to succeed or fail, because what a "\w" matches depends on
   locale.  However, for example, a "." in a pattern will not enable
   tainting, because the dot matches any single character, and what the
   current locale is doesn't change in any way what matches and what
   doesn't.

   "\p{}", "\P{}" matching has changed for non-Unicode code points.
   "\p{}" and "\P{}" are defined by Unicode only on Unicode-defined code
   points ("U+0000" through "U+10FFFF").  Their behavior on matching these
   legal Unicode code points is unchanged, but there are changes for code
   points 0x110000 and above.  Previously, Perl treated the result of
   matching "\p{}" and "\P{}" against these as "undef", which translates
   into "false".  For "\P{}", this was then complemented into "true".  A
   warning was supposed to be raised when this happened.  However, various
   optimizations could prevent the warning, and the results were often
   counter-intuitive, with both a match and its seeming complement being
   false.  Now all non-Unicode code points are treated as typical
   unassigned Unicode code points.  This generally is more Do-What-I-Mean.
   A warning is raised only if the results are arguably different from a
   strict Unicode approach, and from what Perl used to do.  Code that
   needs to be strictly Unicode compliant can make this warning fatal, and
   then Perl always raises the warning.

   Details are in "Beyond Unicode code points" in perlunicode.

   "\p{All}" has been expanded to match all possible code points
   The Perl-defined regular expression pattern element "\p{All}", unused
   on CPAN, used to match just the Unicode code points; now it matches all
   possible code points; that is, it is equivalent to "qr/./s".  Thus
   "\p{All}" is no longer synonymous with "\p{Any}", which continues to
   match just the Unicode code points, as Unicode says it should.

   Data::Dumper's output may change
   Depending on the data structures dumped and the settings set for
   Data::Dumper, the dumped output may have changed from previous
   versions.

   If you have tests that depend on the exact output of Data::Dumper, they
   may fail.

   To avoid this problem in your code, test against the data structure
   from evaluating the dumped structure, instead of the dump itself.

   Locale decimal point character no longer leaks outside of "uselocale"
   scope
   This is actually a bug fix, but some code has come to rely on the bug
   being present, so this change is listed here.  The current locale that
   the program is running under is not supposed to be visible to Perl code
   except within the scope of a "uselocale".  However, until now under
   certain circumstances, the character used for a decimal point (often a
   comma) leaked outside the scope.  If your code is affected by this
   change, simply add a "uselocale".

   Assignments of Windows sockets error codes to $! now prefer errno.h values
   over WSAGetLastError() values
   In previous versions of Perl, Windows sockets error codes as returned
   by WSAGetLastError() were assigned to $!, and some constants such as
   ECONNABORTED, not in errno.h in VC++ (or the various Windows ports of
   gcc) were defined to corresponding WSAE* values to allow $! to be
   tested against the E* constants exported by Errno and POSIX.

   This worked well until VC++ 2010 and later, which introduced new E*
   constants with values > 100 into errno.h, including some being
   (re)defined by perl to WSAE* values.  That caused problems when linking
   XS code against other libraries which used the original definitions of
   errno.h constants.

   To avoid this incompatibility, perl now maps WSAE* error codes to E*
   values where possible, and assigns those values to $!.  The E*
   constants exported by Errno and POSIX are updated to match so that
   testing $! against them, wherever previously possible, will continue to
   work as expected, and all E* constants found in errno.h are now
   exported from those modules with their original errno.h values.

   In order to avoid breakage in existing Perl code which assigns WSAE*
   values to $!, perl now intercepts the assignment and performs the same
   mapping to E* values as it uses internally when assigning to $! itself.

   However, one backwards-incompatibility remains: existing Perl code
   which compares $! against the numeric values of the WSAE* error codes
   that were previously assigned to $! will now be broken in those cases
   where a corresponding E* value has been assigned instead.  This is only
   an issue for those E* values < 100, which were always exported from
   Errno and POSIX with their original errno.h values, and therefore could
   not be used for WSAE* error code tests (e.g. WSAEINVAL is 10022, but
   the corresponding EINVAL is 22).  (E* values > 100, if present, were
   redefined to WSAE* values anyway, so compatibility can be achieved by
   using the E* constants, which will work both before and after this
   change, albeit using different numeric values under the hood.)

   Functions "PerlIO_vsprintf" and "PerlIO_sprintf" have been removed
   These two functions, undocumented, unused in CPAN, and problematic,
   have been removed.

Deprecations

   The "/\C/" character class
   The "/\C/" regular expression character class is deprecated. From perl
   5.22 onwards it will generate a warning, and from perl 5.24 onwards it
   will be a regular expression compiler error. If you need to examine the
   individual bytes that make up a UTF8-encoded character, then use
   "utf8::encode()" on the string (or a copy) first.

   Literal control characters in variable names
   This deprecation affects things like $\cT, where \cT is a literal
   control (such as a "NAK" or "NEGATIVE ACKNOWLEDGE" character) in the
   source code.  Surprisingly, it appears that originally this was
   intended as the canonical way of accessing variables like $^T, with the
   caret form only being added as an alternative.

   The literal control form is being deprecated for two main reasons.  It
   has what are likely unfixable bugs, such as $\cI not working as an
   alias for $^I, and their usage not being portable to non-ASCII
   platforms: While $^T will work everywhere, \cT is whitespace in EBCDIC.
   [perl #119123]

   References to non-integers and non-positive integers in $/
   Setting $/ to a reference to zero or a reference to a negative integer
   is now deprecated, and will behave exactly as though it was set to
   "undef".  If you want slurp behavior set $/ to "undef" explicitly.

   Setting $/ to a reference to a non integer is now forbidden and will
   throw an error. Perl has never documented what would happen in this
   context and while it used to behave the same as setting $/ to the
   address of the references in future it may behave differently, so we
   have forbidden this usage.

   Character matching routines in POSIX
   Use of any of these functions in the "POSIX" module is now deprecated:
   "isalnum", "isalpha", "iscntrl", "isdigit", "isgraph", "islower",
   "isprint", "ispunct", "isspace", "isupper", and "isxdigit".  The
   functions are buggy and don't work on UTF-8 encoded strings.  See their
   entries in POSIX for more information.

   A warning is raised on the first call to any of them from each place in
   the code that they are called.  (Hence a repeated statement in a loop
   will raise just the one warning.)

   Interpreter-based threads are now discouraged
   The "interpreter-based threads" provided by Perl are not the fast,
   lightweight system for multitasking that one might expect or hope for.
   Threads are implemented in a way that make them easy to misuse.  Few
   people know how to use them correctly or will be able to provide help.

   The use of interpreter-based threads in perl is officially discouraged.

   Module removals
   The following modules will be removed from the core distribution in a
   future release, and will at that time need to be installed from CPAN.
   Distributions on CPAN which require these modules will need to list
   them as prerequisites.

   The core versions of these modules will now issue "deprecated"-category
   warnings to alert you to this fact.  To silence these deprecation
   warnings, install the modules in question from CPAN.

   Note that the planned removal of these modules from core does not
   reflect a judgement about the quality of the code and should not be
   taken as a suggestion that their use be halted.  Their disinclusion
   from core primarily hinges on their necessity to bootstrapping a fully
   functional, CPAN-capable Perl installation, not on concerns over their
   design.

   CGI and its associated CGI:: packages
   inc::latest
   Package::Constants
   Module::Build and its associated Module::Build:: packages

   Utility removals
   The following utilities will be removed from the core distribution in a
   future release, and will at that time need to be installed from CPAN.

   find2perl
   s2p
   a2p

Performance Enhancements

   *   Perl has a new copy-on-write mechanism that avoids the need to copy
       the internal string buffer when assigning from one scalar to
       another. This makes copying large strings appear much faster.
       Modifying one of the two (or more) strings after an assignment will
       force a copy internally. This makes it unnecessary to pass strings
       by reference for efficiency.

       This feature was already available in 5.18.0, but wasn't enabled by
       default. It is the default now, and so you no longer need build
       perl with the Configure argument:

           -Accflags=-DPERL_NEW_COPY_ON_WRITE

       It can be disabled (for now) in a perl build with:

           -Accflags=-DPERL_NO_COW

       On some operating systems Perl can be compiled in such a way that
       any attempt to modify string buffers shared by multiple SVs will
       crash.  This way XS authors can test that their modules handle
       copy-on-write scalars correctly.  See "Copy on Write" in perlguts
       for detail.

   *   Perl has an optimizer for regular expression patterns.  It analyzes
       the pattern to find things such as the minimum length a string has
       to be to match, etc.  It now better handles code points that are
       above the Latin1 range.

   *   Executing a regex that contains the "^" anchor (or its variant
       under the "/m" flag) has been made much faster in several
       situations.

   *   Precomputed hash values are now used in more places during method
       lookup.

   *   Constant hash key lookups ($hash{key} as opposed to $hash{$key})
       have long had the internal hash value computed at compile time, to
       speed up lookup.  This optimisation has only now been applied to
       hash slices as well.

   *   Combined "and" and "or" operators in void context, like those
       generated for "unless ($a && $b)" and "if ($a || b)" now short
       circuit directly to the end of the statement. [perl #120128]

   *   In certain situations, when "return" is the last statement in a
       subroutine's main scope, it will be optimized out. This means code
       like:

         sub baz { return $cat; }

       will now behave like:

         sub baz { $cat; }

       which is notably faster.

       [perl #120765]

   *   Code like:

         my $x; # or @x, %x
         my $y;

       is now optimized to:

         my ($x, $y);

       In combination with the padrange optimization introduced in
       v5.18.0, this means longer uninitialized my variable statements are
       also optimized, so:

         my $x; my @y; my %z;

       becomes:

         my ($x, @y, %z);

       [perl #121077]

   *   The creation of certain sorts of lists, including array and hash
       slices, is now faster.

   *   The optimisation for arrays indexed with a small constant integer
       is now applied for integers in the range -128..127, rather than
       0..255. This should speed up Perl code using expressions like
       $x[-1], at the expense of (presumably much rarer) code using
       expressions like $x[200].

   *   The first iteration over a large hash (using "keys" or "each") is
       now faster. This is achieved by preallocating the hash's internal
       iterator state, rather than lazily creating it when the hash is
       first iterated. (For small hashes, the iterator is still created
       only when first needed. The assumption is that small hashes are
       more likely to be used as objects, and therefore never allocated.
       For large hashes, that's less likely to be true, and the cost of
       allocating the iterator is swamped by the cost of allocating space
       for the hash itself.)

   *   When doing a global regex match on a string that came from the
       "readline" or "<>" operator, the data is no longer copied
       unnecessarily.  [perl #121259]

   *   Dereferencing (as in "$obj->[0]" or "$obj->{k}") is now faster when
       $obj is an instance of a class that has overloaded methods, but
       doesn't overload any of the dereferencing methods "@{}", "%{}", and
       so on.

   *   Perl's optimiser no longer skips optimising code that follows
       certain "eval {}" expressions (including those with an apparent
       infinite loop).

   *   The implementation now does a better job of avoiding meaningless
       work at runtime. Internal effect-free "null" operations (created as
       a side-effect of parsing Perl programs) are normally deleted during
       compilation. That deletion is now applied in some situations that
       weren't previously handled.

   *   Perl now does less disk I/O when dealing with Unicode properties
       that cover up to three ranges of consecutive code points.

Modules and Pragmata

   New Modules and Pragmata
   *   experimental 0.007 has been added to the Perl core.

   *   IO::Socket::IP 0.29 has been added to the Perl core.

   Updated Modules and Pragmata
   *   Archive::Tar has been upgraded from version 1.90 to 1.96.

   *   arybase has been upgraded from version 0.06 to 0.07.

   *   Attribute::Handlers has been upgraded from version 0.94 to 0.96.

   *   attributes has been upgraded from version 0.21 to 0.22.

   *   autodie has been upgraded from version 2.13 to 2.23.

   *   AutoLoader has been upgraded from version 5.73 to 5.74.

   *   autouse has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.08.

   *   B has been upgraded from version 1.42 to 1.48.

   *   B::Concise has been upgraded from version 0.95 to 0.992.

   *   B::Debug has been upgraded from version 1.18 to 1.19.

   *   B::Deparse has been upgraded from version 1.20 to 1.26.

   *   base has been upgraded from version 2.18 to 2.22.

   *   Benchmark has been upgraded from version 1.15 to 1.18.

   *   bignum has been upgraded from version 0.33 to 0.37.

   *   Carp has been upgraded from version 1.29 to 1.3301.

   *   CGI has been upgraded from version 3.63 to 3.65.  NOTE: CGI is
       deprecated and may be removed from a future version of Perl.

   *   charnames has been upgraded from version 1.36 to 1.40.

   *   Class::Struct has been upgraded from version 0.64 to 0.65.

   *   Compress::Raw::Bzip2 has been upgraded from version 2.060 to 2.064.

   *   Compress::Raw::Zlib has been upgraded from version 2.060 to 2.065.

   *   Config::Perl::V has been upgraded from version 0.17 to 0.20.

   *   constant has been upgraded from version 1.27 to 1.31.

   *   CPAN has been upgraded from version 2.00 to 2.05.

   *   CPAN::Meta has been upgraded from version 2.120921 to 2.140640.

   *   CPAN::Meta::Requirements has been upgraded from version 2.122 to
       2.125.

   *   CPAN::Meta::YAML has been upgraded from version 0.008 to 0.012.

   *   Data::Dumper has been upgraded from version 2.145 to 2.151.

   *   DB has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.07.

   *   DB_File has been upgraded from version 1.827 to 1.831.

   *   DBM_Filter has been upgraded from version 0.05 to 0.06.

   *   deprecate has been upgraded from version 0.02 to 0.03.

   *   Devel::Peek has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.16.

   *   Devel::PPPort has been upgraded from version 3.20 to 3.21.

   *   diagnostics has been upgraded from version 1.31 to 1.34.

   *   Digest::MD5 has been upgraded from version 2.52 to 2.53.

   *   Digest::SHA has been upgraded from version 5.84 to 5.88.

   *   DynaLoader has been upgraded from version 1.18 to 1.25.

   *   Encode has been upgraded from version 2.49 to 2.60.

   *   encoding has been upgraded from version 2.6_01 to 2.12.

   *   English has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.09.

       $OLD_PERL_VERSION was added as an alias of $].

   *   Errno has been upgraded from version 1.18 to 1.20_03.

   *   Exporter has been upgraded from version 5.68 to 5.70.

   *   ExtUtils::CBuilder has been upgraded from version 0.280210 to
       0.280216.

   *   ExtUtils::Command has been upgraded from version 1.17 to 1.18.

   *   ExtUtils::Embed has been upgraded from version 1.30 to 1.32.

   *   ExtUtils::Install has been upgraded from version 1.59 to 1.67.

   *   ExtUtils::MakeMaker has been upgraded from version 6.66 to 6.98.

   *   ExtUtils::Miniperl has been upgraded from version  to 1.01.

   *   ExtUtils::ParseXS has been upgraded from version 3.18 to 3.24.

   *   ExtUtils::Typemaps has been upgraded from version 3.19 to 3.24.

   *   ExtUtils::XSSymSet has been upgraded from version 1.2 to 1.3.

   *   feature has been upgraded from version 1.32 to 1.36.

   *   fields has been upgraded from version 2.16 to 2.17.

   *   File::Basename has been upgraded from version 2.84 to 2.85.

   *   File::Copy has been upgraded from version 2.26 to 2.29.

   *   File::DosGlob has been upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.12.

   *   File::Fetch has been upgraded from version 0.38 to 0.48.

   *   File::Find has been upgraded from version 1.23 to 1.27.

   *   File::Glob has been upgraded from version 1.20 to 1.23.

   *   File::Spec has been upgraded from version 3.40 to 3.47.

   *   File::Temp has been upgraded from version 0.23 to 0.2304.

   *   FileCache has been upgraded from version 1.08 to 1.09.

   *   Filter::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.89 to 0.91.

   *   Filter::Util::Call has been upgraded from version 1.45 to 1.49.

   *   Getopt::Long has been upgraded from version 2.39 to 2.42.

   *   Getopt::Std has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.10.

   *   Hash::Util::FieldHash has been upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.15.

   *   HTTP::Tiny has been upgraded from version 0.025 to 0.043.

   *   I18N::Langinfo has been upgraded from version 0.10 to 0.11.

   *   I18N::LangTags has been upgraded from version 0.39 to 0.40.

   *   if has been upgraded from version 0.0602 to 0.0603.

   *   inc::latest has been upgraded from version 0.4003 to 0.4205.  NOTE:
       inc::latest is deprecated and may be removed from a future version
       of Perl.

   *   integer has been upgraded from version 1.00 to 1.01.

   *   IO has been upgraded from version 1.28 to 1.31.

   *   IO::Compress::Gzip and friends have been upgraded from version
       2.060 to 2.064.

   *   IPC::Cmd has been upgraded from version 0.80 to 0.92.

   *   IPC::Open3 has been upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.16.

   *   IPC::SysV has been upgraded from version 2.03 to 2.04.

   *   JSON::PP has been upgraded from version 2.27202 to 2.27203.

   *   List::Util has been upgraded from version 1.27 to 1.38.

   *   locale has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.

   *   Locale::Codes has been upgraded from version 3.25 to 3.30.

   *   Locale::Maketext has been upgraded from version 1.23 to 1.25.

   *   Math::BigInt has been upgraded from version 1.9991 to 1.9993.

   *   Math::BigInt::FastCalc has been upgraded from version 0.30 to 0.31.

   *   Math::BigRat has been upgraded from version 0.2604 to 0.2606.

   *   MIME::Base64 has been upgraded from version 3.13 to 3.14.

   *   Module::Build has been upgraded from version 0.4003 to 0.4205.
       NOTE: Module::Build is deprecated and may be removed from a future
       version of Perl.

   *   Module::CoreList has been upgraded from version 2.89 to 3.10.

   *   Module::Load has been upgraded from version 0.24 to 0.32.

   *   Module::Load::Conditional has been upgraded from version 0.54 to
       0.62.

   *   Module::Metadata has been upgraded from version 1.000011 to
       1.000019.

   *   mro has been upgraded from version 1.11 to 1.16.

   *   Net::Ping has been upgraded from version 2.41 to 2.43.

   *   Opcode has been upgraded from version 1.25 to 1.27.

   *   Package::Constants has been upgraded from version 0.02 to 0.04.
       NOTE: Package::Constants is deprecated and may be removed from a
       future version of Perl.

   *   Params::Check has been upgraded from version 0.36 to 0.38.

   *   parent has been upgraded from version 0.225 to 0.228.

   *   Parse::CPAN::Meta has been upgraded from version 1.4404 to 1.4414.

   *   Perl::OSType has been upgraded from version 1.003 to 1.007.

   *   perlfaq has been upgraded from version 5.0150042 to 5.0150044.

   *   PerlIO has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.09.

   *   PerlIO::encoding has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.18.

   *   PerlIO::scalar has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.18.

   *   PerlIO::via has been upgraded from version 0.12 to 0.14.

   *   Pod::Escapes has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.06.

   *   Pod::Functions has been upgraded from version 1.06 to 1.08.

   *   Pod::Html has been upgraded from version 1.18 to 1.21.

   *   Pod::Parser has been upgraded from version 1.60 to 1.62.

   *   Pod::Perldoc has been upgraded from version 3.19 to 3.23.

   *   Pod::Usage has been upgraded from version 1.61 to 1.63.

   *   POSIX has been upgraded from version 1.32 to 1.38_03.

   *   re has been upgraded from version 0.23 to 0.26.

   *   Safe has been upgraded from version 2.35 to 2.37.

   *   Scalar::Util has been upgraded from version 1.27 to 1.38.

   *   SDBM_File has been upgraded from version 1.09 to 1.11.

   *   Socket has been upgraded from version 2.009 to 2.013.

   *   Storable has been upgraded from version 2.41 to 2.49.

   *   strict has been upgraded from version 1.07 to 1.08.

   *   subs has been upgraded from version 1.01 to 1.02.

   *   Sys::Hostname has been upgraded from version 1.17 to 1.18.

   *   Sys::Syslog has been upgraded from version 0.32 to 0.33.

   *   Term::Cap has been upgraded from version 1.13 to 1.15.

   *   Term::ReadLine has been upgraded from version 1.12 to 1.14.

   *   Test::Harness has been upgraded from version 3.26 to 3.30.

   *   Test::Simple has been upgraded from version 0.98 to 1.001002.

   *   Text::ParseWords has been upgraded from version 3.28 to 3.29.

   *   Text::Tabs has been upgraded from version 2012.0818 to 2013.0523.

   *   Text::Wrap has been upgraded from version 2012.0818 to 2013.0523.

   *   Thread has been upgraded from version 3.02 to 3.04.

   *   Thread::Queue has been upgraded from version 3.02 to 3.05.

   *   threads has been upgraded from version 1.86 to 1.93.

   *   threads::shared has been upgraded from version 1.43 to 1.46.

   *   Tie::Array has been upgraded from version 1.05 to 1.06.

   *   Tie::File has been upgraded from version 0.99 to 1.00.

   *   Tie::Hash has been upgraded from version 1.04 to 1.05.

   *   Tie::Scalar has been upgraded from version 1.02 to 1.03.

   *   Tie::StdHandle has been upgraded from version 4.3 to 4.4.

   *   Time::HiRes has been upgraded from version 1.9725 to 1.9726.

   *   Time::Piece has been upgraded from version 1.20_01 to 1.27.

   *   Unicode::Collate has been upgraded from version 0.97 to 1.04.

   *   Unicode::Normalize has been upgraded from version 1.16 to 1.17.

   *   Unicode::UCD has been upgraded from version 0.51 to 0.57.

   *   utf8 has been upgraded from version 1.10 to 1.13.

   *   version has been upgraded from version 0.9902 to 0.9908.

   *   vmsish has been upgraded from version 1.03 to 1.04.

   *   warnings has been upgraded from version 1.18 to 1.23.

   *   Win32 has been upgraded from version 0.47 to 0.49.

   *   XS::Typemap has been upgraded from version 0.10 to 0.13.

   *   XSLoader has been upgraded from version 0.16 to 0.17.

Documentation

   New Documentation
   perlrepository

   This document was removed (actually, renamed perlgit and given a major
   overhaul) in Perl v5.14, causing Perl documentation websites to show
   the now out of date version in Perl v5.12 as the latest version.  It
   has now been restored in stub form, directing readers to current
   information.

   Changes to Existing Documentation
   perldata

   *   New sections have been added to document the new index/value array
       slice and key/value hash slice syntax.

   perldebguts

   *   The "DB::goto" and "DB::lsub" debugger subroutines are now
       documented.  [perl #77680]

   perlexperiment

   *   "\s" matching "\cK" is marked experimental.

   *   ithreads were accepted in v5.8.0 (but are discouraged as of
       v5.20.0).

   *   Long doubles are not considered experimental.

   *   Code in regular expressions, regular expression backtracking verbs,
       and lvalue subroutines are no longer listed as experimental.  (This
       also affects perlre and perlsub.)

   perlfunc

   *   "chop" and "chomp" now note that they can reset the hash iterator.

   *   "exec"'s handling of arguments is now more clearly documented.

   *   "eval EXPR" now has caveats about expanding floating point numbers
       in some locales.

   *   "goto EXPR" is now documented to handle an expression that evalutes
       to a code reference as if it was "goto &$coderef".  This behavior
       is at least ten years old.

   *   Since Perl v5.10, it has been possible for subroutines in @INC to
       return a reference to a scalar holding initial source code to
       prepend to the file.  This is now documented.

   *   The documentation of "ref" has been updated to recommend the use of
       "blessed", "isa" and "reftype" when dealing with references to
       blessed objects.

   perlguts

   *   Numerous minor changes have been made to reflect changes made to
       the perl internals in this release.

   *   New sections on Read-Only Values and Copy on Write have been added.

   perlhack

   *   The Super Quick Patch Guide section has been updated.

   perlhacktips

   *   The documentation has been updated to include some more examples of
       "gdb" usage.

   perllexwarn

   *   The perllexwarn documentation used to describe the hierarchy of
       warning categories understood by the warnings pragma. That
       description has now been moved to the warnings documentation
       itself, leaving perllexwarn as a stub that points to it. This
       change consolidates all documentation for lexical warnings in a
       single place.

   perllocale

   *   The documentation now mentions fc() and "\F", and includes many
       clarifications and corrections in general.

   perlop

   *   The language design of Perl has always called for monomorphic
       operators.  This is now mentioned explicitly.

   perlopentut

   *   The "open" tutorial has been completely rewritten by Tom
       Christiansen, and now focuses on covering only the basics, rather
       than providing a comprehensive reference to all things openable.
       This rewrite came as the result of a vigorous discussion on
       perl5-porters kicked off by a set of improvements written by
       Alexander Hartmaier to the existing perlopentut.  A "more than you
       ever wanted to know about "open"" document may follow in subsequent
       versions of perl.

   perlre

   *   The fact that the regexp engine makes no effort to call (?{}) and
       (??{}) constructs any specified number of times (although it will
       basically DWIM in case of a successful match) has been documented.

   *   The "/r" modifier (for non-destructive substitution) is now
       documented. [perl #119151]

   *   The documentation for "/x" and "(?# comment)" has been expanded and
       clarified.

   perlreguts

   *   The documentation has been updated in the light of recent changes
       to regcomp.c.

   perlsub

   *   The need to predeclare recursive functions with prototypes in order
       for the prototype to be honoured in the recursive call is now
       documented. [perl #2726]

   *   A list of subroutine names used by the perl implementation is now
       included.  [perl #77680]

   perltrap

   *   There is now a JavaScript section.

   perlunicode

   *   The documentation has been updated to reflect "Bidi_Class" changes
       in Unicode 6.3.

   perlvar

   *   A new section explaining the performance issues of $`, $& and $',
       including workarounds and changes in different versions of Perl,
       has been added.

   *   Three English variable names which have long been documented but do
       not actually exist have been removed from the documentation.  These
       were $OLD_PERL_VERSION, $OFMT, and $ARRAY_BASE.

       (Actually, "OLD_PERL_VERSION" does exist, starting with this
       revision, but remained undocumented until perl 5.22.0.)

   perlxs

   *   Several problems in the "MY_CXT" example have been fixed.

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

   *   delete argument is index/value array slice, use array slice

       (F) You used index/value array slice syntax (%array[...]) as the
       argument to "delete".  You probably meant @array[...] with an @
       symbol instead.

   *   delete argument is key/value hash slice, use hash slice

       (F) You used key/value hash slice syntax (%hash{...}) as the
       argument to "delete".  You probably meant @hash{...} with an @
       symbol instead.

   *   Magical list constants are not supported

       (F) You assigned a magical array to a stash element, and then tried
       to use the subroutine from the same slot.  You are asking Perl to
       do something it cannot do, details subject to change between Perl
       versions.

   *   Added Setting $/ to a %s reference is forbidden

   New Warnings

   *   %s on reference is experimental:

       The "auto-deref" feature is experimental.

       Starting in v5.14.0, it was possible to use push, pop, keys, and
       other built-in functions not only on aggregate types, but on
       references to them.  The feature was not deployed to its original
       intended specification, and now may become redundant to postfix
       dereferencing.  It has always been categorized as an experimental
       feature, and in v5.20.0 is carries a warning as such.

       Warnings will now be issued at compile time when these operations
       are detected.

         no if $] >= 5.01908, warnings => "experimental::autoderef";

       Consider, though, replacing the use of these features, as they may
       change behavior again before becoming stable.

   *   A sequence of multiple spaces in a charnames alias definition is
       deprecated

       Trailing white-space in a charnames alias definition is deprecated

       These two deprecation warnings involving "\N{...}" were incorrectly
       implemented.  They did not warn by default (now they do) and could
       not be made fatal via "use warnings FATAL => 'deprecated'" (now
       they can).

   *   Attribute prototype(%s) discards earlier prototype attribute in
       same sub

       (W misc) A sub was declared as "sub foo : prototype(A) :
       prototype(B) {}", for example.  Since each sub can only have one
       prototype, the earlier declaration(s) are discarded while the last
       one is applied.

   *   Invalid \0 character in %s for %s: %s\0%s

       (W syscalls) Embedded \0 characters in pathnames or other system
       call arguments produce a warning as of 5.20.  The parts after the
       \0 were formerly ignored by system calls.

   *   Matched non-Unicode code point 0x%X against Unicode property; may
       not be portable.

       This replaces the message "Code point 0x%X is not Unicode, all \p{}
       matches fail; all \P{} matches succeed".

   *   Missing ']' in prototype for %s : %s

       (W illegalproto) A grouping was started with "[" but never closed
       with "]".

   *   Possible precedence issue with control flow operator

       (W syntax) There is a possible problem with the mixing of a control
       flow operator (e.g. "return") and a low-precedence operator like
       "or".  Consider:

           sub { return $a or $b; }

       This is parsed as:

           sub { (return $a) or $b; }

       Which is effectively just:

           sub { return $a; }

       Either use parentheses or the high-precedence variant of the
       operator.

       Note this may be also triggered for constructs like:

           sub { 1 if die; }

   *   Postfix dereference is experimental

       (S experimental::postderef) This warning is emitted if you use the
       experimental postfix dereference syntax.  Simply suppress the
       warning if you want to use the feature, but know that in doing so
       you are taking the risk of using an experimental feature which may
       change or be removed in a future Perl version:

           no warnings "experimental::postderef";
           use feature "postderef", "postderef_qq";
           $ref->$*;
           $aref->@*;
           $aref->@[@indices];
           ... etc ...

   *   Prototype '%s' overridden by attribute 'prototype(%s)' in %s

       (W prototype) A prototype was declared in both the parentheses
       after the sub name and via the prototype attribute.  The prototype
       in parentheses is useless, since it will be replaced by the
       prototype from the attribute before it's ever used.

   *   Scalar value @%s[%s] better written as $%s[%s]

       (W syntax) In scalar context, you've used an array index/value
       slice (indicated by %) to select a single element of an array.
       Generally it's better to ask for a scalar value (indicated by $).
       The difference is that $foo[&bar] always behaves like a scalar,
       both in the value it returns and when evaluating its argument,
       while %foo[&bar] provides a list context to its subscript, which
       can do weird things if you're expecting only one subscript.  When
       called in list context, it also returns the index (what &bar
       returns) in addition to the value.

   *   Scalar value @%s{%s} better written as $%s{%s}

       (W syntax) In scalar context, you've used a hash key/value slice
       (indicated by %) to select a single element of a hash.  Generally
       it's better to ask for a scalar value (indicated by $).  The
       difference is that $foo{&bar} always behaves like a scalar, both in
       the value it returns and when evaluating its argument, while
       @foo{&bar} and provides a list context to its subscript, which can
       do weird things if you're expecting only one subscript.  When
       called in list context, it also returns the key in addition to the
       value.

   *   Setting $/ to a reference to %s as a form of slurp is deprecated,
       treating as undef

   *   Unexpected exit %u

       (S) exit() was called or the script otherwise finished gracefully
       when "PERL_EXIT_WARN" was set in "PL_exit_flags".

   *   Unexpected exit failure %d

       (S) An uncaught die() was called when "PERL_EXIT_WARN" was set in
       "PL_exit_flags".

   *   Use of literal control characters in variable names is deprecated

       (D deprecated) Using literal control characters in the source to
       refer to the ^FOO variables, like $^X and ${^GLOBAL_PHASE} is now
       deprecated.  This only affects code like $\cT, where \cT is a
       control (like a "SOH") in the source code: ${"\cT"} and $^T remain
       valid.

   *   Useless use of greediness modifier

       This fixes [Perl #42957].

   Changes to Existing Diagnostics
   *   Warnings and errors from the regexp engine are now UTF-8 clean.

   *   The "Unknown switch condition" error message has some slight
       changes.  This error triggers when there is an unknown condition in
       a "(?(foo))" conditional.  The error message used to read:

           Unknown switch condition (?(%s in regex;

       But what %s could be was mostly up to luck.  For "(?(foobar))", you
       might have seen "fo" or "f".  For Unicode characters, you would
       generally get a corrupted string.  The message has been changed to
       read:

           Unknown switch condition (?(...)) in regex;

       Additionally, the '<-- HERE' marker in the error will now point to
       the correct spot in the regex.

   *   The "%s "\x%X" does not map to Unicode" warning is now correctly
       listed as a severe warning rather than as a fatal error.

   *   Under rare circumstances, one could get a "Can't coerce readonly
       REF to string" instead of the customary "Modification of a read-
       only value".  This alternate error message has been removed.

   *   "Ambiguous use of * resolved as operator *": This and similar
       warnings about "%" and "&" used to occur in some circumstances
       where there was no operator of the type cited, so the warning was
       completely wrong.  This has been fixed [perl #117535, #76910].

   *   Warnings about malformed subroutine prototypes are now more
       consistent in how the prototypes are rendered.  Some of these
       warnings would truncate prototypes containing nulls.  In other
       cases one warning would suppress another.  The warning about
       illegal characters in prototypes no longer says "after '_'" if the
       bad character came before the underscore.

   *   Perl folding rules are not up-to-date for 0x%X; please use the
       perlbug utility to report; in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/%s/

       This message is now only in the regexp category, and not in the
       deprecated category.  It is still a default (i.e., severe) warning
       [perl #89648].

   *   %%s[%s] in scalar context better written as $%s[%s]

       This warning now occurs for any %array[$index] or %hash{key} known
       to be in scalar context at compile time.  Previously it was worded
       "Scalar value %%s[%s] better written as $%s[%s]".

   *   Switch condition not recognized in regex; marked by <-- HERE in
       m/%s/:

       The description for this diagnostic has been extended to cover all
       cases where the warning may occur.  Issues with the positioning of
       the arrow indicator have also been resolved.

   *   The error messages for "my($a?$b$c)" and "my(do{})" now mention
       "conditional expression" and "do block", respectively, instead of
       reading 'Can't declare null operation in "my"'.

   *   When "use re "debug"" executes a regex containing a backreference,
       the debugging output now shows what string is being matched.

   *   The now fatal error message "Character following "\c" must be
       ASCII" has been reworded as "Character following "\c" must be
       printable ASCII" to emphasize that in "\cX", X must be a printable
       (non-control) ASCII character.

Utility Changes

   a2p

   *   A possible crash from an off-by-one error when trying to access
       before the beginning of a buffer has been fixed.  [perl #120244]

   bisect.pl

   The git bisection tool Porting/bisect.pl has had many enhancements.

   It is provided as part of the source distribution but not installed
   because it is not self-contained as it relies on being run from within
   a git checkout. Note also that it makes no attempt to fix tests,
   correct runtime bugs or make something useful to install - its purpose
   is to make minimal changes to get any historical revision of interest
   to build and run as close as possible to "as-was", and thereby make
   "git bisect" easy to use.

   *   Can optionally run the test case with a timeout.

   *   Can now run in-place in a clean git checkout.

   *   Can run the test case under "valgrind".

   *   Can apply user supplied patches and fixes to the source checkout
       before building.

   *   Now has fixups to enable building several more historical ranges of
       bleadperl, which can be useful for pinpointing the origins of bugs
       or behaviour changes.

   find2perl

   *   find2perl now handles "?" wildcards correctly.  [perl #113054]

   perlbug

   *   perlbug now has a "-p" option for attaching patches with a bug
       report.

   *   perlbug has been modified to supply the report template with CRLF
       line endings on Windows.  [perl #121277
       <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121277>]

   *   perlbug now makes as few assumptions as possible about the encoding
       of the report.  This will likely change in the future to assume
       UTF-8 by default but allow a user override.

Configuration and Compilation

   *   The Makefile.PL for SDBM_File now generates a better Makefile,
       which avoids a race condition during parallel makes, which could
       cause the build to fail.  This is the last known parallel make
       problem (on *nix platforms), and therefore we believe that a
       parallel make should now always be error free.

   *   installperl and installman's option handling has been refactored to
       use Getopt::Long. Both are used by the Makefile "install" targets,
       and are not installed, so these changes are only likely to affect
       custom installation scripts.

       *   Single letter options now also have long names.

       *   Invalid options are now rejected.

       *   Command line arguments that are not options are now rejected.

       *   Each now has a "--help" option to display the usage message.

       The behaviour for all valid documented invocations is unchanged.

   *   Where possible, the build now avoids recursive invocations of make
       when building pure-Perl extensions, without removing any
       parallelism from the build. Currently around 80 extensions can be
       processed directly by the make_ext.pl tool, meaning that 80
       invocations of make and 160 invocations of miniperl are no longer
       made.

   *   The build system now works correctly when compiling under GCC or
       Clang with link-time optimization enabled (the "-flto" option).
       [perl #113022]

   *   Distinct library basenames with "d_libname_unique".

       When compiling perl with this option, the library files for XS
       modules are named something "unique" -- for example,
       Hash/Util/Util.so becomes Hash/Util/PL_Hash__Util.so.  This
       behavior is similar to what currently happens on VMS, and serves as
       groundwork for the Android port.

   *   "sysroot" option to indicate the logical root directory under gcc
       and clang.

       When building with this option set, both Configure and the
       compilers search for all headers and libraries under this new
       sysroot, instead of /.

       This is a huge time saver if cross-compiling, but can also help on
       native builds if your toolchain's files have non-standard
       locations.

   *   The cross-compilation model has been renovated.  There's several
       new options, and some backwards-incompatible changes:

       We now build binaries for miniperl and generate_uudmap to be used
       on the host, rather than running every miniperl call on the target;
       this means that, short of 'make test', we no longer need access to
       the target system once Configure is done.  You can provide already-
       built binaries through the "hostperl" and "hostgenerate" options to
       Configure.

       Additionally, if targeting an EBCDIC platform from an ASCII host,
       or viceversa, you'll need to run Configure with "-Uhostgenerate",
       to indicate that generate_uudmap should be run on the target.

       Finally, there's also a way of having Configure end early, right
       after building the host binaries, by cross-compiling without
       specifying a "targethost".

       The incompatible changes include no longer using xconfig.h, xlib,
       or Cross.pm, so canned config files and Makefiles will have to be
       updated.

   *   Related to the above, there is now a way of specifying the location
       of sh (or equivalent) on the target system: "targetsh".

       For example, Android has its sh in /system/bin/sh, so if cross-
       compiling from a more normal Unixy system with sh in /bin/sh,
       "targetsh" would end up as /system/bin/sh, and "sh" as /bin/sh.

   *   By default, gcc 4.9 does some optimizations that break perl.  The
       -fwrapv option disables those optimizations (and probably others),
       so for gcc 4.3 and later (since the there might be similar problems
       lurking on older versions too, but -fwrapv was broken before 4.3,
       and the optimizations probably won't go away), Configure now adds
       -fwrapv unless the user requests -fno-wrapv, which disables
       -fwrapv, or -fsanitize=undefined, which turns the overflows -fwrapv
       ignores into runtime errors.  [perl #121505
       <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121505>]

Testing

   *   The "test.valgrind" make target now allows tests to be run in
       parallel.  This target allows Perl's test suite to be run under
       Valgrind, which detects certain sorts of C programming errors,
       though at significant cost in running time. On suitable hardware,
       allowing parallel execution claws back a lot of that additional
       cost. [perl #121431]

   *   Various tests in t/porting/ are no longer skipped when the perl
       .git directory is outside the perl tree and pointed to by $GIT_DIR.
       [perl #120505]

   *   The test suite no longer fails when the user's interactive shell
       maintains a $PWD environment variable, but the /bin/sh used for
       running tests doesn't.

Platform Support

   New Platforms
   Android
       Perl can now be built for Android, either natively or through
       cross-compilation, for all three currently available architectures
       (ARM, MIPS, and x86), on a wide range of versions.

   Bitrig
       Compile support has been added for Bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD.

   FreeMiNT
       Support has been added for FreeMiNT, a free open-source OS for the
       Atari ST system and its successors, based on the original MiNT that
       was officially adopted by Atari.

   Synology
       Synology ships its NAS boxes with a lean Linux distribution (DSM)
       on relative cheap CPU's (like the Marvell Kirkwood mv6282 -
       ARMv5tel or Freescale QorIQ P1022 ppc - e500v2) not meant for
       workstations or development. These boxes should build now. The
       basic problems are the non-standard location for tools.

   Discontinued Platforms
   "sfio"
       Code related to supporting the "sfio" I/O system has been removed.

       Perl 5.004 added support to use the native API of "sfio", AT&T's
       Safe/Fast I/O library. This code still built with v5.8.0, albeit
       with many regression tests failing, but was inadvertently broken
       before the v5.8.1 release, meaning that it has not worked on any
       version of Perl released since then.  In over a decade we have
       received no bug reports about this, hence it is clear that no-one
       is using this functionality on any version of Perl that is still
       supported to any degree.

   AT&T 3b1
       Configure support for the 3b1, also known as the AT&T Unix PC (and
       the similar AT&T 7300), has been removed.

   DG/UX
       DG/UX was a Unix sold by Data General. The last release was in
       April 2001.  It only runs on Data General's own hardware.

   EBCDIC
       In the absence of a regular source of smoke reports, code intended
       to support native EBCDIC platforms will be removed from perl before
       5.22.0.

   Platform-Specific Notes
   Cygwin
       *   recv() on a connected handle would populate the returned sender
           address with whatever happened to be in the working buffer.
           recv() now uses a workaround similar to the Win32 recv()
           wrapper and returns an empty string when recvfrom(2) doesn't
           modify the supplied address length. [perl #118843]

       *   Fixed a build error in cygwin.c on Cygwin 1.7.28.

           Tests now handle the errors that occur when "cygserver" isn't
           running.

   GNU/Hurd
       The BSD compatibility library "libbsd" is no longer required for
       builds.

   Linux
       The hints file now looks for "libgdbm_compat" only if "libgdbm"
       itself is also wanted. The former is never useful without the
       latter, and in some circumstances, including it could actually
       prevent building.

   Mac OS
       The build system now honors an "ld" setting supplied by the user
       running Configure.

   MidnightBSD
       "objformat" was removed from version 0.4-RELEASE of MidnightBSD and
       had been deprecated on earlier versions.  This caused the build
       environment to be erroneously configured for "a.out" rather than
       "elf".  This has been now been corrected.

   Mixed-endian platforms
       The code supporting "pack" and "unpack" operations on mixed endian
       platforms has been removed. We believe that Perl has long been
       unable to build on mixed endian architectures (such as PDP-11s), so
       we don't think that this change will affect any platforms which
       were able to build v5.18.0.

   VMS
       *   The "PERL_ENV_TABLES" feature to control the population of %ENV
           at perl start-up was broken in Perl 5.16.0 but has now been
           fixed.

       *   Skip access checks on remotes in opendir().  [perl #121002]

       *   A check for glob metacharacters in a path returned by the
           "glob()" operator has been replaced with a check for VMS
           wildcard characters.  This saves a significant number of
           unnecessary "lstat()" calls such that some simple glob
           operations become 60-80% faster.

   Win32
       *   "rename" and "link" on Win32 now set $! to ENOSPC and EDQUOT
           when appropriate.  [perl #119857]

       *   The BUILD_STATIC and ALL_STATIC makefile options for linking
           some or (nearly) all extensions statically (into perl520.dll,
           and into a separate perl-static.exe too) were broken for MinGW
           builds. This has now been fixed.

           The ALL_STATIC option has also been improved to include the
           Encode and Win32 extensions (for both VC++ and MinGW builds).

       *   Support for building with Visual C++ 2013 has been added.
           There are currently two possible test failures (see "Testing
           Perl on Windows" in perlwin32) which will hopefully be resolved
           soon.

       *   Experimental support for building with Intel C++ Compiler has
           been added.  The nmake makefile (win32/Makefile) and the dmake
           makefile (win32/makefile.mk) can be used.  A "nmake test" will
           not pass at this time due to cpan/CGI/t/url.t.

       *   Killing a process tree with "kill" in perlfunc and a negative
           signal, was broken starting in 5.18.0. In this bug, "kill"
           always returned 0 for a negative signal even for valid PIDs,
           and no processes were terminated. This has been fixed [perl
           #121230].

       *   The time taken to build perl on Windows has been reduced quite
           significantly (time savings in the region of 30-40% are
           typically seen) by reducing the number of, usually failing, I/O
           calls for each "require()" (for miniperl.exe only).  [perl
           #121119
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121119>]

       *   About 15 minutes of idle sleeping was removed from running
           "make test" due to a bug in which the timeout monitor used for
           tests could not be cancelled once the test completes, and the
           full timeout period elapsed before running the next test file.
           [perl #121395
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121395>]

       *   On a perl built without pseudo-fork (pseudo-fork builds were
           not affected by this bug), killing a process tree with "kill()"
           and a negative signal resulted in "kill()" inverting the
           returned value.  For example, if "kill()" killed 1 process tree
           PID then it returned 0 instead of 1, and if "kill()" was passed
           2 invalid PIDs then it returned 2 instead of 0.  This has
           probably been the case since the process tree kill feature was
           implemented on Win32.  It has now been corrected to follow the
           documented behaviour.  [perl #121230
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121230>]

       *   When building a 64-bit perl, an uninitialized memory read in
           miniperl.exe, used during the build process, could lead to a
           4GB wperl.exe being created.  This has now been fixed.  (Note
           that perl.exe itself was unaffected, but obviously wperl.exe
           would have been completely broken.)  [perl #121471
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121471>]

       *   Perl can now be built with gcc version 4.8.1 from
           <http://www.mingw.org>.  This was previously broken due to an
           incorrect definition of DllMain() in one of perl's source
           files.  Earlier gcc versions were also affected when using
           version 4 of the w32api package.  Versions of gcc available
           from <http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/> were not affected.
           [perl #121643
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121643>]

       *   The test harness now has no failures when perl is built on a
           FAT drive with the Windows OS on an NTFS drive.  [perl #21442
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=21442>]

       *   When cloning the context stack in fork() emulation,
           Perl_cx_dup() would crash accessing parameter information for
           context stack entries that included no parameters, as with
           "&foo;".  [perl #121721
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121721>]

       *   Introduced by perl #113536
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=113536>, a
           memory leak on every call to "system" and backticks (" `` "),
           on most Win32 Perls starting from 5.18.0 has been fixed.  The
           memory leak only occurred if you enabled psuedo-fork in your
           build of Win32 Perl, and were running that build on Server 2003
           R2 or newer OS.  The leak does not appear on WinXP SP3.  [perl
           #121676
           <https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=121676>]

   WinCE
       *   The building of XS modules has largely been restored.  Several
           still cannot (yet) be built but it is now possible to build
           Perl on WinCE with only a couple of further patches (to Socket
           and ExtUtils::MakeMaker), hopefully to be incorporated soon.

       *   Perl can now be built in one shot with no user intervention on
           WinCE by running "nmake -f Makefile.ce all".

           Support for building with EVC (Embedded Visual C++) 4 has been
           restored.  Perl can also be built using Smart Devices for
           Visual C++ 2005 or 2008.

Internal Changes

   *   The internal representation has changed for the match variables $1,
       $2 etc., $`, $&, $', ${^PREMATCH}, ${^MATCH} and ${^POSTMATCH}.  It
       uses slightly less memory, avoids string comparisons and numeric
       conversions during lookup, and uses 23 fewer lines of C.  This
       change should not affect any external code.

   *   Arrays now use NULL internally to represent unused slots, instead
       of &PL_sv_undef.  &PL_sv_undef is no longer treated as a special
       value, so av_store(av, 0, &PL_sv_undef) will cause element 0 of
       that array to hold a read-only undefined scalar.  "$array[0] =
       anything" will croak and "\$array[0]" will compare equal to
       "\undef".

   *   The SV returned by HeSVKEY_force() now correctly reflects the
       UTF8ness of the underlying hash key when that key is not stored as
       a SV.  [perl #79074]

   *   Certain rarely used functions and macros available to XS code are
       now deprecated.  These are: "utf8_to_uvuni_buf" (use
       "utf8_to_uvchr_buf" instead), "valid_utf8_to_uvuni" (use
       "utf8_to_uvchr_buf" instead), "NATIVE_TO_NEED" (this did not work
       properly anyway), and "ASCII_TO_NEED" (this did not work properly
       anyway).

       Starting in this release, almost never does application code need
       to distinguish between the platform's character set and Latin1, on
       which the lowest 256 characters of Unicode are based.  New code
       should not use "utf8n_to_uvuni" (use "utf8_to_uvchr_buf" instead),
       nor "uvuni_to_utf8" (use "uvchr_to_utf8" instead),

   *   The Makefile shortcut targets for many rarely (or never) used
       testing and profiling targets have been removed, or merged into the
       only other Makefile target that uses them.  Specifically, these
       targets are gone, along with documentation that referenced them or
       explained how to use them:

           check.third check.utf16 check.utf8 coretest minitest.prep
           minitest.utf16 perl.config.dashg perl.config.dashpg
           perl.config.gcov perl.gcov perl.gprof perl.gprof.config
           perl.pixie perl.pixie.atom perl.pixie.config perl.pixie.irix
           perl.third perl.third.config perl.valgrind.config purecovperl
           pureperl quantperl test.deparse test.taintwarn test.third
           test.torture test.utf16 test.utf8 test_notty.deparse
           test_notty.third test_notty.valgrind test_prep.third
           test_prep.valgrind torturetest ucheck ucheck.third ucheck.utf16
           ucheck.valgrind utest utest.third utest.utf16 utest.valgrind

       It's still possible to run the relevant commands by "hand" - no
       underlying functionality has been removed.

   *   It is now possible to keep Perl from initializing locale handling.
       For the most part, Perl doesn't pay attention to locale.  (See
       perllocale.)  Nonetheless, until now, on startup, it has always
       initialized locale handling to the system default, just in case the
       program being executed ends up using locales.  (This is one of the
       first things a locale-aware program should do, long before Perl
       knows if it will actually be needed or not.)  This works well
       except when Perl is embedded in another application which wants a
       locale that isn't the system default.  Now, if the environment
       variable "PERL_SKIP_LOCALE_INIT" is set at the time Perl is
       started, this initialization step is skipped.  Prior to this, on
       Windows platforms, the only workaround for this deficiency was to
       use a hacked-up copy of internal Perl code.  Applications that need
       to use older Perls can discover if the embedded Perl they are using
       needs the workaround by testing that the C preprocessor symbol
       "HAS_SKIP_LOCALE_INIT" is not defined.  [RT #38193]

   *   "BmRARE" and "BmPREVIOUS" have been removed.  They were not used
       anywhere and are not part of the API.  For XS modules, they are now
       #defined as 0.

   *   "sv_force_normal", which usually croaks on read-only values, used
       to allow read-only values to be modified at compile time.  This has
       been changed to croak on read-only values regardless.  This change
       uncovered several core bugs.

   *   Perl's new copy-on-write mechanism  (which is now enabled by
       default), allows any "SvPOK" scalar to be automatically upgraded to
       a copy-on-write scalar when copied. A reference count on the string
       buffer is stored in the string buffer itself.

       For example:

           $ perl -MDevel::Peek -e'$a="abc"; $b = $a; Dump $a; Dump $b'
           SV = PV(0x260cd80) at 0x2620ad8
             REFCNT = 1
             FLAGS = (POK,IsCOW,pPOK)
             PV = 0x2619bc0 "abc"\0
             CUR = 3
             LEN = 16
             COW_REFCNT = 1
           SV = PV(0x260ce30) at 0x2620b20
             REFCNT = 1
             FLAGS = (POK,IsCOW,pPOK)
             PV = 0x2619bc0 "abc"\0
             CUR = 3
             LEN = 16
             COW_REFCNT = 1

       Note that both scalars share the same PV buffer and have a
       COW_REFCNT greater than zero.

       This means that XS code which wishes to modify the "SvPVX()" buffer
       of an SV should call "SvPV_force()" or similar first, to ensure a
       valid (and unshared) buffer, and to call "SvSETMAGIC()" afterwards.
       This in fact has always been the case (for example hash keys were
       already copy-on-write); this change just spreads the COW behaviour
       to a wider variety of SVs.

       One important difference is that before 5.18.0, shared hash-key
       scalars used to have the "SvREADONLY" flag set; this is no longer
       the case.

       This new behaviour can still be disabled by running Configure with
       -Accflags=-DPERL_NO_COW.  This option will probably be removed in
       Perl 5.22.

   *   "PL_sawampersand" is now a constant.  The switch this variable
       provided (to enable/disable the pre-match copy depending on whether
       $& had been seen) has been removed and replaced with copy-on-write,
       eliminating a few bugs.

       The previous behaviour can still be enabled by running Configure
       with -Accflags=-DPERL_SAWAMPERSAND.

   *   The functions "my_swap", "my_htonl" and "my_ntohl" have been
       removed.  It is unclear why these functions were ever marked as A,
       part of the API. XS code can't call them directly, as it can't rely
       on them being compiled. Unsurprisingly, no code on CPAN references
       them.

   *   The signature of the "Perl_re_intuit_start()" regex function has
       changed; the function pointer "intuit" in the regex engine plugin
       structure has also changed accordingly. A new parameter, "strbeg"
       has been added; this has the same meaning as the same-named
       parameter in "Perl_regexec_flags". Previously intuit would try to
       guess the start of the string from the passed SV (if any), and
       would sometimes get it wrong (e.g. with an overloaded SV).

   *   The signature of the "Perl_regexec_flags()" regex function has
       changed; the function pointer "exec" in the regex engine plugin
       structure has also changed to match.  The "minend" parameter now
       has type "SSize_t" to better support 64-bit systems.

   *   XS code may use various macros to change the case of a character or
       code point (for example "toLOWER_utf8()").  Only a couple of these
       were documented until now; and now they should be used in
       preference to calling the underlying functions.  See "Character
       case changing" in perlapi.

   *   The code dealt rather inconsistently with uids and gids. Some
       places assumed that they could be safely stored in UVs, others in
       IVs, others in ints. Four new macros are introduced: SvUID(),
       sv_setuid(), SvGID(), and sv_setgid()

   *   "sv_pos_b2u_flags" has been added to the API.  It is similar to
       "sv_pos_b2u", but supports long strings on 64-bit platforms.

   *   "PL_exit_flags" can now be used by perl embedders or other XS code
       to have perl "warn" or "abort" on an attempted exit. [perl #52000]

   *   Compiling with "-Accflags=-PERL_BOOL_AS_CHAR" now allows C99 and
       C++ compilers to emulate the aliasing of "bool" to "char" that perl
       does for C89 compilers.  [perl #120314]

   *   The "sv" argument in "sv_2pv_flags" in perlapi, "sv_2iv_flags" in
       perlapi, "sv_2uv_flags" in perlapi, and "sv_2nv_flags" in perlapi
       and their older wrappers sv_2pv, sv_2iv, sv_2uv, sv_2nv, is now
       non-NULL. Passing NULL now will crash.  When the non-NULL marker
       was introduced en masse in 5.9.3 the functions were marked non-
       NULL, but since the creation of the SV API in 5.0 alpha 2, if NULL
       was passed, the functions returned 0 or false-type values. The code
       that supports "sv" argument being non-NULL dates to 5.0 alpha 2
       directly, and indirectly to Perl 1.0 (pre 5.0 api). The lack of
       documentation that the functions accepted a NULL "sv" was corrected
       in 5.11.0 and between 5.11.0 and 5.19.5 the functions were marked
       NULLOK. As an optimization the NULLOK code has now been removed,
       and the functions became non-NULL marked again, because core
       getter-type macros never pass NULL to these functions and would
       crash before ever passing NULL.

       The only way a NULL "sv" can be passed to sv_2*v* functions is if
       XS code directly calls sv_2*v*. This is unlikely as XS code uses
       Sv*V* macros to get the underlying value out of the SV. One
       possible situation which leads to a NULL "sv" being passed to
       sv_2*v* functions, is if XS code defines its own getter type Sv*V*
       macros, which check for NULL before dereferencing and checking the
       SV's flags through public API Sv*OK* macros or directly using
       private API "SvFLAGS", and if "sv" is NULL, then calling the sv_2*v
       functions with a NULL litteral or passing the "sv" containing a
       NULL value.

   *   newATTRSUB is now a macro

       The public API newATTRSUB was previously a macro to the private
       function Perl_newATTRSUB. Function Perl_newATTRSUB has been
       removed. newATTRSUB is now macro to a different internal function.

   *   Changes in warnings raised by "utf8n_to_uvchr()"

       This bottom level function decodes the first character of a UTF-8
       string into a code point.  It is accessible to "XS" level code, but
       it's discouraged from using it directly.  There are higher level
       functions that call this that should be used instead, such as
       "utf8_to_uvchr_buf" in perlapi.  For completeness though, this
       documents some changes to it.  Now, tests for malformations are
       done before any tests for other potential issues.  One of those
       issues involves code points so large that they have never appeared
       in any official standard (the current standard has scaled back the
       highest acceptable code point from earlier versions).  It is
       possible (though not done in CPAN) to warn and/or forbid these code
       points, while accepting smaller code points that are still above
       the legal Unicode maximum.  The warning message for this now
       includes the code point if representable on the machine.
       Previously it always displayed raw bytes, which is what it still
       does for non-representable code points.

   *   Regexp engine changes that affect the pluggable regex engine
       interface

       Many flags that used to be exposed via regexp.h and used to
       populate the extflags member of struct regexp have been removed.
       These fields were technically private to Perl's own regexp engine
       and should not have been exposed there in the first place.

       The affected flags are:

           RXf_NOSCAN
           RXf_CANY_SEEN
           RXf_GPOS_SEEN
           RXf_GPOS_FLOAT
           RXf_ANCH_BOL
           RXf_ANCH_MBOL
           RXf_ANCH_SBOL
           RXf_ANCH_GPOS

       As well as the follow flag masks:

           RXf_ANCH_SINGLE
           RXf_ANCH

       All have been renamed to PREGf_ equivalents and moved to regcomp.h.

       The behavior previously achieved by setting one or more of the
       RXf_ANCH_ flags (via the RXf_ANCH mask) have now been replaced by a
       *single* flag bit in extflags:

           RXf_IS_ANCHORED

       pluggable regex engines which previously used to set these flags
       should now set this flag ALONE.

   *   The Perl core now consistently uses "av_tindex()" ("the top index
       of an array") as a more clearly-named synonym for "av_len()".

   *   The obscure interpreter variable "PL_timesbuf" is expected to be
       removed early in the 5.21.x development series, so that Perl 5.22.0
       will not provide it to XS authors.  While the variable still exists
       in 5.20.0, we hope that this advance warning of the deprecation
       will help anyone who is using that variable.

Selected Bug Fixes

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

   *   Various memory leaks involving the parsing of the "(?[...])"
       regular expression construct have been fixed.

   *   "(?[...])" now allows interpolation of precompiled patterns
       consisting of "(?[...])" with bracketed character classes inside
       ("$pat = qr/(?[[a]])/; /(?[$pat])/").  Formerly, the brackets
       would confuse the regular expression parser.

   *   The "Quantifier unexpected on zero-length expression" warning
       message could appear twice starting in Perl v5.10 for a regular
       expression also containing alternations (e.g., "a|b") triggering
       the trie optimisation.

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

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

       [RT #118297]

   *   In regular expressions containing multiple code blocks, the values
       of $1, $2, etc., set by nested regular expression calls would leak
       from one block to the next.  Now these variables always refer to
       the outer regular expression at the start of an embedded block
       [perl #117917].

   *   "/$qr/p" was broken in Perl 5.18.0; the "/p" flag was ignored.
       This has been fixed. [perl #118213]

   *   Starting in Perl 5.18.0, a construct like "/[#](?{})/x" would have
       its "#" incorrectly interpreted as a comment.  The code block would
       be skipped, unparsed.  This has been corrected.

   *   Starting in Perl 5.001, a regular expression like "/[#$a]/x" or
       "/[#]$a/x" would have its "#" incorrectly interpreted as a comment,
       so the variable would not interpolate.  This has been corrected.
       [perl #45667]

   *   Perl 5.18.0 inadvertently made dereferenced regular expressions
       ("${qr//}") false as booleans.  This has been fixed.

   *   The use of "\G" in regular expressions, where it's not at the start
       of the pattern, is now slightly less buggy (although it is still
       somewhat problematic).

   *   Where a regular expression included code blocks ("/(?{...})/"), and
       where the use of constant overloading triggered a re-compilation of
       the code block, the second compilation didn't see its outer lexical
       scope.  This was a regression in Perl 5.18.0.

   *   The string position set by "pos" could shift if the string changed
       representation internally to or from utf8.  This could happen,
       e.g., with references to objects with string overloading.

   *   Taking references to the return values of two "pos" calls with the
       same argument, and then assigning a reference to one and "undef" to
       the other, could result in assertion failures or memory leaks.

   *   Elements of @- and @+ now update correctly when they refer to non-
       existent captures.  Previously, a referenced element ("$ref =
       \$-[1]") could refer to the wrong match after subsequent matches.

   *   The code that parses regex backrefs (or ambiguous backref/octals)
       such as \123 did a simple atoi(), which could wrap round to
       negative values on long digit strings and cause segmentation
       faults.  This has now been fixed.  [perl #119505]

   *   Assigning another typeglob to "*^R" no longer makes the regular
       expression engine crash.

   *   The "\N" regular expression escape, when used without the curly
       braces (to mean "[^\n]"), was ignoring a following "*" if followed
       by whitespace under /x.  It had been this way since "\N" to mean
       "[^\n]" was introduced in 5.12.0.

   *   "s///", "tr///" and "y///" now work when a wide character is used
       as the delimiter.  [perl #120463]

   *   Some cases of unterminated (?...) sequences in regular expressions
       (e.g., "/(?</") have been fixed to produce the proper error message
       instead of "panic: memory wrap".  Other cases (e.g., "/(?(/") have
       yet to be fixed.

   *   When a reference to a reference to an overloaded object was
       returned from a regular expression "(??{...})" code block, an
       incorrect implicit dereference could take place if the inner
       reference had been returned by a code block previously.

   *   A tied variable returned from "(??{...})" sees the inner values of
       match variables (i.e., the $1 etc. from any matches inside the
       block) in its FETCH method.  This was not the case if a reference
       to an overloaded object was the last thing assigned to the tied
       variable.  Instead, the match variables referred to the outer
       pattern during the FETCH call.

   *   Fix unexpected tainting via regexp using locale. Previously, under
       certain conditions, the use of character classes could cause
       tainting when it shouldn't. Some character classes are locale-
       dependent, but before this patch, sometimes tainting was happening
       even for character classes that don't depend on the locale. [perl
       #120675]

   *   Under certain conditions, Perl would throw an error if in an
       lookbehind assertion in a regexp, the assertion referred to a named
       subpattern, complaining the lookbehind was variable when it wasn't.
       This has been fixed. [perl #120600], [perl #120618]. The current
       fix may be improved on in the future.

   *   $^R wasn't available outside of the regular expression that
       initialized it.  [perl #121070]

   *   A large set of fixes and refactoring for re_intuit_start() was
       merged, the highlights are:

       *   Fixed a panic when compiling the regular expression
           "/\x{100}[xy]\x{100}{2}/".

       *   Fixed a performance regression when performing a global pattern
           match against a UTF-8 string.  [perl #120692]

       *   Fixed another performance issue where matching a regular
           expression like "/ab.{1,2}x/" against a long UTF-8 string would
           unnecessarily calculate byte offsets for a large portion of the
           string. [perl #120692]

   *   Fixed an alignment error when compiling regular expressions when
       built with GCC on HP-UX 64-bit.

   *   On 64-bit platforms "pos" can now be set to a value higher than
       2**31-1.  [perl #72766]

   Perl 5 Debugger and -d
   *   The debugger's "man" command been fixed. It was broken in the
       v5.18.0 release. The "man" command is aliased to the names "doc"
       and "perldoc" - all now work again.

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

   *   Under copy-on-write builds (the default as of 5.20.0)
       "${'_<-e'}[0]" no longer gets mangled.  This is the first line of
       input saved for the debugger's use for one-liners [perl #118627].

   *   On non-threaded builds, setting "${"_<filename"}" to a reference or
       typeglob no longer causes "__FILE__" and some error messages to
       produce a corrupt string, and no longer prevents "#line" directives
       in string evals from providing the source lines to the debugger.
       Threaded builds were unaffected.

   *   Starting with Perl 5.12, line numbers were off by one if the -d
       switch was used on the #! line.  Now they are correct.

   *   "*DB::DB = sub {} if 0" no longer stops Perl's debugging mode from
       finding "DB::DB" subs declared thereafter.

   *   "%{'_<...'}" hashes now set breakpoints on the corresponding
       "@{'_<...'}" rather than whichever array @DB::dbline is aliased to.
       [perl #119799]

   *   Call set-magic when setting $DB::sub.  [perl #121255]

   *   The debugger's "n" command now respects lvalue subroutines and
       steps over them [perl #118839].

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

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

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

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

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

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

   *   An undefined lexical sub used as an inherited method no longer
       crashes.

   *   The presence of a lexical sub named "CORE" no longer stops the
       CORE:: prefix from working.

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

   *   Evaluating large hashes in scalar context is now much faster, as
       the number of used chains in the hash is now cached for larger
       hashes. Smaller hashes continue not to store it and calculate it
       when needed, as this saves one IV.  That would be 1 IV overhead for
       every object built from a hash. [RT #114576]

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

   *   In Perl v5.18.0 dualvars that had an empty string for the string
       part but a non-zero number for the number part starting being
       treated as true.  In previous versions they were treated as false,
       the string representation taking precedeence.  The old behaviour
       has been restored. [RT #118159]

   *   Since Perl v5.12, inlining of constants that override built-in
       keywords of the same name had countermanded "use subs", causing
       subsequent mentions of the constant to use the built-in keyword
       instead.  This has been fixed.

   *   The warning produced by "-l $handle" now applies to IO refs and
       globs, not just to glob refs.  That warning is also now UTF8-clean.
       [RT #117595]

   *   "delete local $ENV{nonexistent_env_var}" no longer leaks memory.

   *   "sort" and "require" followed by a keyword prefixed with "CORE::"
       now treat it as a keyword, and not as a subroutine or module name.
       [RT #24482]

   *   Through certain conundrums, it is possible to cause the current
       package to be freed.  Certain operators ("bless", "reset", "open",
       "eval") could not cope and would crash.  They have been made more
       resilient. [RT #117941]

   *   Aliasing filehandles through glob-to-glob assignment would not
       update internal method caches properly if a package of the same
       name as the filehandle existed, resulting in filehandle method
       calls going to the package instead.  This has been fixed.

   *   "./Configure -de -Dusevendorprefix" didn't default. [RT #64126]

   *   The "Statement unlikely to be reached" warning was listed in
       perldiag as an "exec"-category warning, but was enabled and
       disabled by the "syntax" category.  On the other hand, the "exec"
       category controlled its fatal-ness.  It is now entirely handled by
       the "exec" category.

   *   The "Replacement list is longer that search list" warning for
       "tr///" and "y///" no longer occurs in the presence of the "/c"
       flag. [RT #118047]

   *   Stringification of NVs are not cached so that the lexical locale
       controls stringification of the decimal point. [perl #108378] [perl
       #115800]

   *   There have been several fixes related to Perl's handling of
       locales.  perl #38193 was described above in "Internal Changes".
       Also fixed is #118197, where the radix (decimal point) character
       had to be an ASCII character (which doesn't work for some non-
       Western languages); and #115808, in which "POSIX::setlocale()" on
       failure returned an "undef" which didn't warn about not being
       defined even if those warnings were enabled.

   *   Compiling a "split" operator whose third argument is a named
       constant evaluating to 0 no longer causes the constant's value to
       change.

   *   A named constant used as the second argument to "index" no longer
       gets coerced to a string if it is a reference, regular expression,
       dualvar, etc.

   *   A named constant evaluating to the undefined value used as the
       second argument to "index" no longer produces "uninitialized"
       warnings at compile time.  It will still produce them at run time.

   *   When a scalar was returned from a subroutine in @INC, the
       referenced scalar was magically converted into an IO thingy,
       possibly resulting in "Bizarre copy" errors if that scalar
       continued to be used elsewhere.  Now Perl uses an internal copy of
       the scalar instead.

   *   Certain uses of the "sort" operator are optimised to modify an
       array in place, such as "@a = sort @a".  During the sorting, the
       array is made read-only.  If a sort block should happen to die,
       then the array remained read-only even outside the "sort".  This
       has been fixed.

   *   $a and $b inside a sort block are aliased to the actual arguments
       to "sort", so they can be modified through those two variables.
       This did not always work, e.g., for lvalue subs and $#ary, and
       probably many other operators.  It works now.

   *   The arguments to "sort" are now all in list context.  If the "sort"
       itself were called in void or scalar context, then some, but not
       all, of the arguments used to be in void or scalar context.

   *   Subroutine prototypes with Unicode characters above U+00FF were
       getting mangled during closure cloning.  This would happen with
       subroutines closing over lexical variables declared outside, and
       with lexical subs.

   *   "UNIVERSAL::can" now treats its first argument the same way that
       method calls do: Typeglobs and glob references with non-empty IO
       slots are treated as handles, and strings are treated as
       filehandles, rather than packages, if a handle with that name
       exists [perl #113932].

   *   Method calls on typeglobs (e.g., "*ARGV->getline") used to
       stringify the typeglob and then look it up again.  Combined with
       changes in Perl 5.18.0, this allowed "*foo->bar" to call methods on
       the "foo" package (like "foo->bar").  In some cases it could cause
       the method to be called on the wrong handle.  Now a typeglob
       argument is treated as a handle (just like "(\*foo)->bar"), or, if
       its IO slot is empty, an error is raised.

   *   Assigning a vstring to a tied variable or to a subroutine argument
       aliased to a nonexistent hash or array element now works, without
       flattening the vstring into a regular string.

   *   "pos", "tie", "tied" and "untie" did not work properly on
       subroutine arguments aliased to nonexistent hash and array elements
       [perl #77814, #27010].

   *   The "=>" fat arrow operator can now quote built-in keywords even if
       it occurs on the next line, making it consistent with how it treats
       other barewords.

   *   Autovivifying a subroutine stub via "\&$glob" started causing
       crashes in Perl 5.18.0 if the $glob was merely a copy of a real
       glob, i.e., a scalar that had had a glob assigned to it.  This has
       been fixed. [perl #119051]

   *   Perl used to leak an implementation detail when it came to
       referencing the return values of certain operators.  "for ($a+$b) {
       warn \$_; warn \$_ }" used to display two different memory
       addresses, because the "\" operator was copying the variable.
       Under threaded builds, it would also happen for constants ("for(1)
       { ... }").  This has been fixed. [perl #21979, #78194, #89188,
       #109746, #114838, #115388]

   *   The range operator ".." was returning the same modifiable scalars
       with each call, unless it was the only thing in a "foreach" loop
       header.  This meant that changes to values within the list returned
       would be visible the next time the operator was executed. [perl
       #3105]

   *   Constant folding and subroutine inlining no longer cause operations
       that would normally return new modifiable scalars to return read-
       only values instead.

   *   Closures of the form "sub () { $some_variable }" are no longer
       inlined, causing changes to the variable to be ignored by callers
       of the subroutine.  [perl #79908]

   *   Return values of certain operators such as "ref" would sometimes be
       shared between recursive calls to the same subroutine, causing the
       inner call to modify the value returned by "ref" in the outer call.
       This has been fixed.

   *   "__PACKAGE__" and constants returning a package name or hash key
       are now consistently read-only.  In various previous Perl releases,
       they have become mutable under certain circumstances.

   *   Enabling "used once" warnings no longer causes crashes on stash
       circularities created at compile time ("*Foo::Bar::Foo:: =
       *Foo::").

   *   Undef constants used in hash keys ("use constant u => undef;
       $h{+u}") no longer produce "uninitialized" warnings at compile
       time.

   *   Modifying a substitution target inside the substitution replacement
       no longer causes crashes.

   *   The first statement inside a string eval used to use the wrong
       pragma setting sometimes during constant folding.  "eval 'uc chr
       0xe0'" would randomly choose between Unicode, byte, and locale
       semantics.  This has been fixed.

   *   The handling of return values of @INC filters (subroutines returned
       by subroutines in @INC) has been fixed in various ways.  Previously
       tied variables were mishandled, and setting $_ to a reference or
       typeglob could result in crashes.

   *   The "SvPVbyte" XS function has been fixed to work with tied scalars
       returning something other than a string.  It used to return utf8 in
       those cases where "SvPV" would.

   *   Perl 5.18.0 inadvertently made "--" and "++" crash on dereferenced
       regular expressions, and stopped "++" from flattening vstrings.

   *   "bless" no longer dies with "Can't bless non-reference value" if
       its first argument is a tied reference.

   *   "reset" with an argument no longer skips copy-on-write scalars,
       regular expressions, typeglob copies, and vstrings.  Also, when
       encountering those or read-only values, it no longer skips any
       array or hash with the same name.

   *   "reset" with an argument now skips scalars aliased to typeglobs
       ("for $z (*foo) { reset "z" }").  Previously it would corrupt
       memory or crash.

   *   "ucfirst" and "lcfirst" were not respecting the bytes pragma.  This
       was a regression from Perl 5.12. [perl #117355]

   *   Changes to "UNIVERSAL::DESTROY" now update DESTROY caches in all
       classes, instead of causing classes that have already had objects
       destroyed to continue using the old sub.  This was a regression in
       Perl 5.18. [perl #114864]

   *   All known false-positive occurrences of the deprecation warning
       "Useless use of '\'; doesn't escape metacharacter '%c'", added in
       Perl 5.18.0, have been removed. [perl #119101]

   *   The value of $^E is now saved across signal handlers on Windows.
       [perl #85104]

   *   A lexical filehandle (as in "open my $fh...") is usually given a
       name based on the current package and the name of the variable,
       e.g. "main::$fh".  Under recursion, the filehandle was losing the
       "$fh" part of the name.  This has been fixed.

   *   Uninitialized values returned by XSUBs are no longer exempt from
       uninitialized warnings.  [perl #118693]

   *   "elsif ("")" no longer erroneously produces a warning about void
       context.  [perl #118753]

   *   Passing "undef" to a subroutine now causes @_ to contain the same
       read-only undefined scalar that "undef" returns.  Furthermore,
       "exists $_[0]" will now return true if "undef" was the first
       argument.  [perl #7508, #109726]

   *   Passing a non-existent array element to a subroutine does not
       usually autovivify it unless the subroutine modifies its argument.
       This did not work correctly with negative indices and with non-
       existent elements within the array.  The element would be vivified
       immediately.  The delayed vivification has been extended to work
       with those.  [perl #118691]

   *   Assigning references or globs to the scalar returned by $#foo after
       the @foo array has been freed no longer causes assertion failures
       on debugging builds and memory leaks on regular builds.

   *   On 64-bit platforms, large ranges like 1..1000000000000 no longer
       crash, but eat up all your memory instead.  [perl #119161]

   *   "__DATA__" now puts the "DATA" handle in the right package, even if
       the current package has been renamed through glob assignment.

   *   When "die", "last", "next", "redo", "goto" and "exit" unwind the
       scope, it is possible for "DESTROY" recursively to call a
       subroutine or format that is currently being exited.  It that case,
       sometimes the lexical variables inside the sub would start out
       having values from the outer call, instead of being undefined as
       they should.  This has been fixed.  [perl #119311]

   *   ${^MPEN} is no longer treated as a synonym for ${^MATCH}.

   *   Perl now tries a little harder to return the correct line number in
       "(caller)[2]".  [perl #115768]

   *   Line numbers inside multiline quote-like operators are now reported
       correctly.  [perl #3643]

   *   "#line" directives inside code embedded in quote-like operators are
       now respected.

   *   Line numbers are now correct inside the second here-doc when two
       here-doc markers occur on the same line.

   *   An optimization in Perl 5.18 made incorrect assumptions causing a
       bad interaction with the Devel::CallParser CPAN module.  If the
       module was loaded then lexical variables declared in separate
       statements following a "my(...)" list might fail to be cleared on
       scope exit.

   *   &xsub and "goto &xsub" calls now allow the called subroutine to
       autovivify elements of @_.

   *   &xsub and "goto &xsub" no longer crash if *_ has been undefined and
       has no ARRAY entry (i.e. @_ does not exist).

   *   &xsub and "goto &xsub" now work with tied @_.

   *   Overlong identifiers no longer cause a buffer overflow (and a
       crash).  They started doing so in Perl 5.18.

   *   The warning "Scalar value @hash{foo} better written as $hash{foo}"
       now produces far fewer false positives.  In particular,
       @hash{+function_returning_a_list} and @hash{ qw "foo bar baz" } no
       longer warn.  The same applies to array slices.  [perl #28380,
       #114024]

   *   "$! = EINVAL; waitpid(0, WNOHANG);" no longer goes into an internal
       infinite loop.  [perl #85228]

   *   A possible segmentation fault in filehandle duplication has been
       fixed.

   *   A subroutine in @INC can return a reference to a scalar containing
       the initial contents of the file.  However, that scalar was freed
       prematurely if not referenced elsewhere, giving random results.

   *   "last" no longer returns values that the same statement has
       accumulated so far, fixing amongst other things the long-standing
       bug that "push @a, last" would try to return the @a, copying it
       like a scalar in the process and resulting in the error, "Bizarre
       copy of ARRAY in last."  [perl #3112]

   *   In some cases, closing file handles opened to pipe to or from a
       process, which had been duplicated into a standard handle, would
       call perl's internal waitpid wrapper with a pid of zero.  With the
       fix for [perl #85228] this zero pid was passed to "waitpid",
       possibly blocking the process.  This wait for process zero no
       longer occurs.  [perl #119893]

   *   "select" used to ignore magic on the fourth (timeout) argument,
       leading to effects such as "select" blocking indefinitely rather
       than the expected sleep time.  This has now been fixed.  [perl
       #120102]

   *   The class name in "for my class $foo" is now parsed correctly.  In
       the case of the second character of the class name being followed
       by a digit (e.g. 'a1b') this used to give the error "Missing $ on
       loop variable".  [perl #120112]

   *   Perl 5.18.0 accidentally disallowed "-bareword" under "use strict"
       and "use integer".  This has been fixed.  [perl #120288]

   *   "-a" at the start of a line (or a hyphen with any single letter
       that is not a filetest operator) no longer produces an erroneous
       'Use of "-a" without parentheses is ambiguous' warning.  [perl
       #120288]

   *   Lvalue context is now properly propagated into bare blocks and "if"
       and "else" blocks in lvalue subroutines.  Previously, arrays and
       hashes would sometimes incorrectly be flattened when returned in
       lvalue list context, or "Bizarre copy" errors could occur.  [perl
       #119797]

   *   Lvalue context is now propagated to the branches of "||" and "&&"
       (and their alphabetic equivalents, "or" and "and").  This means
       "foreach (pos $x || pos $y) {...}" now allows "pos" to be modified
       through $_.

   *   "stat" and "readline" remember the last handle used; the former for
       the special "_" filehandle, the latter for "${^LAST_FH}".  "eval
       "*foo if 0"" where *foo was the last handle passed to "stat" or
       "readline" could cause that handle to be forgotten if the handle
       were not opened yet.  This has been fixed.

   *   Various cases of "delete $::{a}", "delete $::{ENV}" etc. causing a
       crash have been fixed.  [perl #54044]

   *   Setting $! to EACCESS before calling "require" could affect
       "require"'s behaviour.  This has been fixed.

   *   The "Can't use \1 to mean $1 in expression" warning message now
       only occurs on the right-hand (replacement) part of a substitution.
       Formerly it could happen in code embedded in the left-hand side, or
       in any other quote-like operator.

   *   Blessing into a reference ("bless $thisref, $thatref") has long
       been disallowed, but magical scalars for the second like $/ and
       those tied were exempt.  They no longer are.  [perl #119809]

   *   Blessing into a reference was accidentally allowed in 5.18 if the
       class argument were a blessed reference with stale method caches
       (i.e., whose class had had subs defined since the last method
       call).  They are disallowed once more, as in 5.16.

   *   "$x->{key}" where $x was declared as "my Class $x" no longer
       crashes if a Class::FIELDS subroutine stub has been declared.

   *   @$obj{'key'} and "${$obj}{key}" used to be exempt from compile-time
       field checking ("No such class field"; see fields) but no longer
       are.

   *   A nonexistent array element with a large index passed to a
       subroutine that ties the array and then tries to access the element
       no longer results in a crash.

   *   Declaring a subroutine stub named NEGATIVE_INDICES no longer makes
       negative array indices crash when the current package is a tied
       array class.

   *   Declaring a "require", "glob", or "do" subroutine stub in the
       CORE::GLOBAL:: package no longer makes compilation of calls to the
       corresponding functions crash.

   *   Aliasing CORE::GLOBAL:: functions to constants stopped working in
       Perl 5.10 but has now been fixed.

   *   When "`...`" or "qx/.../" calls a "readpipe" override, double-
       quotish interpolation now happens, as is the case when there is no
       override.  Previously, the presence of an override would make these
       quote-like operators act like "q{}", suppressing interpolation.
       [perl #115330]

   *   "<<<`...`" here-docs (with backticks as the delimiters) now call
       "readpipe" overrides.  [perl #119827]

   *   "&CORE::exit()" and "&CORE::die()" now respect vmsish hints.

   *   Undefining a glob that triggers a DESTROY method that undefines the
       same glob is now safe.  It used to produce "Attempt to free
       unreferenced glob pointer" warnings and leak memory.

   *   If subroutine redefinition ("eval 'sub foo{}'" or "newXS" for XS
       code) triggers a DESTROY method on the sub that is being redefined,
       and that method assigns a subroutine to the same slot ("*foo = sub
       {}"), $_[0] is no longer left pointing to a freed scalar.  Now
       DESTROY is delayed until the new subroutine has been installed.

   *   On Windows, perl no longer calls CloseHandle() on a socket handle.
       This makes debugging easier on Windows by removing certain
       irrelevant bad handle exceptions.  It also fixes a race condition
       that made socket functions randomly fail in a Perl process with
       multiple OS threads, and possible test failures in
       dist/IO/t/cachepropagate-tcp.t.  [perl #120091/118059]

   *   Formats involving UTF-8 encoded strings, or strange vars like ties,
       overloads, or stringified refs (and in recent perls, pure NOK vars)
       would generally do the wrong thing in formats when the var is
       treated as a string and repeatedly chopped, as in "^<<<~~" and
       similar. This has now been resolved.  [perl
       #33832/45325/113868/119847/119849/119851]

   *   "semctl(..., SETVAL, ...)" would set the semaphore to the top
       32-bits of the supplied integer instead of the bottom 32-bits on
       64-bit big-endian systems. [perl #120635]

   *   "readdir()" now only sets $! on error.  $! is no longer set to
       "EBADF" when then terminating "undef" is read from the directory
       unless the system call sets $!. [perl #118651]

   *   &CORE::glob no longer causes an intermittent crash due to perl's
       stack getting corrupted. [perl #119993]

   *   "open" with layers that load modules (e.g., "<:encoding(utf8)") no
       longer runs the risk of crashing due to stack corruption.

   *   Perl 5.18 broke autoloading via "->SUPER::foo" method calls by
       looking up AUTOLOAD from the current package rather than the
       current package's superclass.  This has been fixed. [perl #120694]

   *   A longstanding bug causing "do {} until CONSTANT", where the
       constant holds a true value, to read unallocated memory has been
       resolved.  This would usually happen after a syntax error.  In past
       versions of Perl it has crashed intermittently. [perl #72406]

   *   Fix HP-UX $! failure. HP-UX strerror() returns an empty string for
       an unknown error code.  This caused an assertion to fail under
       DEBUGGING builds.  Now instead, the returned string for "$!"
       contains text indicating the code is for an unknown error.

   *   Individually-tied elements of @INC (as in "tie $INC[0]...") are now
       handled correctly.  Formerly, whether a sub returned by such a tied
       element would be treated as a sub depended on whether a FETCH had
       occurred previously.

   *   "getc" on a byte-sized handle after the same "getc" operator had
       been used on a utf8 handle used to treat the bytes as utf8,
       resulting in erratic behavior (e.g., malformed UTF-8 warnings).

   *   An initial "{" at the beginning of a format argument line was
       always interpreted as the beginning of a block prior to v5.18.  In
       Perl v5.18, it started being treated as an ambiguous token.  The
       parser would guess whether it was supposed to be an anonymous hash
       constructor or a block based on the contents.  Now the previous
       behavious has been restored.  [perl #119973]

   *   In Perl v5.18 "undef *_; goto &sub" and "local *_; goto &sub"
       started crashing.  This has been fixed. [perl #119949]

   *   Backticks (" `` " or " qx// ") combined with multiple threads on
       Win32 could result in output sent to stdout on one thread being
       captured by backticks of an external command in another thread.

       This could occur for pseudo-forked processes too, as Win32's
       pseudo-fork is implemented in terms of threads.  [perl #77672]

   *   "open $fh, ">+", undef" no longer leaks memory when TMPDIR is set
       but points to a directory a temporary file cannot be created in.
       [perl #120951]

   *   " for ( $h{k} || '' ) " no longer auto-vivifies $h{k}.  [perl
       #120374]

   *   On Windows machines, Perl now emulates the POSIX use of the
       environment for locale initialization.  Previously, the environment
       was ignored.  See "ENVIRONMENT" in perllocale.

   *   Fixed a crash when destroying a self-referencing GLOB.  [perl
       #121242]

Known Problems

   *   IO::Socket is known to fail tests on AIX 5.3.  There is a patch
       <https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=120835> in the request
       tracker, #120835, which may be applied to future releases.

   *   The following modules are known to have test failures with this
       version of Perl.  Patches have been submitted, so there will
       hopefully be new releases soon:

       *   Data::Structure::Util version 0.15

       *   HTML::StripScripts version 1.05

       *   List::Gather version 0.08.

Obituary

   Diana Rosa, 27, of Rio de Janeiro, went to her long rest on May 10,
   2014, along with the plush camel she kept hanging on her computer
   screen all the time. She was a passionate Perl hacker who loved the
   language and its community, and who never missed a Rio.pm event. She
   was a true artist, an enthusiast about writing code, singing arias and
   graffiting walls. We'll never forget you.

   Greg McCarroll died on August 28, 2013.

   Greg was well known for many good reasons. He was one of the organisers
   of the first YAPC::Europe, which concluded with an unscheduled auction
   where he frantically tried to raise extra money to avoid the conference
   making a loss. It was Greg who mistakenly arrived for a london.pm
   meeting a week late; some years later he was the one who sold the
   choice of official meeting date at a YAPC::Europe auction, and
   eventually as glorious leader of london.pm he got to inherit the
   irreverent confusion that he had created.

   Always helpful, friendly and cheerfully optimistic, you will be missed,
   but never forgotten.

Acknowledgements

   Perl 5.20.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since
   Perl 5.18.0 and contains approximately 470,000 lines of changes across
   2,900 files from 124 authors.

   Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
   were approximately 280,000 lines of changes to 1,800 .pm, .t, .c and .h
   files.

   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 5.20.0:

   Aaron Crane, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Abir Viqar, Alan Haggai Alavi,
   Alan Hourihane, Alexander Voronov, Alexandr Ciornii, Andy Dougherty,
   Anno Siegel, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Arthur Axel 'fREW' Schmidt, Brad
   Gilbert, Brendan Byrd, Brian Childs, Brian Fraser, Brian Gottreu, Chris
   'BinGOs' Williams, Christian Millour, Colin Kuskie, Craig A. Berry,
   Dabrien 'Dabe' Murphy, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsker, Daniel Dragan, Darin
   McBride, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, David Nicol,
   David Steinbrunner, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Dominic Hargreaves, Ed Avis,
   Eric Brine, Evan Zacks, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Franois
   Perrad, Gavin Shelley, Gideon Israel Dsouza, Gisle Aas, Graham Knop,
   H.Merijn Brand, Hauke D, Heiko Eissfeldt, Hiroo Hayashi, Hojung Youn,
   James E Keenan, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jerry D. Hedden, Jess Robinson,
   Jesse Luehrs, Johan Vromans, John Gardiner Myers, John Goodyear, John
   P. Linderman, John Peacock, kafka, Kang-min Liu, Karen Etheridge, Karl
   Williamson, Keedi Kim, Kent Fredric, kevin dawson, Kevin Falcone, Kevin
   Ryde, Leon Timmermans, Lukas Mai, Marc Simpson, Marcel Grnauer, Marco
   Peereboom, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Mark Jason Dominus, Martin McGrath,
   Matthew Horsfall, Max Maischein, Mike Doherty, Moritz Lenz, Nathan
   Glenn, Nathan Trapuzzano, Neil Bowers, Neil Williams, Nicholas Clark,
   Niels Thykier, Niko Tyni, Olivier Mengu, Owain G.  Ainsworth, Paul
   Green, Paul Johnson, Peter John Acklam, Peter Martini, Peter Rabbitson,
   Petr Psa, Philip Boulain, Philip Guenther, Piotr Roszatycki, Rafael
   Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Reuben Thomas, Ricardo Signes, Ruslan
   Zakirov, Sergey Alekseev, Shirakata Kentaro, Shlomi Fish, Slaven Rezic,
   Smylers, Steffen Mller, Steve Hay, Sullivan Beck, Thomas Sibley,
   Tobias Leich, Toby Inkster, Tokuhiro Matsuno, Tom Christiansen, Tom
   Hukins, Tony Cook, Victor Efimov, Viktor Turskyi, Vladimir Timofeev,
   YAMASHINA Hio, Yves Orton, Zefram, Zsbn Ambrus, var Arnfjr
   Bjarmason.

   The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
   generated from version control history. In particular, it does not
   include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
   reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

   Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN
   modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN
   community for helping Perl to flourish.

   For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
   please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

Reporting Bugs

   If you find what you think is a bug, you might check the articles
   recently posted to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup and the perl bug
   database at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .  There may also be
   information at http://www.perl.org/ , the Perl Home Page.

   If you believe you have an unreported bug, please run the perlbug
   program included with your release.  Be sure to trim your bug down to a
   tiny but sufficient test case.  Your bug report, along with the output
   of "perl -V", will be sent off to perlbug@perl.org to be analysed by
   the Perl porting team.

   If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
   inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please
   send it to perl5-security-report@perl.org.  This points to a closed
   subscription unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core
   committers, who will be able to help assess the impact of issues,
   figure out a resolution, and help co-ordinate the release of patches to
   mitigate or fix the problem across all platforms on which Perl is
   supported.  Please only use this address for security issues in the
   Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.

SEE ALSO

   The Changes file for an explanation of how to view exhaustive details
   on what changed.

   The INSTALL file for how to build Perl.

   The README file for general stuff.

   The Artistic and Copying files for copyright information.





Opportunity


Personal Opportunity - Free software gives you access to billions of dollars of software at no cost. Use this software for your business, personal use or to develop a profitable skill. Access to source code provides access to a level of capabilities/information that companies protect though copyrights. Open source is a core component of the Internet and it is available to you. Leverage the billions of dollars in resources and capabilities to build a career, establish a business or change the world. The potential is endless for those who understand the opportunity.

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Source Code - Want to change a program or know how it works? Open Source provides the source code for its programs so that anyone can use, modify or learn how to write those programs themselves. Visit the GNU source code repositories to download the source.





Education


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Linux Manual Pages - A man or manual page is a form of software documentation found on Linux/Unix operating systems. Topics covered include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts.