* B has been upgraded from 1.42 to 1.42_01, fixing bugs related to lexical subroutines.
* Digest::SHA has been upgraded from 5.84 to 5.84_01, fixing a crashing bug.
* Module::CoreList has been upgraded from 2.89 to 2.96.
* Starting in v5.18.0, a construct like /[#](?{})/x would have its # incorrectly interpreted as a comment. The code block would be skipped, unparsed. This has been corrected.
* A number of memory leaks related to the new, experimental regexp bracketed character class feature have been plugged.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Perl v5.16 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby calls to XSUBs that were not visible at compile time were treated as lvalues and could be assigned to, even when the subroutine was not an lvalue sub. This has been fixed.
* Perl v5.18 inadvertently introduced a bug whereby dual-vars (i.e. variables with both string and numeric values, such as $! ) where the truthness of the variable was determined by the numeric value rather than the string value.
* 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
* 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.
* Syntax errors in lexical subroutines in combination with calls to the same subroutines no longer cause crashes at compile time.
* The dtrace sub-entry probe now works with lexical subs, instead of crashing
* Undefining an inlinable lexical subroutine (my sub foo() { 42 } undef &foo) would result in a crash if warnings were turned on.
* Deep recursion warnings no longer crash lexical subroutines.
* FreeBSD 9.1's dtrace support has -h flag but "dtrace -h -s ../perldtrace.d"
filed with following syntax error.
"/usr/lib/dtrace/psinfo.d", line 37: syntax error near "uid_t"
Adding dtrace support for perl5 on FreeBSD is hasty, I feel.
dtrace support for FreeBSD perl5 is disabled.
Fixes errors seen on SmartOS with PKG_DEVELOPER=yes when the fixed file was
regenerated after the fixup, and appears to have the added benefit of removing
the warnings about out of date builds during install.
18 of Perl 5.
You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located in
the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.
Perl v5.18.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl
v5.16.0 and contains approximately 400,000 lines of changes across 2,100
files from 113 authors.
This release contains one major and a number of minor security fixes. It fixes a possible vulnerability to a denial-of-service attack by use of a carefully-crafted set of hash keys, a segmentation fault when reading or writing strings greater than 2^31 bytes in size, and a memory leak in Encode.xs's UTF-8 encoding implementation.
problems with linking and rpaths, such as the NetBSD manifestation of
PR 47187, and probably others; I haven't tried yet but I suspect at
least my manifestation of PR 44985 will be fixed too.
The rm class doesn't always work for me because miniperl regenerates
some Makefiles and then overwrites the substed file. I haven't tracked
the exact reason that triggers this down yet.
Enhancements were made to code features such as "use", which now explicitly enables feature bundles, a more consistent "eval" operator, and a revamped "substr" function. The "__SUB__" sequence now returns a reference to the current subroutine, allowing for recursive subroutines to be written more simply. Support for Unicode 6.1 was improved. Many other minor improvements and bugfixes, along with several deprecations, were made
