7.11 Perl 5.8.0
Along with more Unicode integration, Hash::Util added restricted hashes, which allowed you to prohibit inserting new keys or even changing the values of existing ones. The -t command-line flag allowed taint problems to be downgraded from exceptions to warnings.
The Filter::Util::Call and Filter::Simple modules from CPAN were added to the core so you could perform source filtering, that is, modify the source of a program before the Perl parser saw it. (You might think that this module would be used by those novelty modules that turn your program into white space or punctuation characters, but apparently that would be too easy.)
A panoply of other modules were rolled into the core, including Attribute::Handlers, Digest::MD5, the libnet bundle, List::Util, Memoize.pm, MIME::Base64, Scalar::Util, Storable.pm, Switch.pm, Test::More, Test::Simple, Text::Balanced, Tie::File, and Time::HiRes.
The sort pragma was introduced, allowing you more control over the internal behavior of the sort() function. The suidperl program was finally deprecated after consensus was reached that its security could never be fully guaranteed.
7.11.1 Upgrading to Perl 5.8.0
If you have a CGI program that was never taught about taintedness with the -T command-line flag, you can start out with the -t flag and get warnings on all the uses of tainted data so you can fix them all at once.
|
