Perl 5.13.8 is released

    The aliens called the box a "matter generator," but we'd be more
    inclined to call it a matter duplicator.  By connecting switches
    and potentiometers between the copper posts it was possible to make
    the box mark off two cubic rectangular areas of volume.  Make a
    certain contact, and these areas would be isolated within perfectly
    reflective fields.  They could be expanded or contracted by altering
    resistances between other posts.  As I worked out the user interface
    I built a little control panel for the device.  It was actually a
    clever way for the aliens to do things; instead of trying to build
    controls we could use, they built us an interface we could attach
    to controls that made sense to us.  It could also be automated.

    Once you had made the contact that established the shielded volumes,
    if you made another certain contact the contents of the first volume
    were copied to the second.  The machine copied metal, plastic, steel,
    and diamond with equal ease.  Copies of copies of copies of copies
    were indistinguishable from the originals at any magnification,
    even using techniques like X-ray crystallography.

        -- Roger Williams, "The Fifth Gift"
           <http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/8/19/21304/8493>

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.13.8.

This is the ninth DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.13.x series leading to a
stable release of Perl 5.14.0.  You can find a list of high-profile changes
in this release in the file "perldelta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.13.8 release from:

    http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.13.8/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

    8b2069366152d8bd0035e714514775ac89833d2b  perl-5.13.8.tar.bz2
    f82ecd7c5c4442995ad5bc2747d896d9bb12a918  perl-5.13.8.tar.gz

This release corresponds to commit b6aa14cd2b in Perl's git repository.
It is tagged as "v5.13.8".

We welcome your feedback on this release.

If Perl 5.13.8 works well for you, please use the "perlthanks" tool
included in this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team
how much you appreciate their work.

If you discover issues with Perl 5.13.8, please use the "perlbug" tool
included in this distribution to report them.

If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test
your software against development releases.  While we strive to maintain
source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible,
it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected
consequences.  If you spot a change in a development version which breaks
your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the
next stable release.  If you only test your code against stable releases
of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change
which breaks your code.

Perl 5.13.8 represents approximately one month of development since
Perl 5.13.7 and contains 38715 lines of changes across 546 files from
38 authors and committers.

Notable changes in this release:

    * most forms of the Unicode Bug are fixed

    * filehandle method calls load IO::File on demand

    * statement labels can be stacked

    * API functions for recursive-descent expression parsing

    * ":=" is a syntax error

    * "?PATTERN?" (without leading "m") is deprecated

Thank you to the following for contributing to this release:

    Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Andreas König, Ben Morrow, Brad Gilbert,
    brian d foy, Chip Salzenberg, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Craig A. Berry,
    David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos,
    Florian Ragwitz, Goro Fuji, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jerry
    D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, John Peacock, Karl Williamson, Lukas Mai,
    Marvin Humphrey, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael Fig, Nicholas
    Clark, Nick Cleaton, Paul Evans, Peter J. Holzer, Peter John Acklam,
    Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Reini Urban, Renee Baecker, Ricardo Signes,
    Tony Cook, Yves Orton, Zefram

Development versions of Perl are released monthly on or about the 20th
of the month by a monthly "release manager".  You can expect the following
upcoming releases:

    January 20      -   Jesse Vincent
    February 20     -   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
    March 20        -   Florian Ragwitz
    April 20        -   Jesse Vincent
    May 20          -   Ricardo Signes
    June 20         -   David Golden

Enjoy!

-zefram

• Perl 5.13.8 is released by Zefram