perl 5.8.5

[Christopher Nehren]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 18:36 +0000, Ryan Newman wrote:
> I just installed the 5.3 beta-7 and noticed that perl 5.8.5 was installed.  
> Perl 5.8 breaks a lot of the complex applications that I need to run why not 
> stay with perl 5.6 which is more stable for applications ?

Funny that you mention the word "stable"...

If you read 'perldoc perl58delta', you'll see that 5.6 versions of Perl
used quicksort for the sort() function, which is under some
circumstances an unstable sort algorithm. Versions 5.8 and above use
mergesort, which is guaranteed to be stable. I refer you to 'perldoc
sort' (it's a pragma, too) for more information.

... then there's the algorithmic complexity attacks against the hashing
algorithm, and many other things which were fixed in the 5.8 line (like
the potentially massive delay on creating threads, ...). You wouldn't
want people to be able to guess your hash keys / values, would you?
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