connections use the C<pack> and C<unpack> formats C<n> and C<N>, the
"network" orders. These are guaranteed to be portable.
-As of perl 5.9.2, you can also use the C<E<gt>> and C<E<lt>> modifiers
+As of perl 5.10.0, you can also use the C<E<gt>> and C<E<lt>> modifiers
to force big- or little-endian byte-order. This is useful if you want
to store signed integers or 64-bit integers, for example.
One can circumnavigate both these problems in two ways. Either
transfer and store numbers always in text format, instead of raw
-binary, or else consider using modules like Data::Dumper (included in
-the standard distribution as of Perl 5.005) and Storable (included as
-of perl 5.8). Keeping all data as text significantly simplifies matters.
+binary, or else consider using modules like Data::Dumper and Storable
+(included as of perl 5.8). Keeping all data as text significantly
+simplifies matters.
The v-strings are portable only up to v2147483647 (0x7FFFFFFF), that's
how far EBCDIC, or more precisely UTF-EBCDIC will go.
later. If the bytes are native 8-bit bytes, you can use the C<bytes>
pragma. If the bytes are in a string (regular expression being a
curious string), you can often also use the C<\xHH> notation instead
-of embedding the bytes as-is. (If you want to write your code in UTF-8,
-you can use the C<utf8>.) The C<bytes> and C<utf8> pragmata are
-available since Perl 5.6.0.
+of embedding the bytes as-is. If you want to write your code in UTF-8,
+you can use the C<utf8>.
=head2 System Resources
=head1 PLATFORMS
-As of version 5.002, Perl is built with a C<$^O> variable that
-indicates the operating system it was built on. This was implemented
+Perl is built with a C<$^O> variable that indicates the operating
+system it was built on. This was implemented
to help speed up code that would otherwise have to C<use Config>
and use the value of C<$Config{osname}>. Of course, to get more
detailed information about the system, looking into C<%Config> is
services for OS/390" (formerly known as OpenEdition), VM/ESA OpenEdition, or
the BS200 POSIX-BC system (BS2000 is supported in perl 5.6 and greater).
See L<perlos390> for details. Note that for OS/400 there is also a port of
-Perl 5.8.1/5.9.0 or later to the PASE which is ASCII-based (as opposed to
+Perl 5.8.1/5.10.0 or later to the PASE which is ASCII-based (as opposed to
ILE which is EBCDIC-based), see L<perlos400>.
As of R2.5 of USS for OS/390 and Version 2.3 of VM/ESA these Unix
=item umask
-Returns undef where unavailable, as of version 5.005.
+Returns undef where unavailable.
C<umask> works but the correct permissions are set only when the file
is finally closed. (AmigaOS)