Look at Crowley, doing 110 mph on the M40 heading towards Oxfordshire. Even the most resolutely casual observer would notice a number of strange things about him. The clenched teeth, for example, or the dull red glow coming from behind his sunglasses. And the car. The car was a definite hint.

Crowley had started the journey in his Bentley, and he was dammned if he wasn't going to finish it in the Bentley as well. Not that even the kind of car buff who owns his own pair of motoring goggles would have been able to tell it was a vintage Bentley. Not any more. They wouldn't have been able to tell that it was a Bentley. They would only offer fifty-fifty that it had ever even been a car.

There was no paint left on it, for a start. It might still have been black, where it wasn't a rusty, smudged reddish-brown, but this was a dull charcoal black. It traveled in its own ball of flame, like a space capsule making a particularly difficult re-entry.

There was a thin skin of crusted, melted rubber left around the metal wheel rims, but seeing that the wheel rims were still somhow riding an inch above the road surface this didn't seem to make an awful lot of difference to the suspension.

It should have fallen apart miles back.

-- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, "Good Omens"

It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.13.3.

This is the fourth 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 "perl5133delta.pod" inside the distribution.

You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.13.3 release from:

http://search.cpan.org/~dagolden/perl-5.13.3/

The release's SHA1 signatures are:

• SHA1: 58e802bcae597ca08a6933265d03b37420c80076 perl-5.13.3.tar.bz2
• SHA1: 75b1bb2585fcbc75bfa473fcf77318b3872d61a2 perl-5.13.3.tar.gz

This release corresponds to commit 414abf8 in Perl's git repository. It is tagged as 'v5.13.3'.

We welcome your feedback on this release.

If Perl 5.13.3 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.

If you discover issues with Perl 5.13.3, 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 5.13.3 represents approximately one month of development since Perl 5.13.2, and contains 12,184 lines of changes across 575 files from 104 authors and committers.

Notable changes in this release:

• \o{...} has been added as a string escape for octals.
• \N{} and charnames::vianame now know about the abbreviated character names listed by Unicode, such as NBSP, SHY, etc.
• Most dual-life module have been synchronized with the latest production release on CPAN.
• There is a new internal function PL_blockhook_register for XS code to hook into Perl's lexical scope mechanism

There is one major known issue:

• Bug fixes involving CvGV reference counting break Sub::Name (currently version 0.04). A patch has been sent upstream to the maintainer.

Thank you to the following for contributing to this release:

Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Alex Davies, Alex Vandiver, Alexandr Ciornii, Andreas J. Koenig, Andrew Rodland, Andy Dougherty, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Arkturuz, Ben Morrow, Bo Borgerson, Bo Lindbergh, Brad Gilbert, Bram, Brian Phillips, Chas. Owens, Chip Salzenberg, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dan Dascalescu, Daniel Frederick Crisman, Dave Rolsky, David Caldwell, David E. Wheeler, David Golden, David Leadbeater, David Mitchell, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, Frank Wiegand, Gene Sullivan, George Greer, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Goro Fuji, Graham Barr, H.Merijn Brand, Harmen, Hugo van der Sanden, James E Keenan, James Mastros, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, John Peacock, Jos Boumans, Josh ben Jore, Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, Leon Brocard, Lubomir Rintel, Maik Hentsche, Marcus Holland-Moritz, Matt Johnson, Matt S Trout, Max Maischein, Michael Breen, Michael G Schwern, Moritz Lenz, Nga Tang Chan, Nicholas Clark, Nick Cleaton, Nick Johnston, Niko Tyni, Offer Kaye, Paul Marquess, Philip Hazel, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Reini Urban, Ricardo Signes, Richard Soderberg, Robin Barker, Ruslan Zakirov, Salvador Fandino, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Shlomi Fish, Sinan Unur, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Mueller, Stepan Kasal, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Sullivan Beck, Tim Bunce, Todd Rinaldo, Tom Christiansen, Tom Hukins, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit, Yuval Kogman, Yves Orton, Zefram, brian d foy, chromatic, kmx, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.

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

• August 20 - Florian Ragwitz
• September 20 - Steve Hay
• October 20 - Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
• November 20 - Chris Williams