Perl 5.40.4 is now available!

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be
supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation.
In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but
the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds
of even the prince's infinite decorum.  There are chords in the hearts
of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.

  -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death" (in "Tales of
     Mystery and Imagination")

We are pleased to announce version 40.4, the fourth maintenance release
of version 40 of Perl 5.

You will soon be able to download Perl 5.40.4 from your favourite CPAN
mirror or find it at:

  https://metacpan.org/release/SHAY/perl-5.40.4/

SHA256 digests for this release are:

  *perl-5.40.4.tar.gz
  3258564b644dc912f7367c4f49d6df77a855cdef9305c50801e03d09d39381af

  *perl-5.40.4.tar.xz
  eb0b1116b84ded552f686c9ee40c83000d8388c454f54197ca1d3a3b17246bd3

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perldelta.pod" located
in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web.

Perl 5.40.4 represents approximately 8 months of development since Perl
5.40.3 and contains approximately 4,000 lines of changes across 58 files
from 10 authors.

Excluding auto-generated files, documentation and release tools, there
were approximately 2,800 lines of changes to 24 .pm, .t, .c and .h
files.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant
community of users and developers.  The following people are known to
have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.40.4:

Eric Herman, James E Keenan, Karen Etheridge, Max Maischein, Olaf
Alders, Paul Marquess, Philippe Bruhat (BooK), Richard Leach, Steve
Hay, Thibault Duponchelle.

The list above is almost certainly incomplete as it is automatically
generated from version control history.  In particular, it does not
include the names of the (very much appreciated) contributors who
reported issues to the Perl bug tracker.

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.

For a more complete list of all of Perl's historical contributors,
please see the AUTHORS file in the Perl source distribution.

The next major stable release of Perl should appear in the first half of
2026.

Steve Hay