This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 February 2003)
Here is the popular digest of the Perl 5 porters mailing list for the
second week of February. Featuring new proposals, new command-line
switches, new ideas, and fixes for all sorts of bugs.
lvalue length
Fergal Daly asked why "length($a)" isn't a lvalue. This would allow to
trim a string by changing directly its length. But there is a problem :
defining the proper behavior when the length of $a has to grow. Should
$a be kept unchanged, or should it be blank- (or null-) padded ? For
this reason, Hugo decided that length() isn't going to return a lvalue
yet.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg91851.html
Unexpected scientific notation
Abigail reports (bug #20827) that a large number (1597009560 ** 2) is
sometimes print by perl as an integer, and sometimes in the scientific
notation. When this square operation has been constant folded, the
number is stored by perl as an integer, but when it occurs at run time,
perl uses a floating point value, hence the difference in output.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg91899.html
gzipped modules
Fran�ois Pons proposed a patch to allow to load gzipped modules, via the
PerlIO-gzip layer. Slaven Rezic pointed out that this functionality was
probably not worth being put in the core, because it can be implemented
via the coderef-in-@INC feature.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg91999.html
The -C Unicode switch
Jarkko Hietaniemi implemented the -C command-line switch he proposed
some weeks ago. This switch (with additional option letters) can be used
to control perl's Unicode behavior : for example, to turn on/off the
utf-8-ness of the standard input or output, or of input files supplied
on @ARGV. This new flag will be available in perl 5.8.1 as well.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg91815.html
Namespace pollution
To address a namespace pollution issue raised by John Lenz, Jarkko
implemented a new C preprocessor symbol, PERL_NO_SHORT_NAMES, which
prevents the #definition of the short form of any of the Perl_*
symbols.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg91954.html
In brief
Our pumpking, Hugo van der Sanden, who was quite busy those last weeks,
caught up with the developments. Most notably, the patch that Salvador
Fandi�o sent in November to add assertion support to Perl is now in.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez implemented a new function in Scalar::Util, that
allows to change the prototype of a function.
Jos Boumans proposed (with a patch) to advertise Test::More and
Module::Build in the perlmodstyle man page.
Fergal Daly imagined a new, more concise way to invoke Exporter, and
sent a patch to implement his idea.
Bug #20920 pertains to the new safe signal implementation in perl 5.8.0 :
apparently, when a signal handler is running, the corresponding
signals are not blocked, whereas they should be. This can lead to
segfaults. Slaven Rezic provided a fix.
Bug #20912, fixed by Enache Adrian, is about a split() on a utf-8 string
that causes the unusual error message "Split loop" to be thrown.
Mark Mielke produced a strange case of core dump, involving ties and
auto-references.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg91991.html
Jarkko reminds us that someone has to make sure that the "fields" pragma
still works, now that pseudo-hashes have been removed. (The plan being
to use read-only hashes.) That could be a bite-sized task for someone.
(And while we're at it, there are still traces of the old 5005 threads
to be cleaned up.)
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg92000.html
About this summary
This summary brought to you once more by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries
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