This Week on perl5-porters (26 January / 8 February 2004)
This week, a very special summary indeed, because it actually covers two
weeks. Two quiet weeks, that is. Read below for new proposals to the
Perl 5 language, to its packaging, and for selected bugs and fixes.
Sort in place
After some long discussion on whether adding an UNIX-like "sort -u"
function to perl (return only unique elements), Tels suggested that
sort() could be optimized to sort in place in statements like:
@a = sort @a;
Dave Mitchell is working on this optimization.
my() in conditional
The construct
my $variable = $value if condition();
is documented to be unsafe and unsupported (and moreover it doesn't
currently do what most people expect). Dave Mitchell suggested to
deprecate it and is working on a patch to produce a warning in the most
common cases where it's used. However, he notices that lots of code in
the test suite become noisy with this new warning turned on, notably in
perl's own test suite.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040201015900.GD20819%40fdisolutions.com
Lexical $_
Rafael checked in bleadperl support for a lexically scoped version of
$_, that was proposed last month.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040203213457.4a32a88c.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr
Juerd then remarks that, if developers want to provide functions that
default to $_, we need a way to get at the caller's lexical $_, and he
proposes to implement the perl 6 pseudo-namespace %CALLER::. This may
well end on the to-do list.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040206164438.GK19932%40c3.convolution.nl
Core modules and distributions
Xavier Noria proposed to include a templating module in the core perl
distribution. Michael Schwern points out that "the unofficial policy on
new modules is that if it doesn't help to build, test or document Perl
or if it doesn't help to install more modules, it's not likely to get
in", as the perl distribution is quite large already.
However Tim Bunce proposed (again) to restructure perl into a minimal
core (with a trimmed-down set of modules) and one or several SDKs. This
task needs a champion.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=B531BD75-57C7-11D8-AF6D-000A95A4E370%40hashref.com
Selected Bugs
Bug #25824 describe a way to make perl's parser segfault on a nasty
syntax error. Dave Mitchell found a way to fix it, not too dissimilar to
an older bug.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-25824-73708.15.8676530450102%40perl.org
Michael Yount reported a potential overzealous taint problem in
AutoLoader (bug #25267). Dave Mitchell noted that this bug was already
fixed in perl 5.8.3.
Manuel Valente added a new option to the Shell module,
$Shell::capture_stderr=-1, to discard the standard error of the shell
process.
Bart Schuller shows (bug #26073) that sprintf(), with a %s length
format, doesn't handle correctly UTF-8 strings.
Releases
Leon Brocard released perl 5.005_04 RC1. John Peacock released
version.pm 0.36. Alan Burlison integrated perl 5.8.3 in the upcoming
release of Solaris 10.
About this summary
This summary, which exceptionally covers two weeks, was written by
Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on
http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription
address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corrections and comments
are welcome.
