This Week on perl5-porters (15-21 March 2004)
This week saw the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere, and
coincidentally the release of a new development version of bleadperl,
which you can peruse for testing the new features, the new fixes, the
new optimisations, and of course the new bugs. But of couse 5.9.1 is
already outdated for the perl 5 porters, who like to live at the edge of
the bleadperl. Read on for the latest news.
Perl 5.9.1
The latest development version of perl, numbered 5.9.1, was released.
The annoucement can be found at
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040316221415.05eee295.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr
and the perldelta document for this version can be found at
http://search.cpan.org/~rgarcia/perl-5.9.1/pod/perl591delta.pod
can() is not defined()
Nicholas Clark remarked that after undefining a subroutine Foo::foo(),
the expression `Foo->can('foo')' is still true. Rafael answered that
Foo::foo() still exists(), even if it's not defined(). The rest of the
thread gave lots of good reasons for this behaviour.
Brent Dax proposed to add a `delete &foo' syntax to completely delete
subroutines, consistently with other uses of delete(). This sounds like
a great idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040316222340.GY701%40plum.flirble.org
Optimisations
Elisabeth Mattijsen asked why the assignments to lexical variables in
my $x = undef;
my @x = ();
my %x = ();
were not optimised away. As noone found a good reason, Rafael added the
desired optimisation.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=p05111b08bc7b9fc3e325%40[192.168.10.114]
B::Concise enhancements
Jim Cromie proposed a patch to enhance the backend compiler module
B::Concise, used to dump optrees. For example it can now produce output
to any filehandle. Rafael suggests that this could be useful to test the
non-regressions of some optree optimisations, like the one documented in
the last paragraph.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4058BF4B.1000004%40divsol.com
New warnings
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes added a new warning against the correct but
dubious syntax
$x !=~ /foo/;
Dave Mitchell remarked that the bitwise complement `~' doesn't produce
any "Use of uninitialized value" warning. He fixed it.
UTF-8, the sequel
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes posted a summary of the things that should be
done to address the current UTF-8 encoding issues without annoying too
many people:
* Fix the remaining in-place ugprades due to the proximity of UTF-8
data
* Upgrades without locale should issue a warning (Autrijus Tang's
`encoding::warnings' module already does this for perl 5.8.x), which
will probably be a core warning in perl 5.10
* Provide an API for XS writers who want to copy and upgrade character
data to UTF-8.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040317044500.GA3720%40efn.org
Sadahiro Tomoyuki is working on this last point.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040316132246.2972.4%40llama.elixent.com
In Brief
Jan Dubois sent a patch to add the `Win32' module from Gurusamy
Sarathy's `libwin32' to bleadperl.
Sadahiro Tomoyuki identified several places where some perl built-ins
don't cope with overloaded objects correctly regarding UTF-8 encoding.
(bug #27658.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-27658-82032.6.02101148715519%40perl.org
About this summary
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, from Lyon, France, and
it's likely to be the last one that I'll be writing in Lyon. Weekly
summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing
list, which subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Comments and corrections are welcome.
