This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 April 2004)
Spring is here, at least in the northern hemisphere, and perl 5.8.4 is
approaching. This doesn't stop the Perl 5 porters from pursuing their
usual job: proposing exciting new ideas, and fixing bugs. Read on for
the details.
Towards 5.8.4
Nicholas Clark posted a draft of the perldelta for perl 5.8.4, and then
released a first release candidate, which triggered some last-minute
adjustments. Randal L. Schwartz also commented on the modules that were
still newer on CPAN than in the RC1 tarball; which is not to be
considered absolutely evil, as Nicholas explained, given that the
primary goal of a maintenance release is stability.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040404224109.GJ701%40plum.flirble.org
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040405215642.GG676%40plum.flirble.org
More pack templates
Marcus Holland-Moritz proposed an extension to the pack() template
syntax, to handle signed integers in big- and in little-endian order. H.
Merijn Brand suggested that, instead of using new letters, one could use
a "!" suffix to denote signedness, proposition which was unanimously
approved.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040405182634.7dc02687%40r2d2
But then, Marcus took his initial idea further, and proposed a more
general extension. This second one, among other things, uses the "<" and
">" suffixes to denote respectively little- and big-endianness. Patches
are to be expected.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040408180559.470c4a47%40r2d2
Unicode exercise
Jarkko Hietaniemi proposed a small Unicode task for the interested:
automate the generation of Unicode properties in perl's Unicode
character tables (the files in lib/unicore); they are currently
hardcoded. The details can be found at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40750F8A.7020006%40iki.fi
Optree black magic
Jim Cromie, who recently worked on the B::Concise (a core module to
dump optrees), got an idea: using a B::Concise style to generate code
to be executed by B::Generate to generate an optree equivalent to the
one which was dumped.
Scott Walters commented that he is, on his own, working on a Perl 6 to
Perl 5 bytecode compiler, in sight of using B::Generate to have
executable code; and some of the efforts converge here. Something
interesting might be produced by this (maybe "psooie" -- "Perl Six On
Old Internals Engine".)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40745889.6090208%40divsol.com
An improved warning
Dave Mitchell proposed a patch to improve the famous warning "Use of
uninitialized value..." by adding the name of the undefined variable or
array/hash subscript that triggered the warning in the potentially
faulty expression. I'm sure this additional verbosity will make lots of
coders happy.
Caching tied hash elements
Jamie Lokier submitted an extensive bug report (bug #28233) concerning
the aggressive caching of references to elements of tied hashes. Those
references are magical, since reading from them calls FETCH() and
writing to them calls STORE(), but the read or written value is cached
by perl, and sometimes this cache isn't invalidated whereas it should
be. Jamie proposed a solution but nobody commented yet.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-28233-83777.13.7804390706522%40perl.org
Some other bugs
Rafael fixed a compiler bug, which was indefinitively looping when
parsing (not executing) the following construct:
map { while (1) {} } ()
David Dyck noticed a glitch in find2perl, now that it defaults to
"-print" if no other action is specified: it shouldn't default to
"-print", however, when one of the actions is an "-eval". This was
fixed.
Andrew Alakozow reported (as bug #28364) that perl segfaults on Win32
when some XS code changes values in the program's environment, and when
the destruct level is greater than 0 (for example in spawned threads, or
when the environment variable PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL is set at an
appropriate value).
Leah reported (bug #28294) that the module File::Basename is plagued
with deficiencies. Rafael suggests either to rewrite it (eventually with
a backport to CPAN), or to deprecate it.
Upgraded modules
Dave Rolsky released Time::Local 1.08, then 1.09, which contain mostly
documentation and test fixes.
Jarkko Hietaniemi released Time::HiRes 1.57, 1.58, and 1.59. It fixes a
problem on Windows and Cygwin platforms: "if the performance counter
drifts by more than two seconds from the system clock (due to ntp
adjustments, for example), recalibrate our internal counter".
About this summary
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, from Paris, France.
Thanks to Elizabeth Mattijsen for having taken the role of interim
summarizer during two weeks. (And now for a highly personal
advertisement: I'm still looking for a flat in Paris. Offers welcome!)
Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Comments and corrections are welcome.
