This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 18-31 2004) Using newspeak to redefine a week.
No DESTROY for the wicked coderefs (bug #32024) "DESTROY" doesn't get called on non-closure anonymous subroutines because the "CV" is shared, but this won't be fixed because of performance reasons. http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00287.html This was discussed before: http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg01300.html err and backwards compatibility Michael Schwern and Robert Spier brought up how the new "err" keyword in 5.10 hasn't been properly deprecated. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes claimed "err" is a second-class keyword, while Rafael Garcia-Suarez claimed it was not. Hm.. http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00378.html http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00351.html is_tainted in 5.8 Stas Bekman suggested an improvement of the "is_tainted" subroutine offered in "perldoc perlsec" for testing whether a variable contains tainted data. He found that for some reason it was necessary to use warnings FATAL => 'all'; to prevent compile-time errors from the "eval". http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00305.html Chained goto &sub drops data too early (bug #32039) Henrik Gulbrandsen spotted that patch 22373 in 5.8.4, which was put in place to fix the @_s in recursive "goto"s, now causes @_ to be dropped in chained "goto"s. Dave Mitchell's new solution is to "transfer the reifiedness of the old @_ to the new @_ then ditch the old @_". http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00324.html Optimization idea David Nicol wondered if my $name = 'david'; return "hello my name is $name"; could be optimized with return "hello my name is david"; Elizabeth Mattijsen, for one, doubted this would be worth it because of the complexity of checking when the optimization could be done. http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00376.html perldoc -f for ops (bug #27886) Dan Jacobson dreamed of a world where "perldoc -f =" returns documentation on the "=" operator. I think everyone's thought of this at some point, though it might be better to "ask not what your perldoc can do for you, ask what you can do for your perldoc". http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00412.html Encode::utf8::decode_xs does not check partial chars Bjoern Hoehrmann convinced Dan Kogai that my $x = "Bj\xF6rn"; # as well as "Bj\xF6r" and "Bj\xF6" decode("utf-8", $x, Encode::FB_CROAK); should croak but wasn't. See http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00412.html and I think also bug #32080 http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00375.html Perl doesn't support RAII Anders Johnson submitted four patches for RAII in Perl. Quoth he: "The central idea of the patches that I submitted is to block (defer) signal handlers inside the DESTROY call. That way, you can arrange for signal handlers to die() without having to worry that the exception won't get propagated." http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00423.html http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00421.html http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00422.html http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00424.html Link from John Peacock on RAII (not to be confused with the RIAA): http://www.hackcraft.net/raii/ In brief Steve Peters, sedulous bee that he be, commented on at least a dozen ancient bugs, presumably with the intent of clearing them out. Nicolas Clark said in a couple threads that he doesn't intend to upgrade MakeMaker in maint because versions after 6.17 have bugs with core perl. References The thread for bug number $BUGNUM can be found at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=$BUGNUM About this summary This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published weekly at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections welcome.
