Busy week for the Perl 5 porters : lots of patches were sent. In the discussion, several curious behaviors of perl were also explained, for the enlightenment of all. Ain't it interesting ?
Yves Orton remarked that the popular syntax
my $hashref = { -foo => "bar" };
doesn't seem to be properly deparsed by B::Deparse, which turns the hash
key into -'foo'. As Stephen McCamant points out, this is still correct
however, because if you apply the unary minus operator to a string that
starts with a letter or _, it prepends "-" to the string.
David Dyck noticed (bug #19017) that the x debugger command doesn't display lexical variables any longer in bleadperl (this works fine in 5.8.0 and before). Dave Mitchell identified and fixed the bug, which was introduced by one of his patches, and explained how the debugger is actually able to do things like this.
strftime() Jarkko Hietaniemi grumbled about the %z strftime() format, recently
introduced. This format appears to be non-POSIX, for some values of the
POSIX standard. Finally, as it can't be tested portably, Jarkko removed
the tests for it from the POSIX test suite.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposed a master plan to reconsider the way compiler hints are implemented. The compiler hints are the mechanism that make lexically scoped pragmas work. The need to make hints more extensible and more flexible has been discussed several times since last year, see for example an older summary.
Rafael's detailed proposal and first patch, and the start of the relevant thread, are here.
Mark-Jason Dominus reported bug #19061, which can be summarised as
follows : if goto() is used to jump in the middle of a block which has a
label FOO, a redo FOO in this block won't be able to restart it.
In other words
goto FOO; BAR:{ FOO: print 1; redo BAR; }
emits an error Label not found for "redo BAR".
Stephen McCamant explained this specific behavior, which seems to be hard to change.
Nicholas Clark suggested a performance enhancement by reordering code in
pp_entersub() (a C function which implements a Perl subroutine call).
Nicholas Clark suggested also another potential improvement : replace the %s in the printf-like formats in the core by %_, when the argument is an SV*. %_ is an internal-only printf format hack, that doesn't seem to be widely used anymore in the core, I wonder why.
Ton Hospel reported several obscure bugs on regular expressions (bugs #19048, #19049, #19050, #19078, and #19134, no less). Some of them were already known or corrected.
John Peacock proposed a small change in the implementation of v-strings, consecutive to some earlier critics regarding the consistency of the current behavior.
Various people reported that the tests for POSIX are quite noisy those days, spitting out strange error messages like Unbalanced string table refcount. Dave Mitchell and Nicholas Clark provided fixes and tests. (Bug #19022.)
Craig Berry, back on the VMS port front, asks what the command-line flag
-IFoo::Bar (found in a regression test) is supposed to do. The answer
is simple : it should put a directory Foo::Bar in @INC (at least on
platforms that accept a colon in file names).
Ilya Zakharevich, back on the OS/2 port front, sent six various patches in a row (not all related to OS/2, several being related to MakeMaker).
Tels noticed that the modulus (%) operator works only on integers.
Non-integers arguments to % are truncated. If you want a modulus that
works on floats, use bignum.
This summary brought to you in time by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, both on http://use.perl.org/ and via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Comments and corrections are, as always, welcome.