This week's summary presents a nice variety of language issues. Read about some new errors, documentation patches, bug closing and configuration.
%:: Dave Mitchell proposed to change assignments to %:: to be a
compile-time error (currently, this may cause crashes, and a non-warned
user may fall in this trap). Enache Adrian objected that this doesn't
prevent all nasty things that may be done with the main stash, and thus
was unnecessary bloat. Arthur Bergman proposes to mark %:: as read-only
instead. Hugo van der Sanden feels this patch is actually trying to hide
other problems.
http://xrl.us/g4o
It's a well-known fact that you can crash perl by modifying an array over
which a for loop iterates. Dave Mitchell changed this into a new fatal
run-time error, Use of freed value in iteration.
http://xrl.us/g4p
Dave Mitchell (who got bored and was browsing the bug database) reminds
the crowd that local($x='bar') is currently equivalent to $x='bar'
(i.e. the local() is silently ignored). This is not the right thing ; it
should either produce some error, or localize $x, before or after the
assignment occurs. The general opinion is to disallow it, purely and
simply. Rafael, noticing that other lvalues can be localized (e.g. pos
or substr, although not very reliably sometimes), thinks this should be
fixed to work. Hugo, however, says that the most we can do is to add a
deprecation warning.
http://xrl.us/g4q
But Dave didn't stop there. He also asked about whether splice() should
extend the array it operates on (bug #1832). The consensus was to fix the
docs, which are unclear.
http://xrl.us/g4r
Jarkko asks for someone to solve the remaining problems about restricted
hashes -- that replace pseudohashes in the implementation of the
fields pragma in the perls to be released. And this someone will be%h = (key => 1) ). However, if this
list contains a disallowed key, %h is left empty rather than with its
original contents.
http://xrl.us/g4s
Casey West announces that he's going to do something useful for documentation, and posts a list of goals. Notably, he's willing to coordinate and encourage efforts. Then, proving it, he posted a large number of documentation patches, closing a large number of bugs.
http://xrl.us/g4t
Meanwhile, Nick Ing-Simmons agrees that the PerlIO / open / binmode / perliol docs need to be cleaned up so that they fit more nicely together.
Josh Purinton notices (bug #22010) that reading from a dup'ed DATA
filehandle, by doing open(F,"<&DATA"), in fact doesn't read
anything. (Further investigation indicates that this only occurs when the
environment variable PERLIO is set at stdio.) Nick Ing-Simmons points
out that when the dup is done, the file pointer of DATA is at EOF, and
that dup'ing DATA is not going to copy the DATA buffer.
http://xrl.us/g4u
Bug #22027 is merely a question, asked by Mike Stok : the value of $x,
after this statement
$x = (1,2,3,());
is undef. Is this the right thing to do, or should the final
parentheses be ignored, hence setting $x to 3 ? Graham Barr explains that
a list in a scalar context evaluates each element in a scalar context
before any flattening is done.
http://xrl.us/g4v
Nick Ing-Simmons asks whether sfio support can be removed. Andy Dougherty and Stas Bekman point out that it's used on some mod_perl installations, because under mod_perl STDOUT is tied (unless perl is compiled to use the sfio library), and formats don't work with a tied STDOUT. Mark Mielke considers that writing a CGI and expecting it to work under mod_perl is naive anyway.
http://xrl.us/g4w
Nathan Torkington asks about the use of the -prebind linker option on
Mac OS X. Dan Kogai tells him to use the update_prebinding command, which
should optimize the loading of XS modules (and other dynamic libraries).
Wilfredo Sánchez adds that adding -prebind to the linker flags can't
hurt.
http://xrl.us/g4x
Dave Mitchell fixed a case of memory corruption with the goto &sub
construct.
Abe Timmerman released Test-Smoke v1.17, with loads of improvements.
Peter Scott produces a mysterious case (filed as bug #21999) where $1 is
modified by an unsuccessful regex match, inside a for loop.
Several people walked through the bug database, closing bugs to be closed, or proposing fixes for old bugs. Thanks to Robert, Ask, Arthur, Dave, Casey, and probably others.
This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Feedback (and patches) welcome.