The bulk of the discussion, this week, was about platform-specific adjustments for the upcoming 5.8.1, and other testing feedback. However, don't miss the other interesting topics : v-strings (again), autoboxing, and the usual load of features and bugfixes.
In short : v-strings are back in 5.8.1.
Long version : Jarkko Hietaniemi asked Larry for the ultimate advice. In
the long term, the v1.2.3
form of v-strings will go away, as well as
the confusing equality between 1.2.3
and the "\1\2\3"
string. In
Perl 6, 1.2.3
is going (most probably) to be a full-fledged version
object. Consequently, the 1.2.3
notation should not be deprecated. A
new notation, qv[5.6]
, might be introduced for version objects with
only one decimal point.
http://xrl.us/oze
So Jarkko did put everything about v-strings like it was in perl 5.8.0
(except the fix for barewords of the form v65
, autoquoted by =>
,
see previous weeks.) v-strings don't produce deprecation warnings anymore,
because issuing them only at the right places would be too complicated.
John Peacock is going to produce some design document in order to get
version objects in Perl 5.10 as close as possible to the future Perl 6
version objects.
At some point, Michael G Schwern advocated faster release cycles, leading to faster deprecation cycles. Alan Burlison commented with insight.
http://xrl.us/ozf
chocolateboy proposed a patch to add a new lexically-scoped pragma,
autobox
(the name of this feature comes from Java and C#). This patch,
against perl 5.8.1 RC4, is also available from CPAN. Basically it allows
methods to be invoked on unblessed references and on scalars. It provoked
a wide range of different reactions.
Chip Salzenberg hates the feature. Other disapprovals follow : Abigail,
Graham Barr, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, mostly because they find the new
syntax inconsistent with the rest of Perl 5, like pseudohashes were.
Tassilo von Parseval, Michael Schwern and James Duncan like it. Alan
Burlison wonders about performance impact. Claes Jacobsson wonders if the
name autobox
is well chosen. Simon Cozens comments negatively on the
implementation and posts the source of his Ruby.pm
module, that I've
probably seen on the fwp mailing list before.
Hugo van der Sanden has the wise word : the core must be adjusted so that
it's possible to write pragmas like autobox
without requiring a core
patch.
http://xrl.us/ozg http://search.cpan.org/author/CHOCOLATE/autobox-0.03/lib/autobox.pm
Gerrit P. Haase, Merijn Brand and Jarkko were busy solving problems with compiling perl on recent releases of Cygwin (1.3.22, 1.5), mainly due to evil typecasts between unsigned and signed integers. At some point this ended up in a patch to the stdint.h header file that comes with cygwin 1.5.
Meanwhile, Jari Aalto found that Sys::Syslog doesn't log anything,
apparently, under Cygwin (Cygwin does not use the
Steve Hay reminds about a MakeMaker bug he found : it's not passing DEFINE and INC arguments to other Makefile.PL's in subdirectories, at least on Windows. After having tried a few tweaks, Michael Schwern reaches the conclusion that trying to solve such complex issues just before an imminent release is not a wise idea.
http://xrl.us/ozh
Iain Truskett added a new manpage into the documentation : perlreref, a handy regular expression quick reference. It will be available in perl 5.8.1.
http://xrl.us/ozi
Fergal Daly finds that passing a hash slice in the argument list of a function autovivifies non-existent keys. However hash slices alone don't make autovivification happen, nor does hash elements. This behaviour exists since at least 5.005_03, but looks like a bug nevertheless.
http://xrl.us/ozj
Johan Vromans asked for a way to know what files ExtUtils::Makemaker is
going to install (via make install
), without actually installing them.
There's currently no easy way to have this information, but Michael
Schwern is going to add a packlist target to the Makefile that will be
runnable separately from the complete install.
http://xrl.us/ozk
Raphael Manfredi announced that he wants to revitalize the metaconfig
project. The dist
distribution on CPAN hasn't been updated since 1997.
http://xrl.us/ozl
Dave Mitchell fixed something hidden deeply inside the internals of the
lexical scopes. As a result, SelfStubber
began to emit a new warning,
Variable ``$nested'' is not available, $nested being a lexical variable
used in a recursive qr//
expression. This only confirms the general
proverb : (??{})
assertions break lexicals.
Michael G Schwern found that perl can't be compiled with -Dusemymalloc
on Mac OS X. At least, it can't be compiled without further investigation.
Alain Barbet and his smoke armada found problems with semaphores and NetBSD on sparc : they leak. Jarkko disables them. (bug #23216)
Nicholas Clark and Abhijit Menon-Sen fixed a bug involving an unfortunate
interaction between Storable
and restricted hashes.
Enache Adrian finds that using #line
directives nukes the GvFILE slots
of globs. Don't worry, apparently this only affects B::Bytecode -- but
this prevents it completely from producing any accurate result.
Abe Timmerman released Test-Smoke 1.18.02.
This week's yet another summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Comments and corrections are welcome.