September begins, holidays are over. Lots of little new things occured this week. Read about lexical pragmas, syntax warnings and good style, advancement of the maintainance branches, bugs, fixes, tests and upgrades.
Mark-Jason Dominus, in a sudden and impressive burst of creativity, posted
a patch to implement extensible lexical pragmas in Perl 5. So what does
this mean ? Basically he found a way to store, during the compilation of a
Perl 5 program, variables related to lexical scopes, that can later be
retrieved and used. Currently perl does this fully for some pragmas only
(use strict 'refs', use integer, etc.) and in a non-extensible way.
Moreover Mark-Jason's implementation provides a pragma module which
goal is to help the future authors of lexical pragmas.
However, this patch is not finished, and has to be carefully tested and improved. It's a very promising starting point, though.
http://xrl.us/sos
While the work on 5.8.1 testing and stabilization is continuing, Rafael released a first snapshot of what should become perl 5.6.2 in a not too long amount of time. This led to tests and fixes. Yves Orton provided a fix to MakeMaker on Windows. Rafael decided to copy the platform-specific configuration hint files from bleadperl to 5.6.2.
http://xrl.us/sot
Abigail finds the above warning unuseful and demands it to be removed, on the basis of three considerations : it's issued for sensible and valid code, such as
print (3);
Moreover it's not issued for some buggy code, where it should be issued
print (1 + 2) * 3; # note the two spaces after print here
and finally the statement print(1+2)*3 already gives the warning
Useless use of multiplication (*) in void context. Also, sort() is
subject to the same warning, but no other built-in.
As expected, the porters quickly divide into two camps. Abigail provided a patch to suppress the warning, but no verdict was given.
http://xrl.us/sou
map in void context This wasn't the only controversial discussion. Tassilo von Parseval,
following a piece of opinion posted by Abigail on comp.lang.perl.misc,
provided a patch to optimize away the result of map when it's called in
void context, making it almost as fast as a for loop. A discussion on
the stylistic use of map in void context ensued, raising the question
of whether it should trigger a warning or not.
http://xrl.us/sov
Mark-Jason Dominus asks whether the order of evaluation of some binary
operators is defined ; for example, whether the. concatenation
operator guarantees that its left-hand side will be evaluated before its
right-hand side. The question is more about the future implementations of
Perl (or Ponie) than about the past ones. The answer is undefined.
http://xrl.us/sow
Safe holes Guy Albertelli demonstrated that within a string of perl code to be evaluated by Safe::reval(), some lexical variables from Safe were available. (Bug #23656.) This is related to the fact that eval'ed code sees its lexical context. As perl 5.8.1 contains fixes that allow nested evals to still see their full lexical scope, this bug is actually more serious in 5.8.1 than in previous versions. Hopefully, Dave Mitchell provided a fix.
http://xrl.us/sox
Moreover, Benjamin Goldberg found out that it's possible to exit from a
block evaluated in a Safe compartment by using last LABEL or another
similar construct (provided that LABEL is a valid label in the program at
the point where the Safe compartment is used.)
http://xrl.us/soy
Abhijit Menon-Sen provided a patch to implement a new syntax,
<DIRHANDLE>, making the angle-bracket operator an equivalent of
readdir() when operating over a directory handle. Mark-Jason Dominus
provided a link to an old discussion in comp.lang.perl.moderated about
the potential problems caused by this feature.
http://xrl.us/soz
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes posted a patch to document that the import and
unimport methods don't get autoloaded. But, at the same, he asks
why they aren't autoloaded.
http://xrl.us/so2
Jarkko Hietaniemi asks the brave porters to fetch the patches to perl some OS vendors apply to their distributions, just to see if something interesting can be found.
http://xrl.us/so3
Andreas Koenig wrote a test framework for the perl debugger. (There are currently no regression tests for it.)
Enache Adrian is continuing his work on the ByteLoader module, which apparently is taking a good shape. It was completely broken in 5.8.0.
David Dyck reports (bug #23731) than on his Linux machine, the string returned by perl to represent the infinite IEEE floating point value has leading spaces. That would be a libc bug.
Unicode::Collate version 0.27, then 0.28, were released, as well as Data::Dumper 2.121. This last one, backported to perl 5.6 by Ilya Martynov, was integrated into perl 5.6.2.
The perlreftut manpage is now distributed under the same terms as perl itself. That means that it can be reintegrated into Debian.
This week's discussions were summarized by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are published weekly on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Corrections and comments are welcome.