Elizabeth Mattijsen writes "With a little delay comes this week the weekly Perl 5 Porters Summary from the centre of reality that is Echt, the Netherlands. About 250 messages were posted in the last week. A lot was said about documentation. And a Release Candidate was released! Well, technically not inside the week, but inside of the bounds of this summary, anyway."
No stacked filetest operators
Oops. I misinterpreted 5.8.4's changelog. Perl 5.8.4 will not have stacked filetest operators. Thanks to Paul Johnson for pointing this out.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040329000412.GL23954%40pjcj.net
Indirect notation in core documentation
Yves Orton started a discussion about the usage of indirect object notation in Perl's core documentation, and whether the Perl core documentation should give the good example by not using indirect object notation. Beginning Perl programmers would be confused by this extra synctactic sugar (well, I know when I was starting doing Perl objects).
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=65e7cde0bc3e30b5>
The ref( $proto ) || $proto Debate
Ovid started a discussion aka can of worms about the use of the archetypical idiom sub new { my $proto = shift; my $class = ref( $proto ) || $proto; in Perl's core documentation as it introduces cargo-culting (even though it is documented in perltoot). The discussion continued on what it actually means when you call "new" on an object as opposed to on a class (bareword). Randal Schwartz ended the discussion with a preview of one of his upcoming articles, in which he basically said that there would always be 67% of the people expecting the wrong thing from calling "new" on an object. A patch was supplied by Ovid in the end: it was applied.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=fe974d9bbcd41d9e
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=f6a921f8df9d8529
wantarray inside eval block
Tim Bunce reported that wantarray seems to behave differently inside an eval block from e.g. a do block. Rafael added a documentation patchlet. Personally, I'm not sure whether this is actually a bug or a feature: in any case, it's documented now.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=8e7e5816a64a07
localtime() not mentioning gmtime() and vice versa
Dan Jacobson reported that the perl documentation of localtime() doesn't mention gmtime() and vice versa. He didn't supply a proposal for a change in the documentation, or a patch. Too bad. It would have improved Perl's documentation with little effort on his side. Nobody has reacted so far.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=592e945ce45de89d
The version saga continues
As promised last week, John Peacock uploaded a new version of version.pm on CPAN. This version included some extra's not in the core, which immediately exposed yet another problem of modules living both in the core as well as on CPAN: if version X of something on CPAN includes more files than version X in the core, how will CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS.pm ever download the CPAN version?
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=10d2d4819de85a28
Signed big and little endian in (un)pack
Marcus Holland-Moritz had a feature request for allowing pack to directly support signed little and big endian integers in (un)pack. His original proposal used extra letters. Merijn H. Brand thought the proposal was a good idea, but that it was using too much letter real estate. A different proposal and patch using a "!" suffix was given later, but as yet not committed.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=a9d9e46d9942125f
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=d94d1939b525d878
Nick keeps the pressure on!
Perl 5.8.4 RC1 was released by Nicholas Clark. Expect a proper 5.8.4 in a week or so!
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=8d87fae1ec5e402b
About this summary
This summary was written by Elizabeth Mattijsen, from Echt, The Netherlands while Rafael is still getting settled in Paris. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments and corrections are welcome."
