On the menu of the P5P summary this week, you will find language constructions, segmentation faults, proposals for new tied methods, pronunciation issues, and (in fine) a few bugs.
last Continuing a thread from last week about the last statement used to
exit an eval() block: last and next, when used to exit from a
subroutine, not only exit, but also branch to the specified loop/label of
the caller. This is definitively a feature, since (as Tim Bunce remarked)
Test::More::skip() uses this, and (as Hugo van der Sanden pointed out),
Apocalypse 12 uses this to define method lookup strategies.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405051134.i45BYET26083%40zen.crypt.org
open pragma segfault Tomasz Pala reports (bug #29437) a case of recursion in perl's character
encoding routines, which obviously (once diagnosed) leads to stack
recursion and to segmentation fault. The sample code involves somehow the
open pragma.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-29437-87042.12.9753390677264%40per l.org
Dan Boorstein proposed a patch against bleadperl to add a TRUNCATE method to tied filehandles. Tassilo von Parsval commented that this new method should probably be made optional, for simplicity and compatibility.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040508103121.519a8d9f.dan_boo%40bellsouth .net
pack() work Marcus Holland-Moritz, who implemented a couple of weeks ago new modifiers
(< and >) for pack() templates, added a way to group these
with parentheses.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040503201441.1b058e0d%40r2d2
Stas Bekman reported that Scalar::Util::weaken() (used to make weak references) has new problems in perl 5.8.4 (as it attempts to free unreferenced scalars, unveiling a deeper malfunction.) As those problems don't appear in bleadperl, Dave Mitchell does some investigation about the patches which caused it, and proposes a solution -- a patch from blead to integrate in maint.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4097EF6F.8050401%40stason.org
!~? Yitzchak noticed that using !~ on an uninitialized value reports the
warning as having occured in a not operation, which is not exactly the
case, and proposed to change the message; which raised the question, what
is actually the name of the !~ operator?
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040509075919.GA3752%40efn.org
Dan Dascalescu reported (bug #29346) that passing an undefined argument to
the int() or abs() built-ins produces the Use of uninitialized value
twice. Another history of magic handled twice.
H. Merijn Brand is back on Cygwin smokes. This time, there were some IPC::SysV failures; Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes pointed out that a service needs to be started on Cygwin to make them work.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040506142843.98DB.H.M.BRAND%40hccnet.nl
David Muir Sharnoff reported that Scalar::Util::refaddr() (a function that returns the memory address of the reference it gets passed) doesn't work when magic is somehow involved (bug #29395). Marcus fixed this.
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. 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 welcome.