This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 18-31 2004)

rafael on 2004-11-02T14:25:00

Using newspeak to redefine a week.

No DESTROY for the wicked coderefs (bug #32024)

DESTROY doesn't get called on non-closure anonymous subroutines because the CV is shared, but this won't be fixed because of performance reasons.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00287.html

This was discussed before:

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg01300.html

err and backwards compatibility

Michael Schwern and Robert Spier brought up how the new err keyword in 5.10 hasn't been properly deprecated. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes claimed err is a second-class keyword, while Rafael Garcia-Suarez claimed it was not. Hm..

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00378.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00351.html

is_tainted in 5.8

Stas Bekman suggested an improvement of the is_tainted subroutine offered in perldoc perlsec for testing whether a variable contains tainted data. He found that for some reason it was necessary to

  use warnings FATAL => 'all';

to prevent compile-time errors from the eval.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00305.html

Chained goto &sub drops data too early (bug #32039)

Henrik Gulbrandsen spotted that patch 22373 in 5.8.4, which was put in place to fix the @_s in recursive gotos, now causes @_ to be dropped in chained gotos. Dave Mitchell's new solution is to ``transfer the reifiedness of the old @_ to the new @_ then ditch the old @_''.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00324.html

Optimization idea

David Nicol wondered if

   my $name = 'david';
   return "hello my name is $name";

could be optimized with

   return "hello my name is david";

Elizabeth Mattijsen, for one, doubted this would be worth it because of the complexity of checking when the optimization could be done.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00376.html

perldoc -f for ops (bug #27886)

Dan Jacobson dreamed of a world where perldoc -f = returns documentation on the = operator. I think everyone's thought of this at some point, though it might be better to ``ask not what your perldoc can do for you, ask what you can do for your perldoc''.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00412.html

Encode::utf8::decode_xs does not check partial chars

Bjoern Hoehrmann convinced Dan Kogai that

  my $x = "Bj\xF6rn"; # as well as "Bj\xF6r" and "Bj\xF6"
  decode("utf-8", $x, Encode::FB_CROAK);

should croak but wasn't. See

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00412.html

and I think also bug #32080

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00375.html

Perl doesn't support RAII

Anders Johnson submitted four patches for RAII in Perl. Quoth he: ``The central idea of the patches that I submitted is to block (defer) signal handlers inside the DESTROY call. That way, you can arrange for signal handlers to die() without having to worry that the exception won't get propagated.''

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00423.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00421.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00422.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00424.html

Link from John Peacock on RAII (not to be confused with the RIAA):

  http://www.hackcraft.net/raii/

This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published weekly at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections welcome.