This week, the report comes a little bit earlier than expected, due to a short schedule. However it will not be shorter -- this week was rich in events and in discussions about the future of Perl 5.
Hugo applied the patch by Brent Dax that introduces the //,
err and //= operators (defined-or,
low-priority defined-or,
and defined-or assignment).
H.Merijn Brand seriously thinks about building 5.8.0 with it and put it production.
However this new syntax introduces minor incompatibilities,
so Hugo wants to make it available in the future through a new pragma use perl6ish.
On this same topic,
Chris Reinhardt noticed that shift // 0 is a syntax error.
In fact,
the parser,
seeing the tokens shift //,
can't decide between shift(//) (the regexp) and shift // ... (the operator).
I suggested that,
although difficult to solve in the general case (e.g.
with split),
this can be made to work for the shift operator and most of others.
(That's what we call DWIMmery.)
This problem doesn't occur in Perl 6,
where // is not a valid pattern.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.GSO.4.44.0208091457550.19151-100000%40quartz.bos.dyndns.org
To implement new pragmas (such as perl6ish) or to make the existing sort pragma work with lexical scopes, it's necessary to have a mechanism to retrieve the existing set of pragmas in any scope during the compilation. This mechanism is currently provided by the $^H and %^H special variables. But %^H has at least one problem : it's not propagated to eval "" statements. This has to be fixed.
It would also be handy to access, after the compilation phase, the set of pragmas a particular op has been compiled with. For example, this could be useful for the B:: modules, or for anything that manipulates the optree. For the moment, this works only with the integer, strict 'refs', locale and bytes pragmas (you can for example get them through the 9th value returned by caller(N)).
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200208052352.g75NqGj05578%40crypt.compulink.co.uk
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D511373.8050706%40hexaflux.com
Abigail reported a (known) bug (#16010) : the fat comma doesn't quote v-strings. Hence
perl -we 'print v65 => "\n"'
prints "A\n" (at least on ASCII platforms). John Peacock (who knows the v-strings inner odds and ends, for having worked on them) explained the root of the problem : the parser immediately converts v65 into a string "A" and there is currently no way to distinguish them after compilation.
John then supplied quickly a patch to add magic to v-string scalars, so a copy of the initial string representation is preserved. With this information in place, it will be probably possible to correct a large part of the annoyances caused by v-strings.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D4FF061.7030802%40rowman.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D530D01.9010000%40rowman.com
Arthur Bergman posted a list of ideas for Perl 5.10. Shortly : replace magic by parrot-like PMCs, provide a strict typing pragma, decrease general memory overhead, improve threads, and improve the introspection mechanisms of Perl (e.g. the B:: modules). This triggerred quite a bit of comments -- especially about the proposed replacement of the magic system, used to implement all Perl magic variables, and other things too.
Benjamin Goldberg then dropped some additionnal ideas of his own : for example, allow $/ to be a regexp. Nicholas Clark added that more tests can't hurt.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=F4096C04-AAAE-11D6-AF7A-003065D64CBE%40contiller.se
Michael G Schwern submitted a complete patch to remove pseudo-hashes. With his patch, places that were using pseudo-hashes (as fields.pm) use the new (as of 5.8.0) restricted hashes. He added that some future improvements can be made on the top of his patch. He made also some benchmarking and noticed (quite surprisingly) no performance improvement ; some more digging is needed on this, as he previously estimated an average 15% speedup on hash operations.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020806200510.GC31473%40ool-18b93024.dyn.optonline.net
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020806215439.GA26308%40ool-18b93024.dyn.optonline.net
Johannes Plass, a pseudo-hash user, wondered if the compile-time checking features of the current pseudo-hashes will be preserved with the new implementation of fields.pm and base.pm.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D558057.7010003%40web.de
Dave Mitchell added a new debugging option, -Dv, aimed at making the other debugging options more verbose. He supplied also a verbose version of -Ds (to trace stack contents).
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020805005533.B26111%40fdgroup.com
Robin Berjon pointed the P5P readers at an entry in Leon Brocard's use.perl journal, about securing CPAN. Only Andreas Koenig replied, but I feel that this idea is finding its way in the porters' minds.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=02080502111402.12618%40morgaine
Tim Bunce suggested that porting XS core modules to Inline::C might make them more easily portable to Perl 6. Brian Ingerson and Dan Sugalski disagreed, unless someone defines a compatibility API on top of XS and Parrot.
The perl5-changes mailing list (where commits to the Perl 5 source repository are sent) seems to be allergic to Hugo.
A couple of bug reports about gcc 3.1 not being able to build perl 5.6.1 were sent. This is a known problem with gcc 3.1. H.Merijn Brand suggested to make a patch available on CPAN.
John P. Linderman found that /.{,3}/ is not the same pattern as /.{0,3}/ : the lower bound is not optional. Mark-Jason Dominus says : It turns out it has been this way since Perl 1.
Vadim Konovalov found a bug in seek/tell when the :crlf PerlIO layer is used, and found also the root cause of it (Bug #15986). This was fixed by Nick Ing-Simmons.
Hugo released the first development snapshot. The smoke tests are up again.
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, just before taking his annual vacation. Thanks to Elizabeth Mattijsen, who will take it over for the next two weeks. It's also available via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org.