Here is the popular digest of the Perl 5 porters mailing list for the second week of February. Featuring new proposals, new command-line switches, new ideas, and fixes for all sorts of bugs.
Fergal Daly asked why length($a) isn't a lvalue.
This would allow to trim a string by changing directly its length.
But there is a problem : defining the proper behavior when the length of $a has to grow.
Should $a be kept unchanged,
or should it be blank- (or null-) padded ?
For this reason,
Hugo decided that length() isn't going to return a lvalue yet.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91851.html
Abigail reports (bug #20827) that a large number (1597009560 ** 2) is sometimes print by perl as an integer, and sometimes in the scientific notation. When this square operation has been constant folded, the number is stored by perl as an integer, but when it occurs at run time, perl uses a floating point value, hence the difference in output.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91899.html
François Pons proposed a patch to allow to load gzipped modules, via the PerlIO-gzip layer. Slaven Rezic pointed out that this functionality was probably not worth being put in the core, because it can be implemented via the coderef-in-@INC feature.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91999.html
Jarkko Hietaniemi implemented the -C command-line switch he proposed some weeks ago. This switch (with additional option letters) can be used to control perl's Unicode behavior : for example, to turn on/off the utf-8-ness of the standard input or output, or of input files supplied on @ARGV. This new flag will be available in perl 5.8.1 as well.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91815.html
To address a namespace pollution issue raised by John Lenz, Jarkko implemented a new C preprocessor symbol, PERL_NO_SHORT_NAMES, which prevents the #definition of the short form of any of the Perl_* symbols.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91954.html
Our pumpking, Hugo van der Sanden, who was quite busy those last weeks, caught up with the developments. Most notably, the patch that Salvador Fandiño sent in November to add assertion support to Perl is now in.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez implemented a new function in Scalar::Util, that allows to change the prototype of a function.
Jos Boumans proposed (with a patch) to advertise Test::More and Module::Build in the perlmodstyle man page.
Fergal Daly imagined a new, more concise way to invoke Exporter, and sent a patch to implement his idea.
Bug #20920 pertains to the new safe signal implementation in perl 5.8.0 : apparently, when a signal handler is running, the corresponding signals are not blocked, whereas they should be. This can lead to segfaults. Slaven Rezic provided a fix.
Bug #20912, fixed by Enache Adrian, is about a split() on a utf-8 string that causes the unusual error message Split loop to be thrown.
Mark Mielke produced a strange case of core dump, involving ties and auto-references.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg91991.html
Jarkko reminds us that someone has to make sure that the fields pragma still works, now that pseudo-hashes have been removed. (The plan being to use read-only hashes.) That could be a bite-sized task for someone. (And while we're at it, there are still traces of the old 5005 threads to be cleaned up.)
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92000.html
This summary brought to you once more by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments and corrections are welcome.