What happened this week ? Interesting bugs were found, and solutions proposed ; new areas explored, technical points raised, and patches applied.
Ton Hospel reported bug #22354,
about the use of the multiline flag /m in regular expressions : when a function is called from the right side of a substitution that uses /m,
and when this function uses a second regular expression,
this second regexp has implicitly and incorrectly /m turned on.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez explained what happens behind the scenes : setting /m on a match or on a substitution is equivalent to setting the global special variable $* to 1 (locally).
Thus,
it will influence the behaviour of all regexps that haven't /m or /s set in that scope.
As $* is deprecated (and discouraged due to its action-at-distance semantics), Rafael proposes to purely and simply remove it. That will solve the bug. He asks : when removing a deprecated feature, should the deprecation warning be removed as well ?
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-06/msg00120.html
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-06/msg00138.html
Steve Hays asked how to do the equivalent of warnings::warnif() from XS code (conditionally warn, depending on whether a custom warning category is in use.) Paul Marquess gives some hints, but says that there is no general solution at the moment.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-06/msg00041.html
Should the internal function PerlIO_tempfile() call the core module File::Temp ? Jarkko Hietaniemi proposed this. This would avoid code duplication and ensure that the core works at the same safety level as File::Temp. Gurusamy Sarathy says, however, that this method is bloated and should be avoided, especially on Windows, where File::Temp is sub-optimal. He proposed an implementation based on the native Win32 API. Jarkko reverted his changes.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-06/msg00015.html
William R Ward noticed that the fat comma => no longer auto-quotes compound barewords (that contain ::.) Thus, something like
%h = (Foo::Bar => 1);
is now refused when strict 'subs' is in effect. In fact, only perl 5.6.1 accepted this last construct without complaining. This is potentially dangerous, because if Foo::Bar is a function here, it's not turned into a literal string. Rafael and Michael Schwern explored a bit more this change, and this ended in a documentation patch, to clarify the current behaviour.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-06/msg00061.html
Uri Guttman asks about safe signal callbacks -- more precisely, when can be a signal callback be invoked, under the new safe signal implementation. Nick Ing-Simmons says that perl dispatches signals when it gets its next operation. However, the IO system may also dispatch them when it gets an interrupted function call error (EINTR).
Dan Kogai proposes that on Mac OS X perl should not be built as a shared library by default, to resolve prebinding woes. (Moreover that's the default on most other platforms.) Chris Nandor wonders about whether it would be useful to use prebinding for XS. Dan doesn't think it's a good idea.
Michael Schwern asked for clarifications about how the used only once typo warning works, and why it works that way. Rafael explains that it's issued only at compile-time, and not for variables defined in modules pulled in by use.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-06/msg00103.html
Ton Hospel came up with a new bug gem : #22614, the array length of @- and @+ is not properly localized during backtracking, which leads to the presence of spurious undefined values in those arrays.
Steve Hay released Win32::UTCFileTime on CPAN, a module intended to provide alternative versions of the built-in functions stat(), lstat() and utime() on Win32 systems, to handle correctly UTC file times.
http://search.cpan.org/author/SHAY/Win32-UTCFileTime-1.00/UTCFileTime.pm
Jarkko released a new maintperl snapshot.
This summary was brought to you by your usual summarizer, Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are welcome.