This week, a lot of porters went to YAPC::Europe in Paris, so the list traffic on the list was less important. It wasn't less interesting.
Ed Avis doesn't like the fact that 1/0 is a compile-time error,
and not a runtime one (Bug #23061).
In other words,
he argues that
use constant N => 0;
if (N) { $x = 1/N; } # example number 1
eval { $x = 1/N; } # example number 2
should be legal code -- constant folding, being an optimization, should not change a program's meaning. (He notes also that the equivalent program in C is legal -- although Michael Schwern points out that C compilers shouldn't really be used as a guideline for designing perl errors.) On the other hand, Kurt Starsinic thinks about early detection of divisions by zero as a feature, not a bug.
Hugo van der Sanden describes what should be done to solve this problem : fatal exceptions thrown during constant folding must be caught and abort folding, instead of aborting the whole interpreter.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg01190.html
Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan suggested that one could overload exists, so that exists THING->method would be equivalent to THING->can('method'). Dave Mitchell doesn't like this new syntax proposal, and says yuck.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg01277.html
Dan Kogai had access to a box running an alpha version of Panther -- the next release of Mac OS X. He reports that the version numbers appear to be messed up in the perl 5.8.1 that comes bundled with Panther ; Edward Moy (who maintains Apple's version of perl) blames CVS expanding keywords when he imported the perl sources, and is going to fix it. Ken Williams says that the CVS manuals recommend against using the %Revision% keyword to generate release versions, to prevent this kind of problem.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg01338.html
Ken Williams finds that -T used with a filehandle sometimes doesn't seem to return the appropriate result. (Bug #23077).
Sean M. Burke asks for new regression tests for Perldoc ; regression tests are good.
Ilya Zakharevich proposes to add a new built-in function, Internals::find_script(), to emulate the -S command-line option. Michael G Schwern disagrees on using the Internals namespace (and points out that there's already a module on CPAN called Internals.)
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg01318.html
Stas Bekman finds a problem with perlio layers : if one pushes a layer onto a stream, it's not popped when the filehandle is closed. Nick Ing-Simmons replies that the Popped method should return zero in order to actually pop the layer.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg01391.html
Stas asks also for a way to get a complete list of the dual-life modules, in order to include a file META.yml in the perl 5.8.1 distribution. (This was an idea suggested at the P5P BOF in Paris. A summary of this meeting will be posted at some appropriate time by Elizabeth Mattijsen.)
New modules were released : ExtUtils::MakeMaker, File::Spec, Time::Local. Hugo released a snapshot of bleadperl.
The very first step of the development of Ponie has been made : there is now a Subversion repository for Ponie, in which Arthur Bergman imported the current bleadperl and bleadparrot. Now, the goal is to get to configure and build (portably) a perl containing an embedded parrot. (Reminder : Ponie is Perl On New Internals Engine, namely Perl 5 running on Parrot.)
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, back from YAPC::EU. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are (as always) welcome.