Besides the first release candidate of perl 5.8.3, lots of things happened on perl5-porters this week. Read about new features to be added to the language, lots of bugs and fixes, and other odds and ends.
Nicholas Clark released the first release candidate of perl 5.8.1 on Wednesday. See the announcement at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040107181832.GG11136%40plum.flirble.org
Various problems were then found (and mostly solved). Elizabeth Mattijsen reported problems with her module Thread::Bless. She also found that a thread test was hanging forever. Apparently this has something to do with the flavour of threads used by the Linux kernel.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=p05111b06bc239c68a6fa%40%5b192.168.56.3%5d
5.8.3 is expected next week.
my $_Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposed an extension to the language : the ability to use the default scalar $_ as a lexical variable, by declaring it with my. He outlined the problems solved by this new construction, proposed a preliminary patch and pointed out a few open questions, that were discussed. Feedback was mostly positive.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040108004315.104f51ff.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr
Elizabeth Mattijsen asks whether debug-enabled and standard versions of perl, and threaded / unthreaded versions, can coexist in the same installation tree (the binary executables having different names, of course). The answer is mostly yes, as the relevant perl modules are installed into architecture-specific directories ; but there is no specific archname for debug-enabled perls.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=p05111b01bc237533767b%40%5b192.168.56.3%5d
__WARN__ handlersEd Avis suggests (as bug id #24806) that a localized $SIG{__WARN__} handler could call the outer handler if it happens to call warn() again; or, that some other mechanism could be modified to make this happen. Rafael points out that this is already possible with perl, by using a closure to capture the outer handler. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes says that a new lexical pragma
use warnings::handler sub { ... };
would be a good idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24806-69433.12.789974826153%40perl.org
Tassilo von Parseval noted (bug #24807) that
use if; print if->VERSION;
is a syntax error, because if is not only a standard package, it's also a keyword. The open and sort pragmas share this interesting property.
However, there are several ways to circumvent this :
print "if"->VERSION;
print if::->VERSION;
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24807-69451.9.61826812018678%40perl.org
Dave Mitchell fixed bug #24674 : now, $^O will not incorrectly get tainted when read, as this was the case; but assigning a tainted value to it will produce a fatal error.
Tim Bunce reported a case of segfault with DBD::Oracle, which was traced down and fixed by Dave Mitchell. The bug happened when a closure was returned from a thread via join(). However his regression test hanged on Windows. Dave adds : I'm rather wondering whether we shouldn't just ban altogether threads returning CVs.
Ton Hospel reported bug #24813, the -0 command-line argument doesn't work anymore on the #! line with perl 5.8.2. This was fixed by Rafael (who introduced this bug in the first place).
Ton also reported bug #24815 : some syntax errors lead to unsuppressible warnings; for example, Number found where operator expected. Rafael turned this message (and a similar one involving elseif) into a mandatory warning (enabled by default, but that could be silenced.)
But that's not over; Ton found (bug #24816) that some bitwise operators weren't dealing appropriately with magical variables (with the example of $?) if they were used before the magical variable was accessed at all. Rafael committed a quick fix. However, as Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes finds out, this fix is not perfect because it unnecessarily invokes magic. He's working on this problem.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24816-69523.13.5221943075889%40perl.org
Jesse Vincent reports (bug #28486) that join() has problems with UTF-8 data. Slaven Rezic produced a small test case, and Sadahiro Tomoyuki provided a patch.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24846-69684.3.4343855767974%40perl.org
Stas Bekman reports that seek() and tell() don't work well with a dup'ed DATA filehandle. (Bug #24818)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24818-69544.7.1371603580959%40perl.org
Steve Hay found a weird bug with UNIVERSAL::isa() turning into an undefined subroutine. (Bug #24824)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24824-69588.13.1031404712176%40perl.org
Petras Kudaras provided a Lithuanian translation of perl583delta.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3FF9D0F8.3060109%40delfi.lt
Tels released Math::BigRat 0.11. He also wondered about ways to improve the performance of his Math::* modules, and experimented with Devel::Size. (Eventually he wrote Devel::Size::Report, to be found on CPAN, to produce neater reports for all elements in a data structure.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200401092021.38384%40bloodgate.com
Jim Cromie proposed an enhancement patch for B::Concise, which was discussed in detail. (Bug #24821).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24821-69561.5.46658207059089%40perl.org
Iain 'Spoon' Truskett, Perl hacker, author of the perlreref manpage, died suddenly at the end of last year, at the age of 24. He will be missed.
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Corrections and comments are welcome.