This week, a very special summary indeed, because it actually covers two weeks. Two quiet weeks, that is. Read below for new proposals to the Perl 5 language, to its packaging, and for selected bugs and fixes.
After some long discussion on whether adding an UNIX-like sort -u function to perl (return only unique elements),
Tels suggested that sort() could be optimized to sort in place in statements like:
@a = sort @a;
Dave Mitchell is working on this optimization.
my() in conditionalThe construct
my $variable = $value if condition();
is documented to be unsafe and unsupported (and moreover it doesn't currently do what most people expect). Dave Mitchell suggested to deprecate it and is working on a patch to produce a warning in the most common cases where it's used. However, he notices that lots of code in the test suite become noisy with this new warning turned on, notably in perl's own test suite.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040201015900.GD20819%40fdisolutions.com
$_Rafael checked in bleadperl support for a lexically scoped version of $_, that was proposed last month.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040203213457.4a32a88c.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr
Juerd then remarks that, if developers want to provide functions that default to $_, we need a way to get at the caller's lexical $_, and he proposes to implement the perl 6 pseudo-namespace %CALLER::. This may well end on the to-do list.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040206164438.GK19932%40c3.convolution.nl
Xavier Noria proposed to include a templating module in the core perl distribution. Michael Schwern points out that the unofficial policy on new modules is that if it doesn't help to build, test or document Perl or if it doesn't help to install more modules, it's not likely to get in, as the perl distribution is quite large already.
However Tim Bunce proposed (again) to restructure perl into a minimal core (with a trimmed-down set of modules) and one or several SDKs. This task needs a champion.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=B531BD75-57C7-11D8-AF6D-000A95A4E370%40hashref.com
Bug #25824 describe a way to make perl's parser segfault on a nasty syntax error. Dave Mitchell found a way to fix it, not too dissimilar to an older bug.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-25824-73708.15.8676530450102%40perl.org
Michael Yount reported a potential overzealous taint problem in AutoLoader (bug #25267). Dave Mitchell noted that this bug was already fixed in perl 5.8.3.
Manuel Valente added a new option to the Shell module, $Shell::capture_stderr=-1, to discard the standard error of the shell process.
Bart Schuller shows (bug #26073) that sprintf(), with a %s length format, doesn't handle correctly UTF-8 strings.
Leon Brocard released perl 5.005_04 RC1. John Peacock released version.pm 0.36. Alan Burlison integrated perl 5.8.3 in the upcoming release of Solaris 10.
This summary, which exceptionally covers two weeks, 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.