yOn Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > This Week on perl5-porters (4-10 August 2003) > The bulk of the discussion, this week, was about platform-specific > adjustments for the upcoming 5.8.1, and other testing feedback. However, > don't miss the other interesting topics : v-strings (again), autoboxing, > and the usual load of features and bugfixes. > > v-strings > In short : v-strings are back in 5.8.1. > > Long version : Jarkko Hietaniemi asked Larry for the ultimate advice. In > the long term, the v1.2.3 form of v-strings will go away, as well as > the confusing equality between 1.2.3 and the "\1\2\3" string. In Perl 6, > 1.2.3 is going (most probably) to be a full-fledged version object. > Consequently, the 1.2.3 notation should not be deprecated. A new > notation, qv[5.6], might be introduced for version objects with only > one decimal point. > > http://xrl.us/oze > > So Jarkko did put everything about v-strings like it was in perl 5.8.0 > (except the fix for barewords of the form "v65", autoquoted by "=>", see > previous weeks.) v-strings don't produce deprecation warnings anymore, > because issuing them only at the right places would be too complicated. > John Peacock is going to produce some design document in order to get > version objects in Perl 5.10 as close as possible to the future Perl 6 > version objects. > > At some point, Michael G Schwern advocated faster release cycles, > leading to faster deprecation cycles. Alan Burlison commented with > insight. > > http://xrl.us/ozf > > autobox > chocolateboy proposed a patch to add a new lexically-scoped pragma, > "autobox" (the name of this feature comes from Java and C#). This patch, > against perl 5.8.1 RC4, is also available from CPAN. Basically it allows > methods to be invoked on unblessed references and on scalars. It > provoked a wide range of different reactions. > > Chip Salzenberg hates the feature. Other disapprovals follow : Abigail, > Graham Barr, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, mostly because they find the new > syntax inconsistent with the rest of Perl 5, like pseudohashes were. > Tassilo von Parseval, Michael Schwern and James Duncan like it. Alan > Burlison wonders about performance impact. Claes Jacobsson wonders if > the name "autobox" is well chosen. Simon Cozens comments negatively on > the implementation and posts the source of his Ruby.pm module, that > I've probably seen on the fwp mailing list before. > > Hugo van der Sanden has the wise word : the core must be adjusted so > that it's possible to write pragmas like autobox without requiring a > core patch. > > http://xrl.us/ozg > http://search.cpan.org/author/CHOCOLATE/autobox-0.03/lib/autobox.pm > > Cygwin > Gerrit P. Haase, Merijn Brand and Jarkko were busy solving problems with > compiling perl on recent releases of Cygwin (1.3.22, 1.5), mainly due to > evil typecasts between unsigned and signed integers. At some point this > ended up in a patch to the stdint.h header file that comes with cygwin > 1.5. > > Meanwhile, Jari Aalto found that Sys::Syslog doesn't log anything, > apparently, under Cygwin (Cygwin does not use the /var/log/syslog > logfile, but it should direct the calls to the Windows event log.) > > MakeMaker and PASTHRU > Steve Hay reminds about a MakeMaker bug he found : it's not passing > DEFINE and INC arguments to other Makefile.PL's in subdirectories, at > least on Windows. After having tried a few tweaks, Michael Schwern > reaches the conclusion that trying to solve such complex issues just > before an imminent release is not a wise idea. > > http://xrl.us/ozh > > perlreref > Iain Truskett added a new manpage into the documentation : perlreref, a > handy regular expression quick reference. It will be available in perl > 5.8.1. > > http://xrl.us/ozi > > In Brief > Fergal Daly finds that passing a hash slice in the argument list of a > function autovivifies non-existent keys. However hash slices alone don't > make autovivification happen, nor does hash elements. This behaviour > exists since at least 5.005_03, but looks like a bug nevertheless. > > http://xrl.us/ozj > > Johan Vromans asked for a way to know what files ExtUtils::Makemaker is > going to install (via "make install"), without actually installing them. > There's currently no easy way to have this information, but Michael > Schwern is going to add a packlist target to the Makefile that will be > runnable separately from the complete install. > > http://xrl.us/ozk > > Raphael Manfredi announced that he wants to revitalize the metaconfig > project. The "dist" distribution on CPAN hasn't been updated since 1997. > > http://xrl.us/ozl > > Dave Mitchell fixed something hidden deeply inside the internals of the > lexical scopes. As a result, SelfStubber began to emit a new warning, > "Variable "$nested" is not available", $nested being a lexical variable > used in a recursive qr// expression. This only confirms the general > proverb : (??{}) assertions break lexicals. > > Michael G Schwern found that perl can't be compiled with -Dusemymalloc > on Mac OS X. At least, it can't be compiled without further > investigation. > > Alain Barbet and his smoke armada found problems with semaphores and > NetBSD on sparc : they leak. Jarkko disables them. (bug #23216) > > Nicholas Clark and Abhijit Menon-Sen fixed a bug involving an > unfortunate interaction between Storable and restricted hashes. > > Enache Adrian finds that using #line directives nukes the GvFILE slots > of globs. Don't worry, apparently this only affects B::Bytecode -- but > this prevents it completely from producing any accurate result. > > Abe Timmerman released Test-Smoke 1.18.02. > > About this summary > This week's yet another summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. > Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing > list, which subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Comments and corrections are welcome. >
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