This Week on p5p 2001/01/21

Jan 24, 2001 by Simon Cozens

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sigsetjmp wrangling continues

Last week, there was some discussion about whether Perl ought to use sigsetjmp to jump out of evals and to die. Part of the problem is that sigsetjmp is quite a lot slower than setjmp, so if we can get by without it, we ought to. Nick Ing-Simmons has removed sigsetjmp from the current sources, but now Nick Clark has found that this can sometimes cause a slowdown due to bizarre optimizing.

The discussion then veered onto the problems of using any sort of non-local jump with threads. Alan pointed out that neither sigjmp nor sigsetjmp were thread-safe at all, and since Perl uses them, Perl’s threading implementation is horrifically broken. There were no good suggestions about how to get around this, or to getaway without non-local jumps for trapping exceptions. Alan declared Perl 5 beyond hope, but said:

If perl6 has something akin to the perl5 stack, eval/die will have to be implemented so that that it rolls back up the stack on die, rather than the current longjmp hack.

Alan also suggested that we would need to roll our own threading model in Perl 6 to have full control over exception handling; the discussion carried on about Perl 6 over on the perl6-internals mailing list.

The part where it gets interesting this week starts here.

Safe Signals

Nick came up with a program for people to try to confirm his suspicions about signal handling. His plan was to have C set a flag in the signal handler which is checked after each op is performed, which seems the most obvious way of doing it, but he was worried about systems with signal handlers where SIGCHLD didn’t call wait, meaning there would be still outstanding children when the signal handler returned, meaning a SIGCHLD would be delivered, meaning the handler would get called, rince and repeat.

However, every platform that was tested worked sensibly, so it looks like Nick is going to go ahead and try and implement safe signals.

Large file support wrangling continues

The discussion last week about Linux’s large file support continued this week. The problem is that we need to find the right preprocessor directive to get the most use out of the system; most of the ones which look useful ( _GNU_SOURCE, for instance) also expose other things that we don’t necessarily want. It would also throw up problems in programs embedding Perl. Russ Allbery had been through all this with both INN and autoconf. His advice:

Eventually, the autoconf folks decided to give up on glibc 2.1 as broken for large files and just recommend people upgrade to glibc 2.2 or add -D_GNU_SOURCE manually if it works for their application.

Multiple Pre-Incrementing

I decided to throw a spaniel in the works by submitting a patch to make

    print (++$i, ++$i, ++$i)

work as John Vromans would like; currently, Perl reserves the right to do, well, pretty much anything it wants in that situation, but the “obvious” thing for it to print would be (assuming $i was undefined before hand) “123”. There were some arguments as to why this would be a bad idea - firstly, defining behaviour that is currently undefined robs us of the right to make clever optimizations in the future, and also that the fix slows down the behaviour of pre-increment and pre-decrement for everyone, not just those doing multiple pre-increments in a single statement.

I also wondered whether the confusion at seeing Perl output “333” in the above code would be offset by the confusion required to try something like that in a serious program anyway.

Test::Harness Megapatch

Michael Schwern did his usual trick of popping up out of nowhere with a 40K patch - this time he rewrote Test::Harness to support a lot of sensible things, like the trick of having comments after your message, like this:

    ok 123 - Testing the frobnicator

so that when tests fail you can can search for that string. He went back and forth with Andreas about some of the new features - Andreas felt that, for instance, allowing upper case output creates additional noise and distraction. Jarkko agreed, and the patch got fried.

Not put off, Schwern then went on to unify the skip and todo interfaces. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be done without breaking existing code, especially CPAN modules, so that patch died the death too. Oh, the embarrassment.

Tokeniser reporting and pretty-printing

I did something evil again. After hearing a talk by Knuth about Literate Programming, I went back to bemoaning the lack of a Perl pretty-printer, and the depressing words in the FAQ:

There is no program that will reformat Perl as much as indent(1) will do for C. The complex feedback between the scanner and the parser (this feedback is what confuses the vgrind and emacs programs) makes it challenging at best to write a stand-alone Perl parser.

So if I couldn’t build a stand-alone parser, I’d use the one we’ve got - perl. By adding a call to a reporting function every time Perl makes a decision about what a token is, you can generate a listing of all the tokens in a program and their types. Implementation of a robust pretty-printer is left as an exercise for the reader; answers on a postcard, please.

(PS: I’ve since been alerted to the existence of Tim Maher’s Perl beautifier, which is an equally cool hack.)

Unicode

How could I go a week without mentioning Unicode? Hiroto’s qu operator is in, and someone’s obviously using it, because Nick Clark found that it was turning up a bug in UTF8 hashes - $foo{something} and $foo{qu/something/} were being seen as two different keys. Hiroto said he was aware of it and meant to send a patch but hasn’t managed to yet.

UTF8 support on EBCDIC is starting to work, but it’s being done in a bit of a bizarre way - we’re actually using UTF8 to encode EBCDIC itself, rather than Unicode. This means that whileEBCDIC and non-EBCDIC platforms now both “support” UTF8 and all the code (on the whole) works, Weird Things™ might happen if EBCDIC people start playing with character classes or other Unicode features.

Various

IV preservation is still buggy.

I’ll leave you with the news that several people reported problems with the bug-reporting system; Perl is so great, even its bugs have bugs.

Until next week I remain, your humble and obedient servant,

Simon Couzens

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