This Week on p5p 2001/07/16

Jul 16, 2001 by Simon Cozens

Notes

Please send corrections and additions to perl-thisweek-YYYYMM@simon-cozens.org where YYYYMM is the current year and month. Changes and additions to the perl5-porters biographies are particularly welcome.

A somewhat abridged summary this week, since I’m out and on the road. Today Boston, tomorrow Montreal - Wednesday, the world!

5.7.2 is out!

Jarkko released Perl 5.7.2 on Friday the 13th, tempting fate a little.

5.7.2 has an odd-numbered subversion and so it’s a development release, use it at your peril.

Jarkko says:

    Perl 5.7.2 can be considered to be the virtual Release Candidate
    Zero for the Perl 5.8.0, it is just not called a Release Candidate.
    It is in pretty good shape, it is just that it is not *quite* yet
    ready to be a major release.  No large changes are expected between
    now and 5.8.0.

Many threading fixes

Artur Bergman put in a lot of work to move PMOPs into the pad; PL_regex_padav will now give you a padlist of regexes. He also made Perl use re-entrant C library calls where available - workarounds for localtime and gmtime are used when Perl is configured with -Dusereentrant. There’s also a per-interpreter memory buffer which helps out with the re-entrant stuff. (No, I’m not sure how.)

Artur notes that Win32 and Digital Unix are already re-entrant due to sane C libraries, but other C runtimes may need -Dusereentrant.

Abhijit also wrote re_dup, a cloning function for regular expressions, and there have been discussions of deep cloning functions as well.

package;

The “super-strict” package; construction - used for turning off the default package - has been judged to be confusing, buggy as hell and a pain in the neck. As such, it’s being ripped out - Abhijit Menon-Sen is seeing to this.

SUPER:: debate rages on

Oh well, I tried to quickly brush off the discussion of SUPER:: last week, but it didn’t work: 60 or so messages were wasted, uh, spent on this interminable argument, which essentially boils down to “ SUPER:: is resolved at compiled time, not run time. This is wrong. Oh, no it isn’t. Oh yes it is.” Great.

Various

Russ Allbery released a new version of the podlators and Term::ANSIColor.

Sadayuki Tomohiro produced a bunch of very useful Encode fixes, which unfortunately just missed 5.7.2.

Jeff Pinyan spent ages perfecting a patch to warn on q//o, and then realised this was a bad idea. Roughly the same thing happened for his idea of Scalar::Utils::curse, which was more complex than it might first appear. Oh, and Larry didn’t like it the last time someone tried this. Schwern used the curse patch to take the opportunity to encourage people to use Test::More when writing new test suites. Jonathan Stowe added an option to h2xs to produce Test::More-aware test suites automatically.

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

Simon Cozens