Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from October 2011
On Mon Oct 17 09:18:48 2011, tom christiansen wrote:
> "A. Pagaltzis via RT" <perlbug-followup@perl.org> wrote
> on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:04:07 PDT:
>
> > That will make the read “work” in that it won’t complain and won’t
> > produce corrupt data, but in what practical scenario is this useful?
> >
> > “Sometimes your read will swallow the first character in the data. We
> > won’t tell you though. In fact we’ll make sure you can’t notice even
> > if you wanted to.”
> >
> > What is the sense of that?
>
> Good point.
>
> I agree that it seems dodgy. Perl is pretty careful not to go silently
> destroying data, and I'd like it to remain so. I also wouldn't want
> break {sys,}seek from working when given a legitimate tell address.
>
> I just don't know what the devil to do with reads producing broken strings
> after seek has been given a tell address that is *not* a character
> boundary when you're working with an auto-decoded stream. I'm a bit
> surprised that broken internal strings aren't fatals, actually. Hm?
>
> My stomach has been somewhat unsettled of late, so I don't know that I
> should necessarily trust its instincts, but my gut feel that Perl should
> never let you be able to produce a broken Perl string. Modulo intentional
> malice with the low-level stuff, of course, but I don't see seek and read
> as being in that bucket. This is also what makes me feel that $/ = \INT
> producing broken Perl strings is also inherently flawed. I think Nick
once
> observed that we mustn't let those happen.
>
> I know how the super-duper-over-object-oriented languages would "fix"
> this: they'd create 52 levels of strictly typed I/O wrapper classes and
> only allow you to go through their APIs to get at things. That goes
> against the Unix/C mentality of allowing low-level access to the real
> and very simple system calls when such is asked for, so I don't want to
> even start to go there.
>
> But what to do about these malformed characters, eh?
Either
a) croak, or
b) fudge things, as was suggested above, but with a default (formerly
known as mandatory) warning.
Thread Previous