This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 February 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 February 2003)
  In this week's p5p summary, some stories are continued, and new ones
  begin. Read about the safe signals, the recent support for assertions,
  and a load of fixes and of new bugs, waiting to be fixed.

Unsafe signals
  My regular readers will remember that Jarkko Hietaniemi proposed two
  weeks ago to add a mechanism to optionally enable the pre-5.8 behavior
  of signals (known as "unsafe signals" since the latest incarnation of
  the perldelta man page advertised "safe signals".) He proposed initially
  a new magic variable ${^SIGNAL_UNSAFE}. But this feature is intended to
  allow to write scripts portable across different perl versions, and the
  special variable syntax ${^FOO} produces a syntax error with perl
  5.005xx and below. Several other proposals were suggested :
  $SIGNAL_UNSAFE, %SIGNAL_UNSAFE, $SIG{UNSAFEXXX} (that produces a warning
  with perl 5.6), $SIG::UNSAFE. Finally, Jarkko is going for an
  environment variable, $ENV{PERL_SIGNALS}.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92113.html
      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92443.html

Assertions
  As I briefly wrote last week, Salvador Fandiño's patch to add assertions
  to perl is now in. Basically, assertions are defined as subroutines with
  an :assertion attribute. In a perl program, a lexical block is defined
  as potentially containing assertions via the "assertions" pragma. Then,
  by executing the program with the -A command-line switch, those
  assertion subroutines are activated (and thus executed). It's possible
  to define different assertion groups and to activate them separately.
  Note that assertions that are not activated are optimized out during the
  compilation phase, and have no run-time impact on performances.

  A few more docs are needed for this new feature. Feedback on the API
  would also be much appreciated.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92123.html

Smoke news
  H. Merijn Brand, who has received another HP-UX machine, has set up
  smoke tests to determine whether Nicholas Clark's copy-on-write patches
  actually enhance perl's performance.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92412.html

  One of the thread tests was consistently failing of Johan Vromans' linux
  smoke tests, due to differences in ps(1) output. This has been corrected
  by making the test more liberal in what it accepts.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92290.html

  Jos Boumans' employer, XS4all, donated an x86 box to run smoke tests.
  Jos asked for advice on the OS he should install on it. Several
  proposals were reviewed ; finally this will be Darwin.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92319.html

In brief
  Jarkko hopes to get perl 5.8.1 RC1 in a month or so (but doesn't want to
  stick to a fixed date).

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92151.html

  Philip Newton reported some limitations of B::Terse regarding threaded
  perls (bug #21261). This was fixed by Stephen McCamant who replaced
  B::Terse with a wrapper around B::Concise.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92169.html

  Chip Salzenberg modified the syntax of unpack() so that it defaults to
  unpacking $_ if given only a template parameter.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92209.html

  Michael Schwern noticed that on Darwin, gcc is passed by default the
  "-Os" optimization flag (optimize for size), which is set in the Darwin
  hints file for Darwin 6.X and up. This is due to Apple's policy for one
  part, and to the fact that the version of gcc bundled with earlier
  versions of the OS were sub-optimal regarding size optimizations.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92214.html

  Andreas Koenig embedded a small perl script in the header file
  patchlevel.h, to allow people to add comments in it by doing simply

      perl -x patchlevel.h 'comment'

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92246.html

  Bug #21258, reported by Martin Ruderer, is about large lists causing
  core dumps when used in a for loop (for example, '1 for ("") x
  2147483516'), under some configurations.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92168.html

  Alex Efros reports (bug #21273) that a recursive FETCH on a tied hash
  may lead to a segfault.

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92223.html

  Jarkko reports (bug #21321) that the construct "local ${"FOO"}" is not
  allowed and produces the error message "Can't localize through a
  reference". But this construct is (or should be) equivalent to a simple
  "local $FOO". Rafael Garcia-Suarez provided a patch to allow to localize
  variables given by a symbolic reference. Adrian Enache asked why "local
  $$ref" couldn't work in any case (i.e. when $ref is a true scalar
  reference).

      http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg92357.html

  Adrian Enache continues to fix loads of miscellaneous bugs.

About this summary
  This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are
  available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which
  subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments and
  corrections are welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 February 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez