This Week on perl5-porters (14-20 April 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (14-20 April 2003)
  Not a good week to stop smoking ! Test-wise, that is. In this week's
  summary, read about configuration changes, language proposals, and the
  usual amount of bug fixes.

Binary error messages
  Marc Lehmann remarks that the current maintperl may produce error
  messages that contain a null character (bug #21962), with the one-liner :

      ./perl -e '&{""}'

  Abhijit Menon-Sen finds out that perl, trying to access a symbol that
  has an empty name, sets explicitly the length of this name to 1, which
  seems obviously wrong, and thus fixes the bug by suppressing this
  behaviour.

      http://xrl.us/gll

Long Doubles
  There was a long thread, mainly involving Jarkko and Merijn -- the
  Configure guys -- about Configure's support for long doubles. A patch
  for long double support on Solaris (by Alan Burlison) was integrated. An
  important question was raised, which was : if we ask Configure to enable
  long double support in perl, (or, similarly, 64 bit integers), and if
  Configure fails to detect support for it on the platform, should it
  abort ? The answer, for now, is yes. As a consequence, some holes appear
  in the smoke matrices, corresponding to now-disallowed configs.

      http://xrl.us/gln

Ties, Fetches and Storabilization
  The patch that Dave Mitchell sent last week, to allow nested FETCHes,
  has been applied. The benchmarks give varying results, which apparently
  are due, as Dave says, to "the usual cache noise effects", which have
  been encountered before. So this patch probably doesn't change
  significantly the (already low) performance of ties.

  Speaking about ties, Storable now handles self-tied objects (bug
  #17040, fixed), thanks to Abhijit. The question of serializing tied
  objects is raised again ; David Nicol proposes the convention to use
  SERIALIZE and DESERIALIZE special methods. Slaven Rezic points out that
  Storable uses already the STORABLE_thaw and STORABLE_freeze methods,
  if they're available.

      http://xrl.us/glo

More on cross-compilation
  Redvers Davies posted refactored patches to add support for
  cross-compilation to perl. Jarkko is considering merging them into perl
  5.8.1. Vadim Konovalov reminds us about the Cross.pm module, created
  during the cross-compilation process for WinCE, which is basically a
  substitution for Config.pm when cross-compiling (either perl itself,
  or perl modules).

      http://xrl.us/glp

More black smoke
  Nicholas Clark is struggling with strange smoke failures on BSD.
  Unreproducibly, for some reasons, Makefile.PL expansion is going wrong
  under crontab.

      http://xrl.us/glq

In Brief
  Nathan Torkington notices that reading from a magic scalar with
  PerlIO::scalar sometimes causes coredumps. This buglet is fixed by
  Enache Adrian.

  Jarkko Hietaniemi finished to add a new function PerlIO::get_layers(),
  to retrieve the I/O layers for a given filehandle. Dan Kogai is excited
  about it.

  Bug #21979 demonstrates that, with an ithread-enabled perl, "modifying
  an alias to a read-only item of an argument list of a subroutine works,
  while it's expected to fail."

  Arthur Bergman and Dave Mitchell are struggling with pads, ithreads,
  cloning, and closures, and finally fix an obscure bug I don't
  understand.

  Shlomi Fish posted a proposal to add three new keywords, "class", "up"
  and "this", to manipulate namespaces. He didn't get positive feedback.

About this summary
  This summary was brought to you once again by Rafael Garcia-Suarez.
  Weekly summaries are available on <http://use.perl.org/> and via a
  mailing list, which subscription address is
  perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Feedback welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (14-20 April 2003) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez