This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 January 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 January 2004)
  Besides the first release candidate of perl 5.8.3, lots of things
  happened on perl5-porters this week. Read about new features to be added
  to the language, lots of bugs and fixes, and other odds and ends.

5.8.3 RC1
  Nicholas Clark released the first release candidate of perl 5.8.1 on
  Wednesday. See the announcement at:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040107181832.GG11136%40plum.flirble.org

  Various problems were then found (and mostly solved). Elizabeth
  Mattijsen reported problems with her module Thread::Bless. She also
  found that a thread test was hanging forever. Apparently this has
  something to do with the flavour of threads used by the Linux kernel.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=p05111b06bc239c68a6fa%40%5b192.168.56.3%5d

  5.8.3 is expected next week.

my $_
  Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposed an extension to the language : the ability
  to use the default scalar $_ as a lexical variable, by declaring it with
  "my". He outlined the problems solved by this new construction, proposed
  a preliminary patch and pointed out a few open questions, that were
  discussed. Feedback was mostly positive.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040108004315.104f51ff.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr

Multiple perls in the same tree
  Elizabeth Mattijsen asks whether debug-enabled and standard versions of
  perl, and threaded / unthreaded versions, can coexist in the same
  installation tree (the binary executables having different names, of
  course). The answer is mostly yes, as the relevant perl modules are
  installed into architecture-specific directories ; but there is no
  specific archname for debug-enabled perls.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=p05111b01bc237533767b%40%5b192.168.56.3%5d

Nesting __WARN__ handlers
  Ed Avis suggests (as bug id #24806) that a localized $SIG{__WARN__}
  handler could call the outer handler if it happens to call warn() again;
  or, that some other mechanism could be modified to make this happen.
  Rafael points out that this is already possible with perl, by using a
  closure to capture the outer handler. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes says that
  a new lexical pragma

      use warnings::handler sub { ... };

  would be a good idea.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24806-69433.12.789974826153%40perl.org

Parsing edge cases
  Tassilo von Parseval noted (bug #24807) that

      use if; print if->VERSION;

  is a syntax error, because "if" is not only a standard package, it's
  also a keyword. The "open" and "sort" pragmas share this interesting
  property.

  However, there are several ways to circumvent this :

      print "if"->VERSION;
      print if::->VERSION;

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24807-69451.9.61826812018678%40perl.org

Various bugs, solved
  Dave Mitchell fixed bug #24674 : now, $^O will not incorrectly get
  tainted when read, as this was the case; but assigning a tainted value
  to it will produce a fatal error.

  Tim Bunce reported a case of segfault with DBD::Oracle, which was traced
  down and fixed by Dave Mitchell. The bug happened when a closure was
  returned from a thread via join(). However his regression test hanged on
  Windows. Dave adds : "I'm rather wondering whether we shouldn't just ban
  altogether threads returning CVs."

  Ton Hospel reported bug #24813, the -0 command-line argument doesn't
  work anymore on the "#!" line with perl 5.8.2. This was fixed by Rafael
  (who introduced this bug in the first place).

  Ton also reported bug #24815 : some syntax errors lead to unsuppressible
  warnings; for example, "Number found where operator expected". Rafael
  turned this message (and a similar one involving "elseif") into a
  mandatory warning (enabled by default, but that could be silenced.)

  But that's not over; Ton found (bug #24816) that some bitwise operators
  weren't dealing appropriately with magical variables (with the example
  of $?) if they were used before the magical variable was accessed at
  all. Rafael committed a quick fix. However, as Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes
  finds out, this fix is not perfect because it unnecessarily invokes
  magic. He's working on this problem.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24816-69523.13.5221943075889%40perl.org

  Jesse Vincent reports (bug #28486) that join() has problems with UTF-8
  data. Slaven Rezic produced a small test case, and Sadahiro Tomoyuki
  provided a patch.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24846-69684.3.4343855767974%40perl.org

Various bugs, not yet solved
  Stas Bekman reports that seek() and tell() don't work well with a dup'ed
  DATA filehandle. (Bug #24818)

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24818-69544.7.1371603580959%40perl.org

  Steve Hay found a weird bug with UNIVERSAL::isa() turning into an
  undefined subroutine. (Bug #24824)

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24824-69588.13.1031404712176%40perl.org

In Brief
  Petras Kudaras provided a Lithuanian translation of perl583delta.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3FF9D0F8.3060109%40delfi.lt

  Tels released Math::BigRat 0.11. He also wondered about ways to improve
  the performance of his Math::* modules, and experimented with
  Devel::Size. (Eventually he wrote Devel::Size::Report, to be found on
  CPAN, to produce neater reports for all elements in a data structure.)

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200401092021.38384%40bloodgate.com

  Jim Cromie proposed an enhancement patch for B::Concise, which was
  discussed in detail. (Bug #24821).

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24821-69561.5.46658207059089%40perl.org

In Memoriam
  Iain 'Spoon' Truskett, Perl hacker, author of the perlreref manpage,
  died suddenly at the end of last year, at the age of 24. He will be
  missed.

About...
  This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are
  published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which
  subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Corrections
  and comments are welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 January 2004) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez