This Week on perl5-porters (12-18 January 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (12-18 January 2004)
  Besides the release of a new maintenance version of perl, this week
  passed and carried its usual heterogeneous load of bugs. Read below for
  all the details.

5.8.3
  Perl 5.8.3 was released (as expected.) The announcement and its
  laudatory follow-ups can be seen at:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040114192716.GA13579%40Bagpuss.unfortu.net

Formats improvements
  Wolfgang Laun proposed a huge patch implementing many fixes and
  improvements to formats. The details are to be found in his
  announcement:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=DF27CDCBD2581D4B88431901094E4B4D02B0C4D3%40attmsx1

  However one of the tests added by his patch fail on some architectures.
  (bug #24927.) This is to be investigated.

In Brief
  Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes asked some questions about the next development
  release of Perl, to be numbered 5.9.1: what features are going to be in
  it?

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040111213417.GD2348%40efn.org

  It was found that chop() and chomp() mangle UTF-8-encoded strings (bugs
  #24888 and #24926). Fixes were proposed.

  Abigail found out a complex regular expression that apparently corrupts
  memory somehow. (bug #24898). Wolfgang Laun proposed a patch.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24898-69991.2.12654944284594%40perl.org

  Thomas Bayen found a very strange bug, (#24905), that was quickly fixed
  by Dave Mitchell.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24905-70016.12.3769365894331%40perl.org

  Bug #24914 demonstrates a case of segmentation fault involving closures.
  Dave Mitchell proposed a fix, but it turned out to be unperfect, causing
  a regression test to hang under some conditions.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24914-70050.17.1879051837409%40perl.org

  Merijn Brand notices that the line

      open my $fs, $path or return;

  produces a warning 'Parentheses missing around "my" list'. This warning
  is actually produced by the perl parser by using some rough heuristics,
  for which Sadahiro Tomoyuki proposed an improvement.

  Steve Grazzini reports that

      sub f : unique {}

  is a quick and efficient way to make perl segfault. (bug #24940.)

About this summary
  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 (12-18 January 2004) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez