This Week on perl5-porters (16-22 February 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (16-22 February 2004)
  This week is to be filed in the categpry "busy" for the Perl 5 porters.
  Read about new optimisations, new ideas, new warnings, bugs, fixes, and
  other future plans for the next major version of Per 5.

A couple of optimisations
  Paul Johnson revamped the internal OP structure so that optrees now take
  less memory (while the speed impact is not mesureable.) This is going
  only in bleadperl, because, obviously, it breaks binary compatibility.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040221174213.5c39a8b5.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr

  Dave Mitchell continues his series of impressive patches by extending
  the AELEMFAST optimisation to lexical arrays. This optimisation was
  already in place for global arrays, to access an element where the index
  is an integer constant between 0 and 255. As a result, access to fixed
  elements of lexical arrays seems to be faster by a factor of 50%.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040222160435.GA20408%40fdisolutions.com

read() return value and EOF
  Michael Bell reports (as bug #26787) that read() can return 0 on Linux
  even when not at end-of-file, when under a high system load. It is a bug
  in perl, or a misfeature, or a bug in Linux? Should read() return
  undef on EOF?

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-26787-78336.2.2498005290219%40perl.org

Reopening a STD filehandle
  Stas Bekman reports (bug #26670) that perl (with the PerlIO
  implementation, default since 5.8.0) seems to handle dup(2) badly when
  some STD streams are closed, emitting an obscure warning "Filehandle
  STDOUT reopened only for input" (or the inverse). Nick Ing-Simmons
  points out that this is in fact expected behaviour: since STDOUT was
  closed, the next open() reuses filehandle number 1, which is, by
  definition, STDOUT (in perl and in C); so perl, here, warns about a
  potential bogus situation. Nick's advice is to reopen a closed STD
  handle to /dev/null.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-26670-78082.19.4315995467592%40perl.org

Autovivification of an assignment
  Ton Hospel notices (bug #26866) that the autovivification of hash and
  array references does not seem to happen consistently. For example, this
  is valid:

      $u = undef; $x = $u->{foo}

  but this dies with a fatal error:

      $x = ($u=undef)->{foo}

  Nicholas Clark points out that this is probably the same problem that
  was reported as bug #18635.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c101e9$jf8$1%40post.home.lunix

A prototype for defaulting to $_
  Continuing a thread from last week, a proposal to extend the prototype
  syntax was discussed: a new prototype character, "_", could stand for
  "optional value that defaults to $_". For example, a function that takes
  a list as a parameter, but that uses $_ if passed the empty list, could
  have the prototype "sub mychomp(_@)". However, this implies that the
  prototypes of built-ins would change.

  The complete thread:

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040206164438.GK19932%40c3.convolution.nl

New warning
  The dubious construct

      my $foo = $bar if $condition;

  (and other equivalent ones) now produces a deprecation warning, thanks
  to Dave Mitchell. (See our previous episodes for details).

Miscellaneous Bugs
  Jamie Lokier reports (bug #26909) that in a (?{...}) regular
  expression block, lexical variables are captured, just like in closures,
  but without warning the user as of 5.8.0. This lack of warning is fixed
  in recent perls.

  He also reported (as bug #26910) that "use strict 'vars'" doesn't seem
  to be active in (?{...}) blocks.

  Sean O'Rourke reported that calling a subroutine f() recursively with
  "goto &f" leaks memory, and suggests that it may come from lexicals not
  being freed. (Bug #26959.)

In Brief
  Rafael announced that he plans to make a new developement release of
  perl, 5.9.1, in March.

  Meanwhile, Leon Brocard released perl 5.005_04 RC2.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040219142651.GA31294%40kanga.astray.com

  Brendan O'Dea sent a batch of patches that he applied to the Debian
  5.8.3-2 release of perl.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040215122717.GA26812%40londo.c47.org

  Russ Allbery released Term::ANSIColor 1.08. MIME::Base64 3.00, which was
  released a while ago, was also integrated into the perl distribution.

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. (I've been
  trying to use gmane (http://news.gmane.org/) as a message archive, but
  it's horribly slow.) Corrections and comments are welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (16-22 February 2004) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez