This Week on perl5-porters (3-9 May 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (3-9 May 2004)
  On the menu of the P5P summary this week, you will find language
  constructions, segmentation faults, proposals for new tied methods,
  pronunciation issues, and (in fine) a few bugs.

More on "last"
  Continuing a thread from last week about the "last" statement used to
  exit an eval() block: "last" and "next", when used to exit from a
  subroutine, not only exit, but also branch to the specified loop/label
  of the caller. This is definitively a feature, since (as Tim Bunce
  remarked) Test::More::skip() uses this, and (as Hugo van der Sanden
  pointed out), Apocalypse 12 uses this to define method lookup
  strategies.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405051134.i45BYET26083%40zen.crypt.org

"open" pragma segfault
  Tomasz Pala reports (bug #29437) a case of recursion in perl's character
  encoding routines, which obviously (once diagnosed) leads to stack
  recursion and to segmentation fault. The sample code involves somehow
  the "open" pragma.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-29437-87042.12.9753390677264%40perl.org

Truncation of tied filehandles
  Dan Boorstein proposed a patch against bleadperl to add a TRUNCATE
  method to tied filehandles. Tassilo von Parsval commented that this new
  method should probably be made optional, for simplicity and
  compatibility.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040508103121.519a8d9f.dan_boo%40bellsouth.net

More pack() work
  Marcus Holland-Moritz, who implemented a couple of weeks ago new
  modifiers ("<" and ">") for pack() templates, added a way to group these
  with parentheses.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040503201441.1b058e0d%40r2d2

Weak references problems in 5.8.4
  Stas Bekman reported that Scalar::Util::weaken() (used to make weak
  references) has new problems in perl 5.8.4 (as it attempts to free
  unreferenced scalars, unveiling a deeper malfunction.) As those problems
  don't appear in bleadperl, Dave Mitchell does some investigation about
  the patches which caused it, and proposes a solution -- a patch from
  blead to integrate in maint.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4097EF6F.8050401%40stason.org

How do you say "!~"?
  Yitzchak noticed that using "!~" on an uninitialized value reports the
  warning as having occured in a "not" operation, which is not exactly the
  case, and proposed to change the message; which raised the question,
  what is actually the name of the "!~" operator?

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040509075919.GA3752%40efn.org

In Brief
  Dan Dascalescu reported (bug #29346) that passing an undefined argument
  to the int() or abs() built-ins produces the "Use of uninitialized
  value" twice. Another history of magic handled twice.

  H. Merijn Brand is back on Cygwin smokes. This time, there were some
  IPC::SysV failures; Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes pointed out that a service
  needs to be started on Cygwin to make them work.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040506142843.98DB.H.M.BRAND%40hccnet.nl

  David Muir Sharnoff reported that Scalar::Util::refaddr() (a function
  that returns the memory address of the reference it gets passed) doesn't
  work when magic is somehow involved (bug #29395). Marcus fixed this.

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. Comments and
  corrections welcome.

• This Week on perl5-porters (3-9 May 2004) by Rafael Garcia-Suarez