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Postings from May 2004
This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004)
From:
Rafael Garcia-Suarez
Date:
May 19, 2004 02:13
Subject:
This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004)
Message ID:
20040519111046.225cecbf@localhost
This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004)
Welcome to our latest edition of the P5P summary, for which I'm sure you
have been waiting. This week, you'll read about considerations on
Storable, nice improvements to the debugger, bugs, and other interesting
subjects.
Storable and memory usage
Richard Jelinek was wondering about the reason why the Storable module
sometimes uses so much memory when large hashes are stored. Nicholas
Clark explained some of the inner workings of Storable, which needs to
keep track of every element it stores, in order to avoid duplicates; and
he suggests that maybe using a DB file would be a better idea.
Mark-Jason Dominus suggests to add an option to Storable to avoid the
duplicate check; this would reduce memory consumption, at the expense of
cloning the data structures at retrieval-time.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040514211002.A21640%40petamem.com
Stepping backwards
Richard Foley sent a patch to implement backwards stepping in the perl
debugger. He explains: "Stepping backwards is made possible by using a
true history (earlier save command), and rerunning the debugger to the
indicated command, or to so-many steps backwards, or to the current
position."
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405111104.11484.richard.foley%40rfi.net
Command-line options
Jim Cromie supplied a patch to provide an explanation for the "-D"
debugging command-line switch, when it's invoked with wrong suboptions.
He also added some search options for the "-V:" option, which enables to
search through perl's configuration variables.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40A06F92.1070607%40divsol.com
Regexp bug
Til Schubbe found a regexp bug (#29538). He provides the example of a
regular expression that behaves correctly with "/i", but not without,
even though there is no letter in the regexp. Jeff Pinyan provided some
technical analysis, but no fix (yet).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-29538-87310.6.72801110403121%40perl.org
Encoding and CRLF files on windows
Jan Dubois notices that one cannot write a file in some encodings on
Windows (with the example of "ucs2le") because the output file will be
corrupted by spurious CRLF end-of-line conversions. (The ":crlf" layer
is present by default under Windows.) Adding a ":raw" PerlIO layer is
necessary to get the correct final encoding.
Dan Kogai comments that UCS-2 should always be treated as binary, which
sounds like a sane idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405150041.i4F0fQjh003739%40smtp3.ActiveState.com
In Brief
Rafael patched XSLoader to record the paths of loaded .so files in
@DynaLoader::dl_shared_objects.
Encode 2.00 was released by Dan Kogai. In spite of the name, that's not
a new major version release, that's only 1.99++ :)
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.
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This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 May 2004)
by Rafael Garcia-Suarez