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Postings from February 2007
On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 08:37:48PM -0800, Marvin Humphrey wrote: > I've since been taught to avoid mixing different kinds of scalars, > but I would have been better off if Perl itself had taught me that, > by throwing an error when I tried that operation. This is one of the big legacy bugs of 5.6. It shouldn't matter in perl-space (ie non-XS), but it interacts with the other bug - conflating "I'm stored in UTF-8" with "I want Unicode text matching semantics" (The third was that 5.6 de-facto changed the XS API, with SvPV() and friends no longer quite meaning what they used to. They should have attempted to auto-downgrade anything UTF-8. I think that that would actually have rendered the first bug a non-bug) Perl 5 has ploughed this furrow for 7 years now - it's hard to see how to change direction on the first without breaking a lot of stuff that is now correct. The second might be fixable given 1 more flag bit, 2 more stable releases and a depreciation cycle. So that would be for 5.14 > I wish that Perl had at least two different kinds of scalars, each > with its own vtable for dispatching such behaviors... > ... in a perfect world, that is. Yes. The punchline from the "Irishman giving directions" joke applies here: If I were you sir, I wouldn't start from here. One of the reasons for Perl 6 was to avoid this whole bloody mess. Unicode from the start, rather than a messy retrofit. Nicholas Clark