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Postings from March 2007
> Could you tell me why almost every other 5.6 bug was fixed in 5.8, but > gratitious breakage of large parts of CPAN are accepted with this change? > Whats the rationale behind keeping this 5.6 bug, while fixing the rest? > > So why not fix it? Nobody made such a fuss when they fixed the remaining bugs > from 5.6. Oh, for heavens sake. I'm sorry but I have VERY hard time of listening to your wailing and sitting still. So I won't. Perl 5.8 was in development for quite close to two years (5.7.0 in 2000-Sep, but work started already in July or so - 5.8.0 in 2002-Jul), and 5.8.1 (the "cleanup for oopses" for 5.8.0) took another year. So three years before we had really a useable 5.8. Since then Nicholas picked up and has admirably and thanklessly released SEVEN maintenance releases of 5.8 over three years, meaning that about every six months there has been a change of fixing something that is very broken. How serious a breakage can be if in three years of development and three years of maintenance it hasn't gotten enough attention to be fixed? There is no hidden conspiracy of keeping things broken. I'm the first one to admit that I wasn't brave enough to REALLY fix the Unicode brokenness of 5.6. (1) The more strongly typed scheme, where there would be really forcibly separate "byte strings" and "Unicode strings" *would* have been possible, if I only had had the guts. But it was mostly the regex engine that scared me too much. For basic strings manipulation and I/O it would not have been a problem to implement. (2) Another big mistake (due to lack of courage) was the decision to stick with "Latin-1" as the default 8-bit legacy "type". I should have broken that assumption, too, and stuck with pure ASCII (or EBCDIC). (As a side thing, the 8-bit locale support should have been ejected, too: it is just not worth the trouble: it should have been replaced with something pluggable so that people could have plugged in CLDR or Windows locales or whatever they want.) I'm just getting really, really tired of people whining about Perl's Unicode. -- There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'. -- Jack CohenThread Previous | Thread Next