This Week on perl5-porters - 13-19 January 2008

This Week on perl5-porters - 13-19 January 2008

   "Shifting something that's not a number shouldn't produce a number."
   -- Abigail

Topics of Interest

"grep" and smart match should warn in void context

   Larry Wall remarked last week that Zefram's suggestion regarding the
   propagation of context from "grep"s and "map"s was how he deal with
   the matter. Nicholas spelled out his understanding of the matter.
   Zefram ventured further into the internals than he had ever been
   before and succeeded in returning with a patch to implement warnings
   in void context.

   Abigail thought that the exercise was a bit of a witch hunt but Larry
   was thought that it was unlikely that people had used the syntax
   intentionally, so the weight of backwards compatibility was not so
   great, in this particular case.

     http://xrl.us/betef

"+Inf", "-Inf" and "NaN" (and maybe -0.0 for good measure)

   In the thread about the latest "Math::Complex" release, Jarkko
   Hietaniemi had noted that some platforms will dump core if you try to
   perform floating point arithmetic on a value set to infinity. Nicholas
   Clark wondered whether it was worth probing for the behaviour of these
   special quantities at configuration time, in order to Do The Right
   Thing on as many platforms as possible.

   Zefram suggested peeking at "Data::Float", which can already isolate
   exotic floating point values in pure Perl. Craig Berry pointed out
   that it wasn't so much a problem of arithmetic *per se*, since just
   about everything in use today implements IEEE 754 floats. It's not
   even a problem of exception handling, since that is governed by the
   IEEE standard as well.

   The tricky part is determining what exception handling is enabled by
   default on a given platform, and what can be turned on if you ask for
   it politely. His gave some pointers to additional resources on the web
   regarding the matter.

     there's a point to all this
     http://xrl.us/beteh

Inconsistent bigint behaviour (with ranges)

   Moritz Lenz ran into difficulties using the range ("$x .. $y")
   operator appearing to use floating point numbers instead of integers
   (and hence, bigints). Tels was quick to point out that this was due to
   a long-standing bug in perl: one cannot overload the ".." operator.
   The "bigint" package could do so if it were possible, but alas, the
   implementation is not there yet.

     want your 15 minutes of fame?
     http://xrl.us/betej

   Jerry D. Hedden wrote a patch to make the range operator behave in a
   slightly more sane manner, and this was applied by Rafael.

     http://xrl.us/betem

Implementation of "rand()" in Perl 5.8.8

   Dennis Williams wanted to implement "rand" in Java and wondered how it
   was defined (having become lost after wading through some 18000 lines
   of the Configure shell script.

   Robin Barker told him how Configure chooses the best available
   implementation. Bennett told him how to find out what was chosen.

     http://xrl.us/beteo

"Inf" >> 1

   Abigail was rather surprised to discover that left- or right-shifting
   infinity returns merely a really huge number, rather than infinity.
   And shifting "NaN" produces zero.

   Zefram explained that infinity only really works when dealing with
   floating point numbers, and bit-shifting a floating point number would
   probably do no good to anyone. And the shift operators force integer
   context anyway. Tels was happy to report that "bigint" gets it right.

   Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes argued that it made sense to allow infinity to
   be shifted down among the integers. David Nicol did not agree with
   this and suggested that the way things were currently made some sort
   of sense.

   Zefram came back and said that it was probably too late to try and be
   more strict on the matter: no doubt there's someone out there who's
   relying on the property that 3 >> 1 == 1. Roland Giersig wondered what
   Inf >> Inf and Inf << Inf should return, to which Zefram made a
   reasonable proposition.

     and I thought they said Perl was for text processing
     http://xrl.us/beteq

   Continuing in a numerical recipes vein, Nicholas reported that he had
   committed a change that will generate a warning if code tries to
   increment or decrement an integer beyond the last possible integer
   representation.

     at the end of the line
     http://xrl.us/betes

   Unfortunately, Andreas König was able to foil this plan with the
   careful application of the "-O2" optimisation switch. This caused
   "t/op/inc.t" to begin to fail. Nicholas Clark couldn't see a way to
   sneak a couple of instructions past the compiler to make it do the
   right thing. Jerry D. Hedden also found that it warned about things
   that we really don't care about.

     back to the drawing board
     http://xrl.us/beteu

MIME types for module data

   Mark Overmeer wondered if there was some overall MIME type available
   for Perl that would allow module slinging around private data sets in
   a more orderly manner. Zefram gave an example of what an officially
   sanctioned IANA MIME type would look like. Mark wondered if you would
   have to pay a visit to IANA for each module.

     is this free as in beer?
     http://xrl.us/betew

Onto perl 5.8.9 (Perl @ 32984)

   Nicholas Clark took a snapshot of the maintenance track to see how it
   would fare as a putative 5.8.9. He was hoping such a thing could be
   released before the German Perl Workshop, 5.10.1 or Christmas.

   Windows is behaving pretty well at the moment, thanks to Steve Hay's
   tireless smoking. Other platforms were doing less well: VMS was grumpy
   although Craig Berry and John E. Malmberg were on hand to smooth over
   the rough bits.

   David Cantrell noted severe breakage on a Cray, a Silicon Graphics
   IRIX box and NetBSD/Alpha as well.

     in need of TLC
     http://xrl.us/bete2

   In fact, IRIX cannot compile 5.10.0, for that matter.

     http://xrl.us/bete4

   Jerry D. Hedden also wondered about how the maint patch level should
   be defined in patchlevel.h.

     http://xrl.us/bete8

C for Perl programmers?

   Michael G. Schwern asked how a Perl programmer who knows no C might go
   about picking it up. A number of techniques were suggested, and books
   proposed.

     http://xrl.us/betfa

What we all want

   [Note from the summariser: I have seriously overrun my time budget for
   this week. The following discussions are about major changes that
   people want to see in 5.12. The first items are continuations of
   threads from last week. The new threads have been summarised].

   am I a method call?
         http://xrl.us/betfc

   anonymous packages
         http://xrl.us/betfe

   named parameters
         http://xrl.us/betfg

   method declaration
         http://xrl.us/betfi

   saner behaviour for `length`
         http://xrl.us/betfk

   Direct BigInt (and BigRat) support
         http://xrl.us/betfn

allowing trailing naked blocks in prototyped sub calls

   Aristotle Pagaltzis wanted "foo 1, 2, 3, 4 { say @_ }" to do something
   nifty, given an appropriate "foo" routine. Rafael nodded and said it
   would be nice to have.

     http://xrl.us/betfp

named parameters + prototypes + methods + aliases

   The thread on naming subroutine parameters continued on this week with
   all sorts of syntax ideas and semantic considerations bandied about.

   Rafael brought it down to earth with the restating of the aliasing
   syntax that has been proposed in the TODO list for a long time. The
   best aspect of his proposal was that it was simple enough to stand a
   reasonable chance of being implemented.

     http://xrl.us/betfr

Empty attributes

   As part of the named parameters thread, Peter Scott wondered why "my
   $x := 24" compiled and ran normally. It turns out that it's being
   parsed as an empty attribute list. So it's allowed, but it does
   absolutely nothing. Peter wondered why it was so. No-one was able to
   give an explanation. Rafael thought it was a parser bug until Peter
   pointed to the tests that pin down the behaviour.

     time for an archeological expedition
     http://xrl.us/betft

Recurse into current "qr//"

   Moritz Lenz has started to play with the new "(?R)" recursive sub
   pattern and was saddened to discover that it couldn't recurse across a
   "qr" boundary.

   Yves Orton didn't dismiss the idea out of hand, but said that it
   didn't weigh much against his current list of priorities. The best
   chance of it happening would depend on what Dave Mitchell and he
   planned to do to the regexp engine in the future.

     maybe we'll get it for free
     http://xrl.us/betfv

Tail calls for methods

   Yuval Kogman noted that it was difficult to do tail recursion cleanly
   in Perl, and suggested that with a dash of "tailcall" syntactic sugar,
   it would allow the compilation phase to do the right thing. Part of
   the problem concerns what to do with "caller", which was covered in a
   thread a few weeks ago.

   Jim Cromie restated his op mashup idea, of combining adjacent
   "leavesub"/"entersub" ops. Nicholas Clark thought that it could be
   prototyped using an external XS module.

     http://xrl.us/betfx

A working SUPER

   Johann Vromans lamented that "SUPER" referred to the superclass(es) of
   the package, and not that or those of the object. Stevan Little
   thought that the new MRO infrastructure in 5.10 may be of some help.

   Some people mentioned "NEXT" as coming close, but a common theme was
   that it was too slow. At the end of the week, no real concensus had
   been reached.

     that's really super, super-girl
     http://xrl.us/betfz

Clean up dereferencing syntax for slices

   Curtis "Ovid" Poe proposed a simplification for slicing arrays and
   hashes. Everyone agrees the current syntax, especially when references
   come into the picture, is pretty horrendous.

   Ricardo Signes found the fatal flaw, and so Ovid suggested a more
   alien syntax with a sigil after the arrow, which made Ricardo wonder
   if it couldn't be done with an autoboxed method, at the expense of a
   bit of verbiage.

   Zefram found the fatal flaw in that idea: if the thing being sliced is
   a blessed reference then the method resolution may call something
   else.

     back to the drawing board
     http://xrl.us/betf3

Patches of Interest

Double free error in 5.10.0

   Gerard Goossen proposed a patch to fix the "s///ge" / "FREETMPS"
   problem. Unapplied.

     http://xrl.us/betf5

   Nicholas wondered if there was another way to achieve the goal.

     http://xrl.us/betf7

2..Inf and beyond

   The thread continued this week, with the more pragmatic porters
   pointing out that one should really use a while(1) loop and increment
   a counter variable each time through the loop. Michael G. Schwern said
   that was okay if you were used to procedural languages, but if all you
   had ever known were Perl ranges it would be nice if they did the right
   thing.

   At the end of thread, people started to coalesce upon the idea of an
   new internal type that would provide a direct connection to a
   bigintish datatype, be it a fast C library like GMP or a slower
   pure-Perl implementation.

     http://xrl.us/betf9

perlintern.pod: "PAD_CLONE_VARS"'s parameter list mangled

   Steven Schubiger supplied a small apidoc patch, which was applied.

     http://xrl.us/betgb

New and old bugs from RT

Outdated "Test::Harness::Straps" (#49504)

   Imacat offered to take over the maintenance of "Test::Harness::Straps"
   (insofar as this involves watching over a dying patient and waiting
   until it is safe to pull the plug on the life support systems, and
   made an impassioned plea defending her approach to smoke testing CPAN
   modules.

   Apart from that, the thread devolved into your standard argument
   regarding "Module::Build" *versus* "ExtUtils::MakeMaker". Everyone
   remained very polite, more credit to the porters, but the reader must
   forgive the summariser for not going into more detail than saying that
   the versions of the CPAN shell bundled with older releases of Perl are
   the root of many problems @@@FIXME@@@

   One new item to come out the discussion, however, was Michael G.
   Schwern's observation that "Module::Build"'s auto-generated README was
   pretty hopeless, yet it would be a Simple Matter Of Programming to
   make it do a better job.

     hey! Module::Build is bundled with 5.10
     http://xrl.us/betgd

     do your part for useful READMEs
     http://rt.cpan.org//Ticket/Display.html?id=32391

"open ':locale'" now works (#49646)

   Rafael Garcia-Suarez and Mashrab Kuvatov sorted out what the problem
   was and fixed it up, and the thread painted the bikeshed green.

     http://xrl.us/betgf

glibc error using "Tie::File" on 5.10 (#49724)

   Testcase needs to be slimmed down before anything can be done to
   diagnose the problem.

     come and look on my screen
     http://xrl.us/betgh

Regular expression delimiter sensitivity (#49800)

   Someone reported a regular expression changing behaviour when run
   outside or inside the debugger.

     is ? a wise choice for a regexp delimiter?
     http://xrl.us/betgj

Encode "from_to()" does not return on invalid conversion (#49830)

   Someone spotted some new behaviour in the version of "Encode" bundled
   with 5.10. Paging Dan Kogai.

     http://xrl.us/betgm

XS OVERLOAD keyword causes incorrect C code generation (#49844)

   Salva Fandiño reported a problem using the "OVERLOAD" clause in an XS
   file. Torsten Schönfeld reported that an equivalent bug report was
   filed against the "ExtUtils::ParseXS" queue, but had received no
   replies.

     http://xrl.us/betgo

Bad rounding on "int(log())" (#49872)

   Roland Giersig ran into problems with integer truncation of
   calculations involving logarithms, and was surprised by some of the
   results. People explained that it was due to floating point
   imprecision (as usual).

     fuzzing around
     http://xrl.us/betgq

"gmtime()"/"localtime()" do not use "time()" (#49914)

   Well they sort of do, but Abe Timmerman discovered that if you
   override "time", the "gmtime" and "localtime" routines will happily
   ignore the override, and continue to use the underlying code that
   returns the epoch.

     time time time, see what's become of me
     http://xrl.us/betgs

Ambigous Configure run/make error (#49946)

   Stefan Schlotterbeck-Macht was seriously Warnocked after getting stuck
   trying to cross-compile Perl onto avr32-linux platform.

     hints wanted
     http://xrl.us/betgu

Perl 5.10 @ISA bug (#49952)

   Andrei Galea uncovered some @ISA behaviour modification in 5.10 when
   using "Tk".

     hairy inheritance
     http://xrl.us/betgw

perl fails to compile in "B::C" (#49974)

   A cautionary tail: if you "rsync" the latest source, you must ensure
   that you do so with the "--delete" switch. Sometimes dead wood makes a
   log jam.

     we gave it the axe
     http://xrl.us/betgy

Perl5 Bug Summary

     14 new + 1474 open = 1788 (created 8, closed 0)
     http://xrl.us/betg2

     http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

This is the BBC

   Getopt::Euclid 0.1.0
       The current state of blead made one "Getopt" module fail, this one
       by Damain Conway.

         that's ok, there are plenty of others
         http://xrl.us/betg4

In Brief

   Robin Barker had some consting goodness applied to regexp.h

     http://xrl.us/betg6

   H.Merijn Brand tried building perl on Cygwin and ran into trouble.
   Reini Urban stepped up to help him out, offering a few suggestions
   every Cygwin blead smoker needs to know.

     http://xrl.us/betg8

   Jerry D. Hedden had a pile of taint test fixes for Cygwin, and this
   made all the tests pass. This made Nicholas Clark happy.

     http://xrl.us/betha

   David Landgren wondered whether "is" behaved correctly for tied
   objects when one needs to write "ok($x == 1)" instead of "cmp_ok($x,
   '==', 1)" but received no reply.

     fringe benefits
     http://xrl.us/bethc

   Jan Dubois noted that "File::GlobMapper", part of the "IO::Compress"
   infrastructure, should not be marked as an alpha release (since it's
   now in 5.10). Paul Marquess agreed, and promised to push out a new
   version, *sans* the message of doom.

     good thing it's dual-lifed
     http://xrl.us/bethe

   Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni found a small bug in microperl regarding
   uconfig.h; Steve Peters regenerated it into a healthy state.

     http://xrl.us/bethg

   Steven Schubiger thought that the documentation for "sv_cmp_locale"
   should not say "see also "sv_cmp_locale"". Not applied.

     recursion: see recursion
     http://xrl.us/bethi

   Salvador Fandiño wondered if the new hints infrastructure could help
   solve the bug regarding overloading constants not propagating into
   string "eval"s.

     gotta perlbug id?
     http://xrl.us/bethk

   Jan Dubois reported that "Compress::Zlib" 1.42 was failing tests on
   both blead and maint, and pointed to an older thread on the matter.
   Nicholas Clark backed the change out of maint.

     http://xrl.us/bethn

   "Text::Balance" received a better version number in maint.

     http://xrl.us/bethp

   Nicholas also suggested that distinguishing between "use warnings" and
   "use warnings 'all'" would allow the porters to ease the restrictions
   in adding new warnings to maintenance releases.

     it never used to do that!
     http://xrl.us/bethr

   Johan Vromans complained about smoke runs complaining about
   inconsistent test results between TEST and harness. Some tests are
   known to be very sensitive to timing issues and system load. So the
   tests should either go, or be marked as informational (and thus
   insufficient grounds for aborting a launch).

     all systems go
     http://xrl.us/betht

   While hacking on kurila, Gerard Goossen spotted what he thought may be
   a latent bug in the routine "do_openn" in doio.c, and thought someone
   more intimate with the code should see if it was a problem.

     http://xrl.us/bethv

   He also proposed a patch, not applied, that would cause "-DT" to
   report forced tokens (during tokenisation).

     what you always wanted to know
     http://xrl.us/bethx

   Andrea König produced a patch for "YAML::Syck" to make it aware of the
   5.11 native REGEXP type. Audrey Tang took the patch and pushed version
   1.01 out the door. Michael G. Schwern thought the patch was a bit
   clunky, but Nicholas pointed out that the way it was written prevents
   dead code from forming in 5.10 and below.

     http://xrl.us/bethz

   Jerry D. Hedden uncovered a problem with a target needed for
   "suidperl". Even though the resulting binary is vaguely deprecated,
   Nicholas Clark managed to get thing running smoothly again.

     until the next time it breaks
     http://xrl.us/beth3

   Jerry noted that the change didn't make it past the door.

     http://xrl.us/beth5

   David Cantrell wanted to be able to "lchown" in perl 5.12, so Yitzchak
   wrote a patch to do it for him.

     http://xrl.us/beth7

   Nicholas Clark had a bit of trouble fiddling with version numbers in
   "Test::Harness", as there are now three active branches in the
   repository.

     head, explodes
     http://xrl.us/beth9

   Johnathon Rockway related a question from the "perl-qa" mailing list,
   as it relates to "is_deeply" and "qr//" on 5.11

     http://xrl.us/betib

   Nicholas saw how "itersave" in used "struct block_loop", but wondered
   why, and whether it was ever, or still, necessary.

     http://xrl.us/betid

About this summary

   This summary was written by David Landgren.

     last week's, reduced to clear
     http://xrl.us/betif

   Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
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• This Week on perl5-porters - 13-19 January 2008 by David Landgren