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Postings from November 2012
There are several functions that are no longer used in the Perl core that could be removed, along with their associated interpreter variables. These are is_uni_idfirst_lc is_utf8_idfirst is_utf8_xidfirst is_utf8_idcont In addition, is_uni_idfirst and is_utf8_xidcont should be removed from the core, replaced by ones that call internally known versions. This is because Perl has slightly different definitions of what these should match (http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=74022), and the current ones are getting the wrong definitions. And is_utf8_mark should also be removed. It is used in places by code that implements an obsolete definition of a grapheme cluster. The current definition doesn't need marks explicitly; so those places should change to use the more modern definition. None of these functions are documented. They are listed in perlapi under "Undocumented functions" with this caveat: "The following functions have been flagged as part of the public API, but are currently undocumented. Use them at your own risk, as the interfaces are subject to change." There should be no reason for xs code to access these. They don't (or shouldn't) return the exact same results as Perl's core uses, and are otherwise for outmoded views into Unicode. cpan grep with -file:"ppport\.h|PPPort\.pm" is_(uni|utf8)_(mark|x?id(first|cont)) returned 16 results. None of them look like they are actually using these functions except as compatibility measures. I propose removing them.Thread Next