This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 18-31 2004)

This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 18-31 2004)
  Using newspeak to redefine a week.

No DESTROY for the wicked coderefs (bug #32024)
  "DESTROY" doesn't get called on non-closure anonymous subroutines because
  the "CV" is shared, but this won't be fixed because of performance
  reasons.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00287.html

  This was discussed before:

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg01300.html

err and backwards compatibility
  Michael Schwern and Robert Spier brought up how the new "err" keyword in
  5.10 hasn't been properly deprecated. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes claimed
  "err" is a second-class keyword, while Rafael Garcia-Suarez claimed it was
  not. Hm..

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00378.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00351.html

is_tainted in 5.8
  Stas Bekman suggested an improvement of the "is_tainted" subroutine
  offered in "perldoc perlsec" for testing whether a variable contains
  tainted data. He found that for some reason it was necessary to

    use warnings FATAL => 'all';

  to prevent compile-time errors from the "eval".

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00305.html

Chained goto &sub drops data too early (bug #32039)
  Henrik Gulbrandsen spotted that patch 22373 in 5.8.4, which was put in
  place to fix the @_s in recursive "goto"s, now causes @_ to be dropped in
  chained "goto"s. Dave Mitchell's new solution is to "transfer the
  reifiedness of the old @_ to the new @_ then ditch the old @_".

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00324.html

Optimization idea
  David Nicol wondered if

    my $name = 'david';
    return "hello my name is $name";

  could be optimized with

    return "hello my name is david";

  Elizabeth Mattijsen, for one, doubted this would be worth it because of
  the complexity of checking when the optimization could be done.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00376.html

perldoc -f for ops (bug #27886)
  Dan Jacobson dreamed of a world where "perldoc -f =" returns documentation
  on the "=" operator. I think everyone's thought of this at some point,
  though it might be better to "ask not what your perldoc can do for you,
  ask what you can do for your perldoc".

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00412.html

Encode::utf8::decode_xs does not check partial chars
  Bjoern Hoehrmann convinced Dan Kogai that

    my $x = "Bj\xF6rn"; # as well as "Bj\xF6r" and "Bj\xF6"
    decode("utf-8", $x, Encode::FB_CROAK);

  should croak but wasn't. See

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00412.html

  and I think also bug #32080

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00375.html

Perl doesn't support RAII
  Anders Johnson submitted four patches for RAII in Perl. Quoth he: "The
  central idea of the patches that I submitted is to block (defer) signal
  handlers inside the DESTROY call. That way, you can arrange for signal
  handlers to die() without having to worry that the exception won't get
  propagated."

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00423.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00421.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00422.html
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00424.html

  Link from John Peacock on RAII (not to be confused with the RIAA):

  http://www.hackcraft.net/raii/

In brief
  Steve Peters, sedulous bee that he be, commented on at least a dozen
  ancient bugs, presumably with the intent of clearing them out.

  Nicolas Clark said in a couple threads that he doesn't intend to upgrade
  MakeMaker in maint because versions after 6.17 have bugs with core perl.

References
  The thread for bug number $BUGNUM can be found at
  http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=$BUGNUM

About this summary
  This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published weekly
  at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose subscription
  address is [email protected]. The archive is at
  http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections
  welcome.