This Week on perl5-porters (21-27 July 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (21-27 July 2003)
  This week, a lot of porters went to YAPC::Europe in Paris, so the list
  traffic on the list was less important. It wasn't less interesting.

Compile-time division by zero
  Ed Avis doesn't like the fact that "1/0" is a compile-time error, and
  not a runtime one (Bug #23061). In other words, he argues that

      use constant N => 0;
      if (N) { $x = 1/N; }        # example number 1
      eval { $x = 1/N; }          # example number 2

  should be legal code -- constant folding, being an optimization, should
  not change a program's meaning. (He notes also that the equivalent
  program in C is legal -- although Michael Schwern points out that C
  compilers shouldn't really be used as a guideline for designing perl
  errors.) On the other hand, Kurt Starsinic thinks about early detection
  of divisions by zero as a feature, not a bug.

  Hugo van der Sanden describes what should be done to solve this problem :
  fatal exceptions thrown during constant folding must be caught and
  abort folding, instead of aborting the whole interpreter.

      http://xrl.us/nis

Checking whether a method exists
  Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan suggested that one could overload "exists", so that
  "exists THING->method" would be equivalent to "THING->can('method')".
  Dave Mitchell doesn't like this new syntax proposal, and says *yuck*.

      http://xrl.us/nit

Panther
  Dan Kogai had access to a box running an alpha version of Panther -- the
  next release of Mac OS X. He reports that the version numbers appear to
  be messed up in the perl 5.8.1 that comes bundled with Panther ; Edward
  Moy (who maintains Apple's version of perl) blames CVS expanding
  keywords when he imported the perl sources, and is going to fix it. Ken
  Williams says that the CVS manuals recommend against using the
  %Revision% keyword to generate release versions, to prevent this kind
  of problem.

      http://xrl.us/niu

In Brief
  Ken Williams finds that -T used with a filehandle sometimes doesn't seem
  to return the appropriate result. (Bug #23077).

  Sean M. Burke asks for new regression tests for Perldoc ; regression
  tests are good.

  Ilya Zakharevich proposes to add a new built-in function,
  Internals::find_script(), to emulate the -S command-line option.
  Michael G Schwern disagrees on using the "Internals" namespace (and
  points out that there's already a module on CPAN called Internals.)

      http://xrl.us/niv

  Stas Bekman finds a problem with perlio layers : if one pushes a layer
  onto a stream, it's not popped when the filehandle is closed. Nick
  Ing-Simmons replies that the Popped method should return zero in order
  to actually pop the layer.

      http://xrl.us/niw

  Stas asks also for a way to get a complete list of the dual-life
  modules, in order to include a file META.yml in the perl 5.8.1
  distribution. (This was an idea suggested at the P5P BOF in Paris. A
  summary of this meeting will be posted at some appropriate time by
  Elizabeth Mattijsen.)

  New modules were released : ExtUtils::MakeMaker, File::Spec,
  Time::Local. Hugo released a snapshot of bleadperl.

Meanwhile, in ponie-dev
  The very first step of the development of Ponie has been made : there is
  now a Subversion repository for Ponie, in which Arthur Bergman imported
  the current bleadperl and bleadparrot. Now, the goal is to get to
  configure and build (portably) a perl containing an embedded parrot.
  (Reminder : Ponie is "Perl On New Internals Engine", namely Perl 5
  running on Parrot.)

About this summary
  This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, back from YAPC::EU.
  Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing
  list, which subscription address is [email protected].
  Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are (as always) welcome.