This Week on perl5-porters (8-14 December 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (8-14 December 2003)
  In two words, this was a busy week. Various topics were discussed, from
  the low-level C portability stuff to the Perl language considerations.

*DB*File::delete
  Paul Marquess brings to the general attention that the implementation of
  delete() in the DBM modules does not what the man page says what it
  should do. This implementation glitch was due to efficiency reasons. He
  wonders what's the right solution for this -- interface change or doc
  change.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=AIEAJICLCBDNAAOLLOKLCEILPEAA.Paul.Marquess%40btinternet.com

Concat slowdown
  Stas Bekman notices that some form of concatenation of strings was
  impressively slowed down after the release of perl 5.8.2. This change is
  due to the removal of an aggressive optimization that went wrong on some
  cases. No replacement for this optimization has been worked out yet.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3FD7BC46.8020600%40stason.org

Benchmark and bigint
  Tels reports (bug #24622) that you can't use Benchmark when you've
  loaded bigint. Hugo van der Sanden remarks that bigint interferes
  with Benchmark's use of floating point numbers. Tels then proposes a
  patch to Benchmark to cope with this, but Hugo believes that a more
  correct solution would be to fix bigint so its effect is lexical and
  no more global. (And we're back to this old TODO item : fix lexical
  pragmas.)

      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-12/msg00351.html
      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-12/msg00493.html

Tieing stashes
  Tassilo von Parseval remarks that perl lets you tie stashes (symbol
  table hashes). However, once tied, they don't work quite as expected. So
  it's maybe a good idea to forbid tying stashes (unless we can make them
  work correctly, for some acceptable value of correctly.)

  On the other hand, one can mark stashes as read only, and this seems to
  behave.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24652-68283.15.7477948573825%40perl.org

A void context warning in boolean context
  Gisle Aas reports that the following code :

      if ("") { do_something() }

  produces a warning, "Useless use of a constant in void context". Rafael
  comments and thinks that this one will be difficult to fix. (Bug
  #24646).

      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-12/msg00510.html

In Brief
  Scott Walters announces that he might have an occasion to add a Perl 5
  backend to parrot.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031208082317.GA26642%40illogics.org

  Tels posted a abstract of the current state of Math::BigInt and
  Math::BigFloat (and pre-released Math::BigInt 1.68).

      http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-12/msg00557.html

  Steve Hay proposed to add a function Win32::IsAdminUser(). Michael
  Schwern proposes to put it in libwin32 instead. No Windows guru
  comments.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3FD5E3F8.6070900%40uk.radan.com

  Paul Marquess works on the DB_File and utf8 issue reported last week.

  Enache Adrian works on old and new memory leaks. (E.g. bug #24624 for a
  memory leak related to the new version object code.)

  Enache also fixed a bug related to mishandling of utf8 strings by
  substr().

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031210203439.GA581%40math.berkeley.edu

  Bug #24615 is, for once, about a case where perl's taint checks are too
  zealous.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24651-68277.9.65202065328413%40perl.org

  Alan Burlison has problems building perl with a C99-compliant compiler.
  This has something to do with #include guards and obscure predefined
  compiler symbols, that are in the source code of perl from ages. Some
  cleanup is in order.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3FDA4994.6050209%40sun.com

  Nicholas Clark, integrating changes to the perl 5.8 branch, remarks that
  the recent fixes made to the $0 variable break PAR.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031214210647.GF30930%40colon.colondot.net

  Nicholas also released a snapshot of perl 5.8.x at the very end of the
  week.

Quote of the week
  'This is the "camel grooming club" - we have to make the hair as unhairy
  as possible while making things work'. -- Nick Ing-Simmons, speaking
  about P5P.

About this summary
  This summary was compiled by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are
  published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which
  subscription address is [email protected]. Corrections
  and comments are welcome. (Yes, mixed archives. Baroque style.)