This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 December 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (22-28 December 2003)
  Due to holidays, this was a low-traffic week. That's one more reason to
  get it delivered in time.

Math::BigInt
  Tels pre-released Math::BigInt 1.68, with new stuff, refactorization,
  memory savings, and new method aliases to make the interface more
  consistent. He also posted some benchmarks.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200312230106.27661%40bloodgate.com
      http://www.bloodgate.com/perl/bigint/bench_timeline.html

Optimizations
  Enache Adrian re-optimized the implementation of the string
  concatenation with lexical variables; the previous optimization has been
  disabled because it was buggy.

Windows breakages
  According to bug report #24731, the implementation of fork() has
  problems under Windows 2003 64-Bit on Itanium 2. Unfortunately, we lack
  porters with access to this kind of machine.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24731-68810.11.7760523742712%40perl.org

  Speaking about Windows, we seem to have lost threaded builds of perl
  5.8.x on Windows, for an unknown reasons. Investigations to follow...
  (Obviously, perl 5.8.3 can't be shipped without this being fixed.)

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031227224542.GZ94211%40plum.flirble.org

Other bugs
  Ton Hospel reports that "undef" used with the range operator in list
  context is treated as numerical 0, even for a magical string range.
  Rafael fixed this.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24735-68834.12.6928254949564%40perl.org

  Jarkko Hietaniemi reports that this small code snippet :

      *foo{CODE} ? 1 : 0

  is a syntax error in perl. It shouldn't be. Rafael fixed this.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24762-68931.15.246354815684%40perl.org

  Marcus Holland-Moritz thinks he hits a bug in a recent development
  snapshot of gcc 3.4, because a sprintf() test failing in perl's test
  suite. The bug in fact turns out to be an old bug in gcc's optimizer,
  and is trigerred with the "-O3" level since gcc 3.4.

      http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=02b801c3ca9a$ff6661e0$5700a8c0%40R2D2

About this summary
  This summary was written 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.