This Week on p5p 2001/06/25

This week on perl5-porters (18 June–25 June 2001)

Notes

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This was a fairly busy week, seeing just under 500 messages.

Regular expressions

There were a couple of regular expression threads this week.

Heikki Lehvaslaiho found a bug with some end-anchored regular expressions when using study, which involved the regular rexpression engine looping. The problem was quickly found and patched by Hugo.

Jeff Pinyan almost presented a patch for regex negation, before being kindly asked not to forget Unicode.

Artur Bergman and Richard Soderberg started to move regular expressions from the optree to the pad so that they can be redefined under USEITHREADS. They also patched perl to allow /o to work under ithreads.

Jeffrey Friedl asked about applying regular expressions backwards (from right to left):

    $text =~ s/^\s+//;  # strip leading whitespace
    $text =~ s/^\s+//r; # strip trailing whitespace

… and Jeff Pinyan plugged his sexeger research.

5.7.2 in sight

Jarkko informed us that the latest snapshot, perl@10825, would be the last snapshot before the next Perl development release of 5.7.2. Snapshots after that would be release candidates, leading on to the next Perl stable release of 5.8.0:

So now it’s definitely time to remind me of any patches that I might have missed. If you have a bug fixing going on please inform your loved ones that you’ll camp at the office / by the computer for coming few weeks.

rsync-able snapshots

Jarkko also announced availability of a way to rsync his development snapshots, staying away from the bleading-edge part of bleadperl, so that you don’t report a bug which is in the midst of getting patched (or created), available via:

    mkdir -p perl;cd perl && rsync -av ftp.funet.fi::perlsnap .

overloading s?printf

Jarkko Hietaniemi asked for opinions on a way to use formatted printing for objects.

For example, it would be nice to able to use, say, %Z, to format both the real and imaginary part of Math::Complex objects at the same time, say %7.3Z –or even tamper with %f %g %e so that they would recognize their arguments being Math::Complexes.

Some options are: using overload to pass formats via coderefs, or inventing a whole new mini language.

Various

Nicholas Clark reported a problem with 64 bit int support under x86 FreeBSD and with gcc’s optimiser enabled. This was tracked down to a patch (10417), but no solution was offered other than patch retraction.

Mike Guy commented that not_a_number in sv.c didn’t grok UTF8. This got added to the UTF8 TODO list, as a request for a function sv_printify for displaying PVs with control characters, embedded nulls, and Unicode.

Spider Boardman was awarded the nightship of the Wielder of the Holy Cast, for fixing casting warnings under HP-UX cc.

There was some talk about compiling Perl with the new, pickier -Wall that comes with the new gcc 3.0.

Artur Bergman asked an interesting problem about what to do with the seed for rand when threads are involved. Do we want srand() and rand() to be performed on a single global seen variable or a “per-thread” seed variable? Jarkko suggested that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have our own PRNG implementation.

Nikola Knezevic asked about configure.com not working under DOS, which is in fact the configure script for VMS. It now sports a comment reflecting this.

Abhijit Menon-Sen’s macro cleanups last week were backed out for performance reasons, but with the macros left in as comments to aid grepping.

Doug MacEachern, amongst other sterling patches, offered a patch to make make Foo.s add -S to cc flags, which outputs the assembly code to Foo.s.

Laszlo Molnar provided some patched to get bleadperl working under djgpp.

Abhijit Menon-Sen patch a problem spoted by Harmon S. Nine about => turning ANY bareword before it into a quoted string. The documentation is somewhat vague about what exactly is quoted by => but this is a change in behaviour since 5.6.0. The patch reverted the behaviour so that function calls that are used as hash key-values in the construction of a hash are still called.

Spider Boardman reported that PERLIO=unix broke many tests and offered some patches. Nick Ing-Simmons countered that it always has, as it makes the “stream” completely unbuffered and that isn’t really very perlish. However, he fixed a reported bug in PerlIOBase_unread, which was messing with b->posn after the unread(), rather than setting it before the unread.

Peter Prymmer worried about floating point representations of numbers under OS/390 with exponents over +63.

Marcel Grunauer produced some patches for Darwin.

Ilya Zakharevich provided a slew of OS/2 patches.

There were also some minor documentation patches (some very pedantic).

Oh, and Jarkko had an off-by-one error.

Until next week I remain, your temporarily-replacing humble and obedient servant,

Leon Brocard, leon@iterative-software.com

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