September 2012 Archives

Perl 5 Porters Weekly: September 10-September 16, 2012

[cross posted from its original blog]

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl5-porters email list. Once again subroutine signatures dominated the list. I'll put all of the discussion about them at the end of this summary. I've added an "official" license to these summaries. It's Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0. You can find the summary of rights granted by that license by following that link. The full license text is available in the github repo. Obviously, the content of emails quoted here are owned by their respective authors.

This week's dusty thread is CALL FOR DOCS: how to dual life? from the week of August 6, 2012. Rik was looking for a volunteer to document the process of dual-lifing core code. He specifically called out Tie::Scalar and Time::local. Anyone have any insight into this? Contact Ricardo Signes.

This week's quote of the week is about an epic csh behavior relating to getcwd. As if you needed more reasons to avoid csh.

Csh does not rely on PWD.  Instead, it does a getcwd all by itself.
It then prepends 'set cwd =' and evals the result.  Thus interesting
things happen if the directory happens to have any csh metacharacters
in its name.

Topics this week:

  • EXISTS and SCALAR return values are treated differently
  • 5.14.3 approaches
  • PATCH: pack()ing long words
  • rxres_save etc (was Re: Fix for recursive substitution)
  • given/when/~~ "final" thoughts (ha ha ha)
  • Changing the Perl error message when a module is not found
  • Named prototypes (again)

Perl 5 Porters Weekly: September 3-September 9, 2012

[ Cross posted from its original blog ]

Welcome again to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl5-porters email list. Are you tired of talking and thinking about smartmatch? P5P was dominated this week by talk of named prototypes (again.)

Since the named prototypes discussion had so many responses, they'll be put at the end of the summary. I also decided this week to start a "dusty" thread feature - some issue that's been raised on p5p but without any subsequent response on the public list traffic.

This week's dusty thread is proposed/drafted new perl docs which were part of the p5p summary in July. These docs cover metadoc, perlblurb, perladvantages, and perlresources. They're intended for newbies and language marketing purposes. You can find the docs in this git repo. If you're interested in working on them, contact Uri Guttman.

Topics this week include:

  • Swapping SV bodies between two SV heads
  • UTF-8 just turned 20 years old
  • optimising JRuby by avoiding hashes
  • :utf8 status
  • Lexical subs are ready
  • Named prototypes (again)

Cross posted from my blog

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl5-porters email list. The smartmatch discussion continues to be very popular, so its summary will go at the end of this post. There was also a very long, very tedious thread about how Perl ought to handle UTF-8 output which almost demonstrated [Godwin's Law] [1] (the longer a thread continues, the higher the liklihood someone will call someone else a Nazi.)

If you're reading this on my blog or somewhere else on the web, you can now find the summaries in Markdown format in [this github repository] [2].

Also, since there seems to be influx of new readers, ohai! I started writing these summaries after YAPC::NA 2012 after having a breakfast conversation with Gabor Szabo. If you don't already read his Perl Weekly email newsletter, you really ought to sign up for it.

Topics this week include:

  • Term::ReadLine::Perl not moving forward
  • DTrace probes for loading-file, loaded-file, op-entry
  • My Perl Foundation Grant for Improving the Perl Debugger Was Accepted
  • utf8 problems (still, )
  • fixing smartmatch (again (still))

Perl 5 Porters Weekly: August 20-August 26, 2012

[ Cross posted from its home blog ]

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on the perl-5-porters email list. Sorry I'm running a bit behind this week; there was really a tremendous volume of email this week, mostly about Ricardo's changes to smartmatch and the given/when syntax. Since that's the case, I'm going to put all of the non-smartmatch mail first, and a good sampling of the discussion around smartmatch at the end.

Topics this week include:

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