Perl 5 Porters Weekly: December 10-December 16, 2012
Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.
Topics this week include:
- RFC: Adding a prototype attribute
- Undocumented %ENV behaviour
- rand() on Windows only uses 15 bits of entropy
RFC: Adding a prototype attribute
Peter Martini proposed adding a 'prototype' attribute into the Perl core, so that other modules can use the syntactical space more cleanly. If you're interested in the specific implementation notes, please read the thread.
Undocumented %ENV behaviour
Kent Fredric reported a surprising property of %ENV in blead. Apparently, a value stored in an environment variable is stringified. Kent later submitted some patches to create a warning class when a ref is inserted into %ENV (that would be stringified.)
rand() on Windows only uses 15 bits of entropy
You may recall a thread from a few weeks ago pointed out that the rand() call on Win32 was woefully not random. In response, Yves Orton recently created some patches to add the TinyMT32 random number generator. All of this work is still very experimental, but there is going to be a round of "does this break CPAN?", so it will be interesting to see the outcome of those tests.
Weekly p5p summaries