Perl 5 Porters Weekly: August 5-11, 2013
Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.
Topics this week include:
- perl 5.18.1-RC3 is now available
- perldoc perlre does not appear to mention /r
- Perl 5.18 and Regexp::Grammars
- "\c\" is a syntax error
- Apologies and good news
- postfix dereference syntax
- Cuckoo packages aren't listed in Module::Corelist
perl 5.18.1-RC3 is now available
RJBS announced that RC3 of perl 5.18.1 is available. The final release may be available by the time you (probably) read this on Monday.
perldoc perlre does not appear to mention /r
Jacinta Richardson sent a message that the non-destructive /r flag for Perl's RE engine does not appear in the perlre perldoc corpus. There were some suggestions to briefly document the flags in perlre and point to the "definitive" documentation.
Perl 5.18 and Regexp::Grammars
Dave Mitchell followed up with some feature enhancements which may make it into Perl 5.20 for building parsers on top of Perl written in Perl (that aren't evil source filters.) Damian Conway approves.
"\c\" is a syntax error
Perl has a shorthand for "Control+CHAR" which is a string expressed as "\cX" where X is some character. The problem is that \ escapes the next character include a quote, so a literal Control+\ can't be easily expressed using this syntax.
Some possible solutions are proposed in the thread.
Apologies and good news
Dennis Kaarsemaker runs a lot of the Perl infrastructure including the git repository and the Jenkins build system(s). The physical machines these services live on have been refreshed by Booking.com and Dennis reports on several updates and improvements.
postfix dereference syntax
RJBS has signalled that the proposed scalar-reference dereference syntax
(e.g., my @data = $hashref->{'list_of_things'}->@* vs.
my @data = @{ $hashref->{'list_of_things'} }) for arrays and hashes be
accepted into the 5.20 release.
Cuckoo packages aren't listed in Module::Corelist
Neil Bowers wants to add "cuckoo" packages (these are packages that are defined as multiple packages in one physical .pm file) to the Module::Corelist data.
Weekly p5p summaries