Perl 5 Porters Weekly: July 29-August 4, 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-RC2 is now available
- Perl 5.18 and Regexp::Grammars
- Empty regular expression does not match in some cases
- Using braces on 'if'
- refactoring of regex execution / calling
perl 5.18.1-RC2 is now available
RJBS announced perl 5.18.1-RC2 is now available.
Perl 5.18 and Regexp::Grammars
Working on the various issues reported by Damian Conway in Regexp::Grammars and perl 5.18, Dave Mitchell found a serious regression in the 5.18 regex engine where a comment ('#') in a character class stops code blocks from being parsed.
This has been backported to 5.18.1
Empty regular expression does not match in some cases
Petr Pisar reported what seemed like a bug, but it turns out it's a feature.
H. Merijn Brand replied with a quote from perlreref:
If 'pattern' is an empty string, the last successfully matched regex is used. Delimiters other than '/' may be used for both this operator and the following ones. The leading "m" can be omitted if the delimiter is '/'.
Using braces on 'if'
Nothing like some C style bikeshedding.
refactoring regex execution / calling
Dave Mitchell commited a huge new patch with tons of refactoring and fixes in Perl's regex engine.
Weekly p5p summaries