[roch-pm] [Fwd: www.perl.com: Why I Hate Advocacy]

Thu Dec 14 14:55:05 CST 2000

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: www.perl.com: Why I Hate Advocacy
Resent-Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 02:15:35 -0800
Resent-From: perl-update at lists.oreillynet.com
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 13:33:13 -0800
From: "www.perl.com update" <onperl at lists.oreillynet.com>
To: <perl-update at pepper.oreillynet.com>

          www.perl.com update
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The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

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Hello, perl.com subscribers.

* Perl News

Big news from perl5-porters this week. Unicode support is almost
complete! There were two big missing pieces. One was the I/O
system.  In Perl 5.6.0 it was not possible to read in a file in
a foreign encoding, do operations on it, and write it back out.
Thanks to Nick Ing-Simmons' excellent work on the I/O filter
code, this all now works as it should. You can say (for example)

         open $fh, ">:utf8", $filename ;

and data will be written to the file in an UTF8 encoding, converted
automatically as necessary. Similarly

         binmode $fh, ":bytes";

changes the filehandle so that it no longer writes data in a UTF8
encoding. The other missing part was that hash keys couldn't be UTF8.
The problem was that because they're not always full SVs, there's
nowhere to store the information about whether a given hash key is a
UTF8 string or a plain string. Inaba Hiroto contributed a series of
patches to fix that, storing UTF8-ness information in the sign bit
of the key length structure. Thank you very much, Hiroto!

The final missing piece is full UTF8 support in regexes. Jarkko
Hietaniemi is working on that now and has it mostly complete.

But there's more. For years, people have been puzzled and annoyed
by the apparently non-deterministic order in which perl calls the
->DESTROY method on destroyed objects. Ilya Zakharevich contributed a
dismayingly simple patch that seems to fix the problem.

Perl 5.6.1 is sure to be a big improvement over 5.6.0, thanks in no
small part to the efforts of Jarkko, the current pumpking.

* Version Trivia

But when 5.6.1 is released, will it be stable?  Rich Lafferty
reminded me of the Secret to Perl Version Stability: If the version
number has exactly three prime factors, Perl is stable.  For example:

         4.036:      4036   =  2 *  2 * 1009   is stable
         5.004_05:   500405 =  5 * 41 * 2441   is stable
         5.005_03:   500503 = 23 * 47 *  463   is stable

Clearly, 5.6.0 was doomed to be unstable.  But 561 = 3 * 11 * 17, so
the outlook is good.

I don't know just how 5.001m fits into this theory, so please don't
ask.

* New on the Site

In addition to Simon Cozens' usual weekly report in which you can
read more about the UTF8 and DESTROY stuff, we have a surprise
article. I was in Boulder last week and I told Nat Torkington that
I wanted to do a talk at the next Perl conference titled
'Why I Hate Advocacy'. I have been thinking about that for several
months. Nat seemed to like the idea, but over the following week
all the ideas came together for me and I wrote it up for the web site.
So I probably won't give the talk, but we do have an article about it.

* Coming up

Doug Sheppard will return next week with Part 5 of his series on Perl
for beginners.  Also, the long-promised POE article.  (All the delay
is on my end.)

Thank you all.  I will be in touch again next week.

Mark Dominus
Managing Editor

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Article: Why I Hate Advocacy
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/12/advocacy.html?wwwrrr_20001213.txt
Are you an effective Perl advocate? Mark Dominus explains why you
might be advocating Perl the wrong way.

Article: Beginners Intro to Perl - Part 4
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/12/begperl4.html?wwwrrr_20001213.txt
Doug Sheppard teaches us CGI programming in part four of his
series on beginning Perl.

Article: Red Flags Return
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/repair3x.html?wwwrrr_20001213.txt
Readers pointed out errors and suggested more improvements to the
code in my 'Red Flags' articles. As usual, there's more than one
way to do it!

Programming GNOME Applications with Perl - Part 2
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/gnome2.html?wwwrrr_20001213.txt
Simon Cozens shows us how to use Perl to develop applications for
Gnome, the Unix desktop environment.

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