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perl5
:
5.004
5.005
For the next release a new scheme was introduced - stable perls would have
even version numbers, development perls would have odd version numbers
Version Pumpking
5.6 Sarathy
5.7 Jarkko
So 5.7 devel leads to 5.8 stable
Unicode in general should be now much more usable than in Perl 5.6.0
(or even in 5.6.1). Unicode can be used in hash keys, Unicode in
regular expressions should work now, Unicode in tr/// should work now,
Unicode in I/O should work now.
5.6 has bugs. It's been described as "Marketing compatible with Unicode"
(I forget by whom). In 5.6, if you put Unicode into a hash key, you get
the bytes out. If you put Unicode into a regular expression which wasn't
expecting Unicode you get bytes out. I don't know about tr///. Output can
be a mismatch of 8 bit characters and Unicode.
Two modules by SADAHIRO Tomoyuki in the core provide Unicode collation
and Unicode normalization; Unicode::Collate and Unicode::Normalize.
You can also mark file handles as being in other encodings, so you can do things like say that the file is in Greek, or Japanese in Shift-JIS, and then PerlIO will translate all the Greek or Japanese characters to the correct Unicode code points.
A module called Via lets you perform arbitrary custom data processing, and
there is perl syntax to let you create automatic temporary files
(open($fh,"+>", undef) || ...) and read/write scalars as memory
buffers (open($fh,'>', \$variable) || ...).
Of course you can do all of these things with tied handles already, but with
PerlIO you can do them in C (or get someone else to do them for you in
C), which makes it much faster)
And some people start doing things like compression...
ithreads is a whole new threading module based (I think) on the work done
by Sarathy to emulate fork on Windows for perl 5.6. It's important for
modperl2, which in turn is for apache2, which has a hybrid process &
thread based architecture. This should give decent modperl performance on
Windows. [As I understand it, apache 1.3 on Windows serves requests using
multiple threads within a single process. modperl isn't threaded, hence
there is only 1 modperl interpreter per apache server, and it becomes
a bottleneck]
make test when you build perl, don't you?)
Sadly, Schwern is not poorer yet, despite a large effort to write tests for all the untested core modules. Also, core perl isn't 100% tested, as it's still possible to find coredumps, as I did on Tuesday.
keys, values or each
iterates over the hash, then it's in for a nasty surprise. Of course, nobody
is that silly. [No no no. Data::Dumper didn't do this. Not at all]
fields.pm) will remain, probably using the new restricted
hashes.
perlbug program. And we'll try to fix it before 5.8.
Jarkko's 5.7.3 release message says:
This is the release 5.7.3 of Perl.
This is the last developer release (5.7.x) before the next major
public release (5.8.0). The current intent is to release Perl 5.8.0
in April or May, the Release Candidate 1 is planned to be released
Monday the 8th of April.
and he says that this plan is currently unchanged.