New article available on www.perl.com

[mjd-perl-pm@plover.com]

Geoff said that he had no idea that the site was being updated weekly,
so I thought I'd send out an announcement that it was just updated.
This week's feature article is "Why I Hate Advocacy".  Next week we'll
have part 5 in Doug Sheppard's series on Perl for Beginners.

If you were on the mailing list, and if you received the mailing list
mail, you might see something like this:

================================================================


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 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 sopport in regexes.  Jarkko
Hietaniemi is working on that now and has it mostly complete.

But there's yet 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 so 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.

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