Add partial summary for 2012-09-10

2012/09/10.md

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+Perl 5 Porters Weekly: September 10-September 16, 2012
+======================================================
+
+Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic on
+the perl5-porters email list.  Once again subroutine signatures dominated
+the list. I'll put all of the discussion about them at the end of this
+summary.
+
+This week's dusty thread is [CALL FOR DOCS: how to dual life?][1] from the
+week of August 6, 2012.  Rik was looking for a volunteer to document the
+process of dual-lifing core code. He specifically called out Tie::Scalar and
+Time::local.  Anyone have any insight into this?  Contact [Ricardo
+Signes][2].
+
+This week's quote of the week is about an epic csh behavior relating to
+getcwd. As if you needed more reasons to [avoid csh][].
+
+    Csh does not rely on PWD.  Instead, it does a getcwd all by itself.
+    It then prepends 'set cwd =' and evals the result.  Thus interesting
+    things happen if the directory happens to have any csh metacharacters
+    in its name.
+
+Topics this week:
+
+* EXISTS and SCALAR return values are treated differently
+* 5.14.3 approaches
+* PATCH: pack()ing long words
+* rxres_save etc (was Re: Fix for recursive substitution)
+* given/when/~~ "final" thoughts (ha ha ha)
+* Changing the Perl error message when a module is not found
+* Named prototypes (again)
+
+**EXISTS and SCALAR return values are treated differently**
+
+I saved this thread because Yves Orton mentioned he had built some code to
+collect and show detailed hash utilizaton stats.  The background for this
+thread had to do with the return values of EXISTS and SCALAR in tied hashes.
+
+[Read the thread][3]
+
+**5.14.3 approaches**
+
+Dominic Hargreaves announced that he's doing some work to get a 5.14.3
+maintenance release shipped, and so was looking for any overlooked patches
+which hadn't been part of the cherrymaint process. The first RC is due in
+September.
+
+[Read the announcement][4]
+
+**PATCH: pack()ing long words**
+
+[Last month][5], I noted that David Cantrell was proposing a new pack syntax that
+would take arbitrary length words. This week he submitted a set of patches
+to reserve the proposed syntax in blead.
+
+[Read the thread][6]
+
+**rxres_save etc (was Re: Fix for recursive substitution)**
+
+Nicholas Clark wrote an email saying that rxres_save() seems to do too much
+work in the perl core.  The extra steps apparently date back to a 1997 patch
+intended for DBD::Oracle. Both Dave Mitchell and Yves Orton think a rethink
+and clean up is overdue for the way regex state is saved for potentially
+re-entrant/recursive calls.
+
+[Read the thread][7]
+
+**given/when/~~ "final" thoughts (ha ha ha)**
+
+Ricardo posted a summary of his view of smartmatch:
+
+    $x ~~ undef                                                                   
+    $x ~~ $overloaded_object                                                      
+    $x ~~ sub {}                                                                  
+    $x ~~ regex                                                                   
+    ...or fail                                                                    
+
+    ...with when:
+
+    when ("foo") # str eq
+    when (12345) # num ==
+    when ($x)    # ~~
+    when { ... } # block evaluates true
+
+    when breaks the enclosing topicalizer
+
+And later, he wrote:
+
+    I feel like no matter what, given/when/~~ are really balancing on the
+    very very thin edge of "can be worth the complexity."  I really do not
+    relish the idea of all the required work being done only to realize that
+    we've gone from unbearable to just barely bearable.
+
+Which got a couple of +1s and surprisingly few replies given how popular
+this thread was two weeks ago. 
+
+[Read the thread][8]
+
+**Changing the Perl error message when a module is not found**
+
+Michael Stapelberg posted a suggestion to make the "module not found" 
+error message friendlier to newbies.  One proposed variation I liked was 
+
+    Can't locate LWP/UserAgent.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl
+    /usr/local/lib/perl/5.12.4 /usr/local/share/perl/5.12.4 /usr/lib/perl5
+    /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.12 /usr/share/perl/5.12
+    /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at -e line 1. 
+    BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.
+
+    The above error is most likely caused by Perl not finding the module
+    LWP::UserAgent. Try installing LWP::UserAgent from your distribution
+    or via CPAN. Run 'perldoc perlmodinst' for more information.
+
+The thread veered into a digression about having or adding "real" exception
+objects into the core (someday.)
+
+[Read the thread][9]
+
+**Named prototypes (again)**
+
+I O U a summary to be named later
+
+
+[avoid csh]: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
+[1]: http://byte-me.org/perl-5-porters-weekly-august-6-august-12-2012/#5
+[2]: mailto:rjbs@cpan.org
+[3]: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg191905.html
+[4]: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg192050.html
+[5]: http://byte-me.org/perl-5-porters-weekly-august-13-august-19-2012/#1
+[6]: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg192076.html
+[7]: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg192287.html
+[8]: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg192299.html
+[9]: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg192365.html
+
+