Perl 5.6.1 Released, My Precioussss...

Pudge tells me that perl 5.6.1 is released. Tell your boss you won't get any work done today, you have to, er, upgrade your personal knowledgebase of evolving regularly expressional technology. Then test every one of the bugfixes, like ""a\nxb\n" =~ /(?!\A)x/m". Pick your favorite new feature or bugfix from the announcement and tell us about it.

Comments

Best fix?

[YuppieScum]

Has to be

Infinity is now recognized as a number.

Now we can write the code for the Infinate Improbability Drive...

Re:how do these people find bugs to fix?

[Masem]

To be truthful, someone generally easily finds a bug in the regex engine about twice a month. Yes, they tend to be on the most complex of regexes, but they are still there and still need to be fixed. Plus memory issues and the typical details you get into with any program.

how do these people find bugs to fix?

[Bistromat]

with a language as utterly inexplicable as perl, i wonder how programmers *find* bugs, especially in later releases, where the bugs are that much more obscure.

"Say, Cletus, ah jist noticed that "a\nxb\n" =~ /(?!\A)x/m doesn't properly eval-yoo-ate for certain prop'rties of 'nxb'.

then again, i suppose it's about as easy as finding all the little discrepancies between Microsoft's idea of C++ and the ANSI standard -- a famous example is Microsoft's interpretation of the scope of variables declared inside the conditional section of a for loop. with "for(int i..." in standard C++, i's scope is for the duration of the loop. in MSVC, you've just declared a new variable, so putting two for loops in a row with the same variable initialization will cause compiler errors which you *shouldn't be seeing*.

--nick

Just wondered

[Salieri]

It just occurred to me, how many departments does slashdot HAVE? I've seen hundred and hundreds already. Where do you find managers and resources for an operation that large?

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