The streets were pretty quiet, which was nice. They're always quiet here
at that time: you have to be wearing a black jacket to be out on the
streets between seven and nine in the evening, and not many people in the
area have black jackets. It's just one of those things. I currently live
in Colour Neighbourhood, which is for people who are heavily into colour.
All the streets and buildings are set for instant colourmatch: as you
walk down the road they change hue to offset whatever you're wearing.
When the streets are busy it's kind of intense, and anyone prone to
epileptic seizures isn't allowed to live in the Neighbourhood, however
much they're into colour.
- Michael Marshall Smith, "Only Forward"
It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.2.
This is the third DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5112delta.pod" inside the distribution.
You can download the 5.11.2 release from:
http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/perl-5.11.2/
The release's SHA1 signatures are:
2988906609ab7eb00453615e420e47ec410e0077 perl-5.11.2.tar.gz
We welcome your feedback on this release. If you discover issues with Perl 5.11.2, please use the 'perlbug' tool included in this distribution to report them. If Perl 5.11.2 works well for you, please use the 'perlthanks' tool included with this distribution to tell the all-volunteer development team how much you appreciate their work.
If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior stable versions of Perl wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development version which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code.
Notable changes in this release:
- It is now possible to overload the C operator
- Extension modules can now cleanly hook into the Perl parser to define new kinds of keyword-headed expression and compound statement
- The lowest layers of the lexer and parts of the pad system now have C APIs available to XS extensions
- Use of C<:=> to mean an empty attribute list is now deprecated
Abhijit Menon-Sen, Abigail, Ben Morrow, Bo Borgerson, Brad Gilbert, Bram, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Daniel Frederick Crisman, Dave Rolsky, David E. Wheeler, David Golden, Eric Brine, Father Chrysostomos, Frank Wiegand, Gerard Goossen, Gisle Aas, Graham Barr, Harmen, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jerry D. Hedden, Jesse Vincent,
Karl Williamson, Kevin Ryde, Leon Brocard, Nicholas Clark, Paul Marquess, Philippe Bruhat, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Sisyphus, Steffen Mueller, Steve Hay, Steve Peters, Vincent Pit, Yuval Kogman, Yves Orton, and Zefram.
Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish.
Jesse Vincent or a delegate will release Perl 5.11.3 on December 20, 2009. Ricardo Signes will release Perl 5.11.4 on January 20, 2010. Steve Hay will release Perl 5.11.5 on February 20, 2010.
Regards, Léon
OOPSLA 2009 happened a few weeks ago. OOPSLA stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications and I've always been quite interested in the conference. The proceedings of the conference aren't put online, but I've managed to find two interesting papers:
A Market-Based Approach to Software Evolution (PDF) tries to imagine an open market which is targetted around fixing bugs and improving software. It's quite interesting as it's quite similar to a proposal from Nicholas on spending other people's money. The authors point out many potential flaws.
The Commenting Practice of Open Source (PDF) analyses projects on Ohloh and tries to spot commenting trends. "We find that comment density is independent of team and project size", but they find that it varies from language to language. "Java has the highest mean of comment lines per source lines at.. one comment line for three source code lines" and "Perl has the lowest mean with.. one comment line for nine source code lines". They list as future work to find out why this might be the case.
