perl 3.0 patch #7 (combined patch)

The select operator didn't interpret bit vectors correctly on
non-little-endian machines such as Suns.  Rather than bollux up
the rather straightforward interpretation of bit vectors, I made
the select operator rearrange the bytes as necessary.  So it
is still true that vec($foo,0,1) refers to the first bit of the
first byte of string $foo, even on big-endian machines.

The send() socket operator didn't correctly allow you to specify
a TO argument even though this was documented.  (The TO argument
is desirable for sending datagram packets.)

In ANSI standard C, they decided that longjmp() didn't have to
guarantee anything about registers.  Several people sent me
some patches that declared certain variables as volatile
rather than register for such compilers.  Rather than go that
route, however, I wanted to keep some of these variables in
registers, so I just made sure that the important ones are
restored from non-register locations after longjmp().  I think
"volatile" encourages people to punt too easily.

The foreach construct still had some difficulty with two nested
foreach loops referring to the same array, and to a single
foreach that called its enclosing subroutine recursively.
I think I've got this straight now.  You wouldn't think
a little iterator would give some much trouble.

A pattern like /b*/ wouldn't match a null string before the
first character.  And certain patterns didn't match correctly
at end of string.  The upshot was that

$_ = 'aaa';
s/b*/x/g;

produced 'axaxa' rather than the expected 'xaxaxax'.  This has
been fixed.  Note however that the split operator will still
not match a null string before the first character, so that
split(/b*/,'aaa') produces ('a','a','a'), not ('','a','a','a','').

The saga continues, and hopefully concludes.  I realized I was
fighting a losing battle trying to grep out all the includes
from <time.h> and <sys/time.h>.  There are just too many funny
includes, symbols, links and such on too many kinds of machines.
Configure now compiles a test program several different ways to
figure out which way to define the various symbols.

Configure now lets you pick between yacc or bison for your
compiler compiler.  If you pick bison, be sure you have alloca
somewhere on your system.

The ANSI function strerror() is now supported where available.
In addition, errno may now be a macro with an lvalue, so errno
isn't declared extern if it's defined as a macro in <errno.h>.
The memcpy() and memset() are now allowed to return void.

There is now support for sys/ndir.h for systems such as Xenix.
It's now also easier to cross compile on a 386 for a 286.

DG/UX has functions setpgrp2() and getpgrp2() to keep the BSD
sematics separate from the SystemV semantics.  So now we have
yet another wonderful non-standard way of doing things.  There
is also a utime.h file which lets them put time stamps on
files to microsecond resolutions, though perl doesn't take
advantage of this.

The list of optional libraries to be searched for now includes
-lnet_s, -lnsl_s, -lsocket and -lx.  We can now find .h files
down in /usr/include/lan.

Microport systems have problems.  I've added some CRIPPLED_CC
support for them, but you still need to read the README.uport
file for some extra rigamarole.

In the README file, there are now hints for what to do if your
compile doesn't work right, and specific hints for machines
known to require certain switches.

The grep operator with a simple first argument, such as grep(1,@array),
didn't work right.  That one seems silly, but grep($_,@array)
didn't work either.  Now it does.

A /$pat/ followed by a // wrongly freed the runtime pattern twice,
causing ill-will on the part of all concerned.

The ord() function now always returns positive even on signed-char
machines.  This seems to be less surprising to people.  If you
still want a signed value on such machines, you can always use
unpack.

The lib/complete.pl file misused the @_ array.  The array has
been renamed.

In the man page, I clarified that s`pat`repl` does command
substitution on the replacement string, that $timeleft from
select() is likely not implemented in many places, and that
the qualified form package'filehandle works as well as
$package'variable.  It is also explicitly stated that
certain identifiers (non-alpha, STDIN, etc.) are always
resolved in package main's symbol table.

Perl didn't grok setuid scripts that had a space on the
first line between the shebang and the interpreter name.

In stab.c, sighandler() may now return either void or int,
depending on the value of VOIDSIG.

You couldn't debug a script that used -p or -n because they would
try to slap an extra } on the end of the perldb.pl file.  This
upset the parser.

The interpration of strings like " ''$foo'' " caused problems
because the tokener didn't realize that neither single quote
following the variable was indicating a package qualifier.
(It knew the last one wasn't, but was confused about the first one.)
Merely changing an if to a while fixed it.  Well, two if's.

Another place we don't want ' to be interpreted as a package
qualifier is if it's the delimiter for an m'pat' or s'pat'repl'.
These have been grandfathered to look like a match and a substitution.

There were a couple of problems in a2p.  First, the ops array
was dimensioned too big on 286's.  Second, there was a problem
involving passing a union where I should've passed a member of
the union, which meant user-defined functions didn't work right
on some machines.

1 files changed, 22 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/README b/README
index df960443e3..eea93d8f9d 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -60,6 +60,27 @@ Installation
 
     This will attempt to make perl in the current directory.
 
+    If you can't compile successfully, try adding a -DCRIPPLED_CC flag.
+    (Just because you get no errors doesn't mean it compiled right!)
+    This simplifies some complicated expressions for compilers that
+    get indigestion easily.  If that has no effect, try turning off
+    optimization.  If you have missing routines, you probably need to
+    add some library or other, or you need to undefine some feature that
+    Configure thought was there but is defective or incomplete.
+
+    Some compilers will not compile or optimize the larger files without
+    some extra switches to use larger jump offsets or allocate larger
+    internal tables.  It's okay to insert rules for specific files into
+    Makefile.SH, since a default rule only take effect in the
+    absence of a specific rule.
+
+    The 3b2 needs to turn off -O.
+    AIX/RT may need a -a switch and -DCRIPPLED_CC.
+    SGI machines may need -Ddouble="long float".
+    Ultrix (2.3) may need to hand assemble teval.s with a -J switch.
+    SCO Xenix may need -m25000 for yacc.
+    Genix needs to use libc rather than libc_s, or #undef VARARGS.
+
 5)  make test
 
     This will run the regression tests on the perl you just made.
@@ -88,7 +109,7 @@ Installation
     Context diffs are the best, then normal diffs.  Don't send ed scripts--
     I've probably changed my copy since the version you have.
 
-    Watch for perl patches in comp.sources.bugs.  Patches will generally be
+    Watch for perl patches in comp.lang.perl.  Patches will generally be
     in a form usable by the patch program.  If you are just now bringing up
     perl and aren't sure how many patches there are, write to me and I'll
     send any you don't have.  Your current patch level is shown in patchlevel.h.