[MacPerl] Big weirdness in MacPerl 5.1.4r4

[Angus McIntyre <angus@pobox.com>]

Apologies if these are recently-asked questions ... I've just rejoined the
MacPerl list, so if everyone's been hotly debating this for the past week,
well, I haven't seen it. Anyway ...

I've just spent the morning sweating over a script which used to run
perfectly and which, without being modified, suddenly started behaving
bizarrely. After much headscratching, I realised that the last time I ran
it successfully was the day before I upgraded from MacPerl 5.1.3r2 to
MacPerl 5.1.4r4 ...

It looks to me as if two things (at least) have changed:

   1. A construct of the form:

         LABEL: {
            &foo, last LABEL if $bar;
            &baz, last LABEL if $quux;
         }

      No longer returns a value. Previously, if '$bar' was true, then
      the value of this construct would have been whatever was returned
      by '&foo'. This seems no longer to be the case.

   2. Something has happened to I/O redirection. I use constructs of the
      form:

         open(STDOUT,">foo) || die "can't open 'foo': $!";
	 ... call subroutines ...
         close(STDOUT);

      The subroutines call 'print' to output stuff to the file 'foo'. In
      the past, this worked fine. Now, it seems to be more or less random
      whether anything gets written to 'foo' or not. I had an idea that
      writing something in the same subroutine in which the redirection
      was performed might improve matters, but if so, it doesn't seem to
      do it consistently.

   3. I also managed to crash MacPerl completely by hitting Cmd-.; like
      a fool, I forgot to take a Macsbug dump of the result, but I will
      next time if I manage to reproduce the error.

Have I had a brain haemorrhage, or has MacPerl? I thought all these things
were legal, but perhaps this is sloppy code which MacPerl has now tightened
up on. If so, please let me down gently ...

And in the meantime, is MacPerl 5.1.3r2 still available anywhere?

System info: MacPerl 5.1.4r4 (not BigMacPerl) running on a PowerMac
8500/180 under System 7.5.5.

Thanks
	A

--
angus@pobox.com                                   http://pobox.com/~angus/

 "My loathings are simple: stupidity,            [Vladimir Nabokov]
  oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."



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