Fix (or rewrite) the implementation of the C</(?{...})/> closures.
+=head1 A re-entrant regexp engine
+
+This will allow the use of a regex from inside (?{ }), (??{ }) and
+(?(?{ })|) constructs.
+
=head1 pragmata
=head2 lexical pragmas
Make the peephole optimizer optional.
+=head2 You WANT *how* many
+
+Currently contexts are void, scalar and list. split has a special mechanism in
+place to pass in the number of return values wanted. It would be useful to
+have a general mechanism for this, backwards compatible and little speed hit.
+This would allow proposals such as short circuiting sort to be implemented
+as a module on CPAN.
+
=head2 lexical aliases
Allow lexical aliases (maybe via the syntax C<my \$alias = \$foo>.
The old perltodo notes "This has been done in places, but needs a thorough
code review. Also fchdir is available in some platforms."
-=head2 foreach reverse
-
-The old perltodo notes that we could optimise foreach to iterate in reverse.
-(instead of making a reversed copy on the stack)
-
=head1 Tests
=head2 Make Schwern poorer
=head2 make HTML install work
+=head2 put patchlevel in -v
+
+Currently perl from p4/rsync ships with a patchlevel.h file that usually
+defines one local patch, of the form "MAINT12345" or "RC1". The output of
+perl -v doesn't report that a perl isn't an official release, and this
+information can get lost in bugs reports. Because of this, the minor version
+isn't bumped up util RC time, to minimise the possibility of versions of perl
+escaping that believe themselves to be newer than they actually are.
+
+It would be useful to find an elegant way to have the "this is an interim
+maintenance release" or "this is a release candidate" in the terse -v output,
+and have it so that it's easy for the pumpking to remove this just as the
+release tarball is rolled up. This way the version pulled out of rsync would
+always say "I'm a development release" and it would be safe to bump the
+reported minor version as soon as a release ships, which would aid perl
+developers.
+
=head1 Incremental things
Some tasks that don't need to get done in one big hit.
Tainting would be easier to use if it didn't take documented shortcuts and allow
taint to "leak" everywhere within an expression.
+=head2 Dual life everything
+
+As part of the "dists" plan, anything that doesn't belong in the smallest perl
+distribution needs to be dual lifed. Anything else can be too.
+
=head1 Vague things
Some more nebulous ideas
the dormant C<nswitch> and C<cswitch> ops in F<pp.c>; using these opcodes would
be much faster."
-** Attach/detach debugger from running program
+=head2 Attach/detach debugger from running program
The old perltodo notes "With C<gdb>, you can attach the debugger to a running
program if you pass the process ID. It would be good to do this with the Perl
debugger on a running Perl program, although I'm not sure how it would be done."
ssh and screen do this with named pipes in tmp. Maybe we can too.
+=head2 A decent benchmark
+
+perlbench seems impervious to any recent changes made to the perl core. It would
+be useful to have a reasonable general benchmarking suite that roughly
+represented what current perl programs do, and measurably reported whether
+tweaks to the core improve, degrade or don't really affect performance, to
+guide people attempting to optimise the guts of perl.