perl 3.0 patch #13 (combined patch)

perl 3.0 patch #13 (combined patch)

I added the list slice operator: (LIST)[LIST]

$hexdigit = (0..9,'a','b','c','d','e','f')[$fourbits]

There was no way to cut stuff out of the middle of an array
or to insert stuff without copying the head and tail of the array,
which is gross.  I added the splice operator to do this:

@oldelems = splice(@array,$offset,$len,LIST)

    Equivalencies:
splice(@array,0,1)
splice(@array,0,0,$x,$y)
splice(@array,-1,1)
splice(@array,$#array+1,0,$x,$y)
splice(@array,$x,1,$y)

Having -lPW as one of the libraries that Configure looks for
was causing lots of people grief.  It was only there for
people using bison who otherwise don't have alloca(), so I
zapped it.

Some of the questions that supported the ~name syntax didn't
say so, and some that should have supported it didn't.  Now they do.

If you selected the manp directory for your man pages, the manext
variable was left set to 'n'.

When Configure sees that the optional libraries have previously
been determined in config.sh, it now believes it rather than using
the list it generates.

In the test for byteorder, some compilers get indigestion on the
constant 0x0807060504030201.  It's now split into two parts.

Some compilers don't like it if you put CCFLAGS after the .c file
on the command line.  Some of the Configure tests did this.

On some systems, the test for vprintf() needs to have stdio.h
included in order to give valid results.

Some machines don't support the volatile declaration as applied
to a pointer.  The Configure test now checks for this.
Also, cmd.c had some VOLATILE declarations on pointed-to items
rather than the pointers themselves, causing MIPS heartburn.

In Makefile.SH, some of the t*.c files needed to have dependencies
on perly.h.  Additionally, some parallel makes can't handle a
dependency line with two targets, so the perly.h and perl.c lines
have been separated.  Also, when perly.h is generated, it will
now have a declaration added to it for yylval--bison wasn't supplying
this.

The construct "while (s/x//) {}" was partially fixed in patch 9, but
there were still some weirdnesses about it.  Hopefully these are
ironed out now.

If you did a switch structure based on numeric value, and there
was some action attached to when the variable is greater than
the maximum specified value, that action would not happen.  Instead,
any action for values under the minimum value happened.

The debugger had some difficulties after patch 9, due to changes
in the meaning of @array in a scalar context, and because of
an pointer error in patch 9.

Because of the fix in patch 9 to let return () work right, the
construct "return (@array)" did counter-intuitive things.  It
now returns an array value.  "return @array" and "return (@array)"
now mean the same thing.

A pack of ascii strings could call str_ncat() with negative length
when the length of the string was greater than the length specified
for the field.

Patch 9 fixed *name values so that the wouldn't collide with ordinary
string values, but there were two places I missed, one in perldb,
and one in the sprintf code.

Perl looks at commands it is going to execute to see if it can
bypass /bin/sh and execute them directly.  Ordinarily = is not
a shell metacharacter, but in a command like "system 'FOO=bar command'"i
it indicates that /bin/sh should be used, since it's setting an
environment variable.  It now does that (other than that construct,
the = character is still not a shell metacharacter).

If a runtime pattern to split happens to be null, it was being
interpreted as if it were a space, that is, as the awk-emulating
split.  It now splits all characters apart, since that's more in
line with what people expect, and the other behavior wasn't documented.

Patch 9 added the reserved word "pipe".  The scripts eg/g/gsh and
/eg/scan/scanner used pipe as filehandle since they were written
before the recommendation of upper-case filehandles was devised.
They now use PIPE.

The undef $/ command was supposed to let you slurp in an entire
binary file with one <>, but it didn't work as advertised.

Xenix systems have been having problems with Configure setting
up ndir right.  Hopefully this will work better now, but it's
possible the changes will blow someone else up.  Such is life...

The construct (LIST,) is now legal, so that you can say

@foo = (
1,
2,
3,
);

Various changes were made to the documentation.

In double quoted strings, you could say \0 to mean the null
character.  In pattern matches, only \000 was allowed since
\0 was taken to be a \<digit> backreference.  Since it doesn't
make sense to refer to the whole matched string before it's done,
there's no reason \0 can't mean null in a pattern too.  So now
it does.

You could modify a numeric variable by using substr as an lvalue,
and if you then reference the variable numerically, you'd get
the old number out rather than one derived from the new string.
Now the old number is invalidated on lvalued substr.

The test t/op.mkdir should create directories 0777 rather than 0666.

As Randal requested, the last semicolon of a program is now optional.
Actually, he just asked for -e 'prog' to have that behaviour, but
it seemed reasonable to generalize it slightly.  It's been that
way with eval for some time.