Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: patch #19...
Message-ID: <9075@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 9 Aug 90 19:25:16 GMT
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 22

Just thought I'd warn you guys--it looks like patch 19 is actually
going to be patch 19..27 or so.  Make sure you've got half a meg
free in your news spool directories...

I guess things have been collecting since March.

Also, while I do a certain amount of QA on a patch, there's been enough
fiddling that I expect there to be a followup patch or two.  For example,
there are some optimizations in there that make certain pathological patterns
run up to 100 times faster.  But optimizations always have a way of biting
you where you aren't expecting it.  There's also an internal change in that
numeric literals used be stored as both strings and doubles, and now they're
just stored as doubles.  This may have some unknown repercussions for people
with odd floating point hardware.  And there's a change in the grammar
to take advantage of the way yacc resolves reduce/reduce conflicts, and I
can't know in advance if this will give some versions of yacc or bison
heartburn.

So if you're faint of heart, you might sit out for a while and see how
things settle.

Larry