On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 10:38:47PM +0100, Dave Mitchell wrote:
> One of the reasons I used numerical accuracy as an example was because
> in Perl 5, Nick's mini-essay on his stirling work *is* buried somewhere
> in the middle of the 10,000 line sv.c, and thus probably hasn't been seen
> by most people. If there was a .dev file, it would (hopefully) become a
> well-known starting point and thus things in it would more likely be
> drawn to the attention of the reader earlier.
Hmm. But you're right too. I want them in both places.
Well, more accurately, I think I'd agree that the overview documentation
deserves not to be in sv.c, but all the "don't do this here" or "you don't
need to worry about that here" stay inline. I *think* that means I'd like
comments such as this:
/* IV not precise. No need to convert from PV, as NV
conversion would already have cached IV if it detected
that PV->IV would be better than PV->NV->IV
flags already correct - don't set public IOK. */
to stay where they are, but the description (and health warning) maybe
should come out. I guess the distinction should be that in perl5, sv.c
does lots of things, and that description needs to stay together with the
numeric conversion code. If the numeric conversion code got to live in its
own file, then sv_convert.c and sv_convert.dev would make sense, as it
ought to be obvious to anyone fundamentally chaining sv_convert.c that they
had better look at and correct sv_convert.dev
It's just that as is, perl5's sv.dev would have essays on SV allocation
strategies, SV copying routines, SV number conversion, SV string conversion,
SV setting routines (there are a lot of variants of these), magic, recycling
unused SVs, SV string comparison, sv_gets, sprintf and cloning. And that
list may not be complete. I had no idea so much was in there.
Nicholas Clark
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