Hi,
I'm trying to build Gtk2-1.22 on Win32 with perl-5.8.0.
It builds ok, but nearly all of the tests fail because of a syntax error in TestHelper.pm, which is one of the files that ship with the Gtk2 source. Surprisingly, (to me at least), identical syntax is considered fine in both perl-5.10.0 and perl-5.12.0.
The actual error is: 
C:\build\Gtk2-1.222>perl -Mblib -c blib\lib/Gtk2/TestHelper.pm
syntax error at blib\lib/Gtk2/TestHelper.pm line 98, near "ok "
syntax error at blib\lib/Gtk2/TestHelper.pm line 100, near "}"
blib\lib/Gtk2/TestHelper.pm had compilation errors.

[download]
And here's the relevant section of the TestHelper.pm: 
sub ok_idle ($;$) {
88:    my ($testsub, $test_name) = @_;
89:    run_main {
90:    # 0 Test::More::ok
91:    # 1 this block's ok() call
92:    # 2 idle callback in run_main
93:    # 3 Gtk2::main call in run_main
94:     # 4 Gtk2::main call in run_main (again)
95:     # 5 ok_idle
96:     # 6 the caller we want to print
97:     local $Test::Builder::Level = 6;
98:     ok ($testsub->(), $test_name);
99:     }
100: }

[download]
Does anyone know why perl-5.8 sees that as syntactically erroneous ? ... and what do do about it ?

I wondered if it might be something to do with the antiquated version of Test::Simple/Test::Builder I was running, so I updated to 0.96, and updated ExtUtils::MakeMaker to 6.57. Both of those modules passed all tests while building, but the syntax error persists.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to syntax error - perl-5.8 only by syphilis

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