Grr. I had a notion to try and work out what code Perl was actually using to parse doubles and 'forgot' my rule of the last few years: don't go looking in the recent perl sources; it will only piss you off.

It pissed me off. It used to be that you could compile Perl to use stdio, and I thought I might do that for 5.22; but apparently that is not longer possible!

Perl is still my go-to language for getting stuff done in a hurry; and in many cases even when the program has ultimately to be written in some compiled language, whether for speed or to satisfy some other requirement, I still use Perl to prototype and only convert to C or C++ or D or whatever once I have the code working.

But for the last few years, the P5 development has become introspective, even introverted; titivating instead of innovating; throwing any weird idea that comes up into the code base only to remove it a build or two later. I've lost track of the number of "experimental" additions that have come and inevitably gone.

It's just a shame that PerlIO isn't so easily back out and discarded! :(