use Perl

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                MP3-Mplib-0.01.tar.gz

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        Request entered by: VPARSEVAL (Tassilo von Parseval)
        Request entered on: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 12:15:17 GMT
        Request completed: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 12:15:57 GMT

                Virtually Yours,
                Id: paused,v 1.81 2002/08/02 11:34:24 k Exp k

Another tough session today made the above possible. Perl5.8.0 complained about some readonly values that I tried set somewhere within my XS code. It took a while to find the delinquent. 5.005_03 and 5.6.1 did not have these objections.

In the last moment I decided to use Test::More instead of Test. That made a few rewrites necessary, too.

Also, h2xs obviously screwed up when I created the extension skeleton some months ago. This part was funny actually: When I tested all the constants from mplib.h, Perl failed to export UTF16...but only on this one. UTF16BE and all the other encodings worked ok. I located the error somewhere here:

        static double
        constant_UTF1(char *name, int len, int arg)
        {
                if (4 + 1 >= len ) {
                errno = EINVAL;
                return 0;
                }
                switch (name[4 + 1]) {
                case '\0':
                if (strEQ(name + 4, "6")) { /* UTF1 removed */
        #ifdef UTF16
                        return UTF16;
        #else
                        goto not_there;
        #endif
                }
                case 'B':
                if (strEQ(name + 4, "6BE")) { /* UTF1 removed */
        #ifdef UTF16BE
                        return UTF16BE;
        #else
                        goto not_there;
        #endif


It turned out that the first if-condition was messed up. It should have been:


        if (3 + 1 >= len ) {


I have no explanation for this failure but I find it somehow amusing that even a machine can come up with an incorrect calculation of a string length. This puts my sometimes scaringly silly errors into the right perspective, I think. ;-)

<rant>

Who actually came up with this insane constant handling in XS code? A constant name is cut into strings of variable length and then control is delegated to another suitable constant-function that exclusively deals with constants of a particular prefix. If that is a performance tweak then it is silly since any constant is only retrieved once and after that compiled into a subroutine by AUTOLOAD.

</rant>