Backport of r22311 to 1.4.3.

Hi Dan,

I just noticed that your backport of r22311 to 1.4.3 in r22694 didn't
make use of the backport branch that clkao updated in r22570
(/branches/1.4.x-r22311/) - not too surprising, since it wasn't
mentioned in STATUS.

Anyway, I notice that there is a small difference between the two merges
- clkao's one changes (genericises?) a Perl-specific thingy above the
changed general typemap.

Could someone confirm what the effect of the current state on 1.4.3 is?
I suspect that the answer is that the Perl bindings are still in the
same state as they were in 1.4.2, and so we still need a merge of that
final hunk in STATUS for 1.4.4. (Ironically, I think one result of
this change might been that we managed to wrap the _Ruby_ bindings,
something we didn't intend).

Regards,
Malcolm