[Buffalo-pm] Toronto-pm's next meeting

[Kevin Christopher]

Buffalo-pm members:

I'm passing along some info from Toronto-pm's Richard Dice about their
meeting next Thursday (April 24). We are all welcome to this and any other
TPM meeting. I'm not planning on going myself, but by all means organize a
car pool among yourselves if you're interested.

Richard will be presenting on the handy debugging module Data::Dumper, and
there may be another presenter or two from KW-pm that evening.

Here's the scoop on next Thursday's meeting and his talk:

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Time:     6:30pm, Thu 24 April 2003

           Arrive approx. 10 minutes earlier than that or you will be
locked out of the elevator by building security!  Note that
if this fate does befall you, you can call up to my [ Riachrd Dice's
]cellphone (416-841-7365) *in this timeperiod only!* and we'll send
someone down to get you.

Location: 2 Bloor Street West (NW corner of Bloor & Yonge, CIBC Tower)
           16th Floor, classroom 8 (but please check again on the day of
the talk! the room may move)

Speaker:  Richard Dice <rdice at dice-con.com>

Title:    Data::Dumper -- is there anything it can't do?

URL:      http://www.dice-con.com/tpm/DataDumper

Description:

This is meant to be a smallish talk regarding the Data::Dumper module.
Once only a part of CPAN, as of Perl 5.8.0 is has been migrated into the
core modlib.

Data::Dumper is used to "stringify" the contents of a Perl variable
(including "complex" variable).  This has two main uses:

     * the saving of a program's state to file, so that a program can
       be stopped and resumed at some future point in time

     * debugging

Examples of these uses will be given, including some (but not all)
"fancy" uses of the module.  Limitations will be discussed.
Alternatives to Data::Dumper will also be discussed (e.g. Storable,
FreezeThaw).

Here's a quick Data::Dumper example...


rdice at RDICELAPTOP /usr/bin/rdice
$ cat dd_test.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use Data::Dumper;

my $foo = { a => { b => { c =>
            [ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, sub { return "Happy Happy Joy Joy" } ] } }
} ;

print Data::Dumper::Dumper($foo);

exit 0;

rdice at RDICELAPTOP /usr/bin/rdice
$ perl dd_test.pl
$VAR1 = {
           'a' => {
                    'b' => {
                             'c' => [
                                      0,
                                      1,
                                      2,
                                      3,
                                      4,
                                      sub { "DUMMY" }
                                    ]
                           }
                  }
         };

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-- Kevin