LPM: October meeting

[David Hempy]

At 07:43 PM 9/25/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>OK, just so we're all on the same page, here's the way I understand
>things.
>
>Our October meeting will be held at KET, at 6pm on the 13th of October.
>Mik will be speaking about the debugger. Are there any other folks that
>want to talk about anything, before I make up the posters? Was the
>notion of having a beginner topic and an advanced topic too optimistic?
>
>Rich

Yes, room is confirmed.  We'll get the pizza ordered by quarter past this time.

As for the beginner topic, I'll throw out an idea that is probably *way*
below most of the Mongers, but would be helpful to me as a Perl novice.  

I would like to learn more about perlish ways of doing things.  Coming from
more procedural languages, perl seems very magical to me the way you can
jump in and start doing useful work in a program without doing a lot of
ancillary work first.  Things like opening files, allocating memory, even
declaring variables for goodness sake!  It seems so seductive and
racy...almost dirty...

I've got some idea of tasks that perl does exceptionally well...greping and
transmorgifying and listing and such.  I would like to see a few sample
tasks, and hear some typical approaches on ways to accomplish it in perl.
Things as simple as "Count the number of words in a file," "Spell check the
Note column in a CSV file," "Ask all females logged in for a date if they
are cute."  

As I said, this is probably not going to be interesting stuff to anyone
devoted to the language enough to go to a Perl meeting.  Some might tell me
to go read "Learning Perl" again.  Maybe they're right.  Anybody else?


-dave


--
David Hempy
Internet Database Administrator
Kentucky Educational Television