[Rehovot-pm] Report on the Last Rehovot.pm Meeting

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

this is my report on the last Rehovot.pm meeting. I'd like to blog it, but 
I'll see about.

Well, I arrived by train in time, as the train was right on schedule, but this 
time it took me a lot of time to find the building (I should consult the map 
next time) so I arrived just in time. There I saw Gabor and also met his son, 
as well as Jaime (= "Hayim") Prilusky. Other people arrived momentarily 
including Ilan, the nefarious Pythoneer spy (just kidding about that) as well 
as someone new who was interested in using Perl to fetch stock data from the 
stocks' agency sites and ran into a few problems.

In any case, this time no one brought any bourekas (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek ) so I became hungry during the recess 
and had to eat some Bisli (an Israeli snack) I brought from home. Next time 
I'll make sure to: 1. Coordinate who will bring Bourekas. 2. Bring some spare 
coins for the vending machines.

In any case, we waited a little and started the presentation, which as noted 
earlier was about Perl 6. Not too many people came, but there were between 8 
and 10 people I think. The presentation was different from Gabor's old 
presentation about Perl 6, and used slides with a smaller amount of text on 
them, and primarily one or two code samples.

The presentation sparked some discussions. Among them:

1. We noted that when entering text on the Rakudo REPL then .chars() which 
should return the count of characters returned an incorrect result for Unicode 
characters, including Hebrew. As I learned later on IRC, this was a semi-known 
issue and it didn't work very well for some reason.

In Perl 6, there is no longer length and there are only chars() (for 
characters) and bytes() (for bytes).

2. We noted that the multiple-comparison conditional notation - 
«if 0 <= $percent <= 100» emulated Python.

3. Again there was interest in the junctions («if ($n == 3|44|505)»).

4. We discussed the new Perl 6 regular expressions including the ":" operator 
which stops the backtracking and recursion at this point.

5. There was some discussion about sub-classing Perl 6's grammars.

6. We discussed testing briefly. I told that perl-5.12.0 already had over 
300,000 test assertions, in comparison to ruby's few thousand tests (which 
Gabor said some of them still failed for him). 

---------------------

I should note that I noticed that there was Firefox 2.0.0.x installed on the 
computers we had there, and that there was a nasty Firewall there that blocked 
IRC.

Maybe I'll recall more stuff later on. In any case, we ran out of slides 
relatively early, and I left to catch the train. I had to switch to a 
different train at the end station, and then arrived at the Tel Aviv 
university's train station, where my father waited for me. After I arrived 
home I updated Rakudo from git/svn and tested the Unicode bug and IRCed about 
it. :-)

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Interview with Ben Collins-Sussman - http://shlom.in/sussman

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