[roch-pm] [Fwd: Perl Newsletter: Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good]

Thu Apr 5 01:31:30 CDT 2001

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Perl Newsletter: Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 17:25:39 -0700
From: Perl Newsletter <elists-admin at oreillynet.com>
To: "Perl Newsletter" <perl at paprika.oreillynet.com>

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Greetings, perl.com subscribers.

This is Schuyler Erle, web hacker for the O'Reilly Network, and it
is my honor and pleasure to bring you the latest www.perl.com
newsletter. Without forking a subprocess, here's what's new in the
world of Perl.

* Perl at large.

The big news this week is that the outlines of Perl 6 are starting
to emerge! Several glimpses of the future of Perl have been published
in various places on the Net, some of them to be taken more
seriously than others.[1] The indefatigable Damian Conway,
indentured servant to the Perl community, has stepped forward with
his "Perl 5+i -- an exploration of a possible future in an alternate
reality." In his diary at yetanother.org, Damian writes:

     Just after I returned from India, Nat Torkington contacted me.
     Wearing his Perl 6 Project Manager hat (the steel one with the
     big spike on top), he asked me to put together my personal
     "take" on what Perl 6 might look like, based on the 300+ RFCs
     that were submitted late last year...

The end result is 7,000 lines of design recommendation, spanning 42
outlines and covering about 240 design decisions, which cover syntax
and semantics, data types, I/O, object orientation (naturally), and
much, much more. This stuff is worth a read, if you're feeling brave,
or at least a brief perusal. You can find out all about it in Damian's
ongoing diary at:

     http://www.yetanother.org/damian/diary_April_2001.html

Damian notes, "This is not a draft of the Perl 6 language. Larry has
already explained that he's been journeying well outside the boundaries
that Nat asked me to explore. So Perl 6 will not only be stranger than
I have imagined, it will be stranger than I have been permitted to
imagine!"

And, on that note, we come to...

* What's new on www.perl.com? (a/k/a apocalypse -r now)

At last! www.perl.com is almost elated to present Larry Wall himself,
in the first of an ongoing series on the design of Perl 6. Larry
introduces this series as an Apocalypse, which sounds a bit scary,
but, as he points out, "Here I mean it in the good sense: a Revealing.
An Apocalypse is supposed to reveal good news to good people. (And if
it also happens to reveal bad news to bad people, so be it. Just don't
be bad.)"  With this first installment, Larry presents some of the
approaches he's been taking toward the Perl 6 RFCs, and begins laying
out his vision for the design of Perl 6. This week, he covers these
RFCs:

      16: Keep default Perl free of constraints such as warnings and strict.
      26: Named operators versus functions
      28: Perl should stay Perl.
      73: All Perl core functions should return objects
     141: This Is The Last Major Revision

Of course, Larry continues to deliver his ideas in that
characteristic style we've all come to know and love. Come check it
out. You'll dig it. (I sure did.)

Also, Simon Cozens returns to push the envelope with his perl5-porters
digest. This week, more on autoloading Errno via %!, some discussion
of pack and unpack, taint checking in the test suite, and a whole grab
bag of odds and ends, sure to delight and mystify the whole family.

Until next week, illustrious Perl hackers! We now return you to your
regularly scheduled E-mail.

SDE

[1] Rumor has it that a major technology news provider contacted
ActiveState early this week to ask about their Parrot strategy, and
find out when they were planning to support Parrot in Komodo.

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Off The Wall: Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/02/wall.html?wwwrrr_20010402.txt
With breathless expectation, the Perl community has been waiting
for Larry Wall to reveal how Perl 6 is going to take shape. In
the first of a series of "apocalyptic" articles, Larry reveals
the ugly, the bad, and the good parts of the Perl 6 design
process.

A Simple Gnome Panel Applet
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/03/27/gnome.html?wwwrrr_20010402.txt
Build a useful Gnome application in an afternoon! Joe Nasal
explains some common techniques, including widget creation,
signal handling, timers, and event loops.

DBI is OK
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/03/dbiokay.html?wwwrrr_20010402.txt
Chromatic makes a case for using DBI and shows how it works well
in the same situations as DBIx::Recordset.

Article: Creating Modular Web Pages With EmbPerl
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/03/embperl.html?wwwrrr_20010402.txt
If you have ever wished for an "include" HTML tag to reuse large
chunks of HTML, you are in luck. Neil Gunton explains how
Embperl solves the problem.

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