[roch-pm] [Fwd: Perl.com Newsletter: Larry Wall -- Apocalypse Two]

Sat May 5 15:28:57 CDT 2001

Larry's Apocalypse series gives a good look into what he has to go through 
in designing a language, and where Perl 6 seems to be going.  Pretty good stuff.

Brian Mathis

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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.  So, without a snappy comback to Simon's last intro,
here's what's new in the world of Perl.

* Perl at large.

The Perl Journal lives! Copies of Issue #20 have been spotted all
over! However, according to the homepage at http://www.tpj.com,
individual subscriptions hadn't shipped as of last week, and are
"awaiting a postage deposit from Earthweb." Still, this is
magnificent news for Perl's finest print periodical. Congrats again
to Jon Orwant for snatching TPJ from the jaws of doom.

Also, MacPerl enters the twenty-first century with the recent
release of 5.6.1-alpha. Congratulations are in order for Chris
Nandor, MacPerl maintainer extraordinaire, who notes on use.perl.org
that MacPerl 5.6.1-alpha "is not ready for production use, there are
a lot of bugs, but it is usable." Mac users are strongly encouraged
to download it and take it for a spin, as the more information can
be collected on the few remaining bugs, the sooner they can be fixed.
You can download copies of the source and binaries at:

     http://macperl.sourceforge.net

Meanwhile, in the wake of his Perl 5+i proposals, Damian Conway has
begun to implement some of his ideas in your favorite programming
language, and mine, Perl 5. Among some of his recent exploits are a
NEXT:: pseudoclass that eases the pain of mixing AUTOLOAD with
multiple inheritance, and an extension of the Perl 5 subroutine
attribute syntax that has to be seen to be believed. Personally,
I think the bug he picked up in India may be making him feverish
yet. Find out more and decide for yourself:

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

* What's new on www.perl.com?

The O'Reilly Network is pleased and proud to bring you the
long-awaited second installment of Larry Wall's Perl Apocalypse,
continuing on his whirlwind guided tour of the issues surrounding
the design and development of Perl 6. In this installment, Larry
covers no fwer than 28 of the over 360 Perl 6 RFCs, focusing this
week on the evolution of basic Perl constructs, like comments,
literals, and variables. This week's Perl Apocalypse is classic
Larry, and practically guaranteed to knock your socks off -- So
roll your browser on up to www.perl.com, 'cause you're sure not
going to want to miss this one!

As if that wasn't enough, Pete Sergeant explores this week the wild
and somewhat wacky world of reversed regular expressions, or
"sexegers". (Get it?) While perl's regular expression syntax is
enormously powerful, there are some common tasks, like formatting
numbers with commas, that aren't so easy or efficient to perform
with ordinary regexes. Using a few simple examples, Pete illustrates
the "sexeger" technique, and discusses how it can be used to optimize
certain matching problems in Perl.

As a side note, after I read this article, I wanted to run out and
write a module that would let me construct sexeger objects and use
them like ordinary qr//-type regexes:

     my $r = Regex::Sexeger->new(... some ordinary regex ...);
     my $string = "... some string we want to match ...";

     $string =~ $r # (or $string =~ /$r/)

The object would then use the sexeger technique transparently. Well,
as far as I can tell, you can't overload =~, so I decided the idea
needed further thought, and I haven't gotten back to it. If you've
got any ideas, I'd love to hear 'em.

Finally, Simon Cozens is back with his (*insert drumroll here*)
perl5-porters digest! The usual bug smashing and feature hacking
continues, with one potentially exciting note being Robin Houston's
continuing work on B::Deparse. Simon writes that "The Deparser is
particularly important, because it shows us just how much we can
get out of Perl bytecode. What would happen, for instance, if
someone rewrote the Deparser to output not Perl, but another
language?" Like, maybe, thinking back to Larry's announcement at
TPC4, Perl 6? Read more about it at www.perl.com!

So, until next week, fair Perl hackers! We now return you to your
regularly scheduled E-mail.

SDE

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Off The Wall: Larry Wall: Apocalypse Two
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/03/wall.html?wwwrrr_20010501.txt
Larry Wall produces the next episode in his series of
"Apocalypses": glimpses into the design of Perl 6. This week, he
explains how Perl 6 will differ from Perl 5 in terms of chapter
2 of the Camel Book: fundamental data types, variables and the
context and scoping of the language.

Reversing Regular Expressions
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/01/expressions.html?wwwrrr_20010501.txt
There are some cases where searching a regular expression is
faster backwards. Pete Sergeant introduces us to sexegers,
regular expressions (regexes) operating in reverse.

Quick Start Guide with SOAP Part Two
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/24/soap.html?wwwrrr_20010501.txt
Paul Kulchenko continues his SOAP::Lite guide and shows how to
build more complex SOAP servers.

MSXML, It's Not Just for VB Programmers Anymore
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/17/msxml.html?wwwrrr_20010501.txt
Shawn Ribordy puts the tech back into the MSXML parser by using
Perl instead of Visual Basic.

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-- 
Brian Mathis
Direct Edge
http://www.directedge.com

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