[roch-pm] [Fwd: Perl.com Newsletter: Taking Lessons From Traffic Lights]

Tue May 29 22:21:12 CDT 2001

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Perl.com Newsletter: Taking Lessons From Traffic Lights
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 15:24:20 -0700
From: Perl Newsletter <elists-admin at oreillynet.com>
To: "Perl Newsletter" <perl at paprika.oreillynet.com>

          www.perl.com update
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Hello, world.

This is Simon Cozens, www.perl.com managing editor, stepping in
to write the perl.com newsletter this week. It's been quite a
busy week for Perl, so without further ado, let's see what's been
happening.

* Perl at large.

A few weeks ago, I reported on the establishment of a mailing list
for Perl beginners - beginners at perl.org. From what I hear, it's
been extremely successful, with 1300 messages coming in last month.
We'll be bringing you a lot more about the beginners list in our
featured article next week. This week, Casey West, the founder
of the list, and Ask Bjorn Hansen, the curator of perl.org,
announced a "daily tips" mailing list. If you subscribe to this
list by sending an email to daily-tips-subscribe at perl.org, you'll
receive a handy Perl programming tip in your inbox every day.

They've also been working on a web site for tutorials and beginners'
articles about Perl:

     http://learn.perl.org/

Currently, there's not much there, other than the FAQ for the mailing
list:

     http://learn.perl.org/beginners-faq

But they're looking for people to add content. If you think you could
contribute a tutorial or guidance, why not subscribe to their workers
mailing list - send mail to beginners-workers at perl.org - and help out?

As announced in the Perl Journal, the 2nd Annual Perl Poetry Contest
is under way. As before, there are four major categories: "porting"
a favourite poem or song lyric to Perl; writing a Perl program which
performs a useful task; writing a poetry-writing program (which may
itself be a poem); a haiku, (5-7-5) tanka (5-7-5-7-7) or limerick
relating to Perl. The judge this year is Kevin Meltzer, and entries
are invited by July the 1st. Full instructions for submitting entries
will appear shortly on

     http://www.tpj.com/

Finally, our resident Perl historian, Elaine Ashton, noticed that
Fast Company Magazine (http://www.fastcompany.com) has declared
Perl one of the "best-of-the-best" innovations of the information
age. She's scanned the relevant page and put it on

     http://history.perl.org/misc/overthehump.html

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

As well as being a busy week for Perl, it's been a busy week for
us here at perl.com.

Firstly, I've temporarily handed over the reins of the perl5-porters
summaries to the ever energetic Leon Brocard, who's given us this
week's summary. If you want to know more about the proposed Perl
Legal FAQ, internationalising the Perl interpreter, resuscitation
attempts on pseudohashes and much more, get yourself over to

     http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/p5pdigest/THISWEEK-20010520.html

The Perl 6 Summaries live! Bryan Warnock has done a sterling job
catching up on the past three weeks worth of activity on the various
perl6-* lists. This is particularly impressive since there was so
much going on - there have been around 800 messages so far this month,
mainly in response to Larry and Damian's articles on the design of
Perl 6.

     http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/p6pdigest/THISWEEK-20010501.html

Our feature article this week comes from Michael Schwern, Perl's
very own Kwalitee Assurance man.

One of the ideas tossed around for Perl 6 has been to rename the
method call operator ("->") to ".". Of course, this causes a
problem - what do we now call string concatenation? While watching
perl6-language tie itself in all sorts of knots trying to come up
with a substitute, Michael stepped back and had a long think about
language design. His article details his train of thought as he
examines how people think about signs and semantics in general and
the semantics of computer languages in particular, all told through
the metaphor of traffic lights. It's a very thoughtful and ingenious
piece, which I would consider essential reading for anyone who wants
to be involved in the work of helping to design Perl 6. You can
find it at:

     http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/22/trafficlights.html

My predecessor Mark-Jason Dominus has written an article for one
of our sister publications, the O'Reilly Network, in his popular
"Red Flags and Program Repair Shop" series. Mark will give a
tutorial on that very topic at this year's Perl Conference.
His article is at:

     http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2001/05/18/perl_redflags.html

He's also released a preview of the tutorial on his web site, at:

     http://perl.plover.com/yak/flags/preview/

You can also find out more details about the seven (yes, seven!)
talks he'll be giving at the Perl Conference from:

     http://perl.plover.com/yak/tpc2001.html

And with that, I should get back to preparing my talks for the Perl
Conference!

SC

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Taking Lessons From Traffic Lights
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/22/trafficlights.html?wwwrrr_20010522.txt
Michael Schwern examines traffic lights and shows what lessons
applied to the development of Perl 6.

Exegesis 2
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/08/exegesis2.html?wwwrrr_20010522.txt
Having trouble visualizing how the approved RFC's for Perl 6 will
translate into actual Perl code? Damian Conway provides an
exegesis to Larry Wall's Apocalypse 2 and reveals what the code
will look like.

Off The Wall: Larry Wall: Apocalypse Two
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/03/wall.html?wwwrrr_20010522.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_20010522.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.

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