London.pm Emergency Technical Meeting 31st July

[Chris Benson]

London.pm held an emergency technical meeting because several Perl People
were passing through on the way from The Perl Conference (TPC4? 5?) in
San Diego to YetAnotherPerlConference::Europe in Amsterdam.

Visit to London.pm emergency technical meeting in honour of Brian Ingerson
author of Inline.pm

Venue: State51.  A place with all the necessary facilities, space,
electricity ... and good Internet connection.  Remarkable to this
first-time visitor: the range of sofas and chairs, the largest
free-standing table I've seen, the amount of warm beer and bagles
lying around.

Brian gave a laidback (jet-lagged?) talk about Inline, the recent TPC
in San Diego, working for Activestate, tattoos and piercing and showed
Inline::C, Inline::Java, C with embedded Perl ... using Inline to embed
C ... or was it Perl? Inline::Perl and his tattoos and piercings.

Inline.pm acts as a front-end to the standard way of embedding
non-Perl code in Perl: XS.  Inline does a very good job of hiding
the nasty bits:-
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Inline C;

print "9 + 16 = ", add(9, 16), "\n";
print "9 - 16 = ", subtract(9, 16), "\n";

__END__
__C__
int add(int x, int y) {
        return x + y;
}

int subtract(int x, int y) {
        return x - y;
}

Works for multiple languages: useful ones like C/C++ and then the
rest: Java/Tcl/Python/... there's even a joke language: Inline::PERL

There's also CPR (SeePerlRun) that turns C into a scripting language
(with the full Perl language available to help it out):-
#!/usr/bin/cpr

int main(void) {

        printf("Hello World, I'm running under Perl version %s\n",
                CPR_eval("use Config; $Config{version}")
                );

        return 0;
}

Then about 10pm we went out for a drink,  chatted for a while and the
I went back to the hotel.

-- 
Chris Benson