[Canberra-pm] Re: Starting meetings

[Iain 'Spoon' Truskett]

* Jeremy Price (jepri at webone.com.au) [27 Oct 2002 22:07]:
> Eeek. It looks like my other mail (the one I was speaking of) didn't
> make it off the ground. I was saying that all these topics look pretty
> good, and wondering who was going to give them.

Given appropriate time I could probably come up with something for the
ones I suggested. That said, I'm usually crap at presentations =)

> I've got one or two talks I could do, but I can guarantee that you'll
> get sick of my voice pretty fast.

Ideally we'd find various companies, institutions and people who use
Perl in interesting ways and get them to do some talks.

It also depends on how many people decide to become regular mongers.

> It's interesting that there are people here developing for perl as
> well as using it.

I've a few modules on CPAN. I notice you've got a PAUSE ID but haven't
released anything. I generally find, when writing scripts, that a lot of
code can just be happily factored out. And if it's on CPAN, then I can't
lose it =)

My main bit of Perl using at present is the site http://books.perl.org/
Should be properly open at some point in the next few weeks if I get
enough tuits.

> I'm not good enough at C or XS to do that, or even talk about it.
> Maybe Iain could tell us how to make basic wrappers for C libraries?

Heh. And what will I do for the rest of the 5 minutes? =) No, a talk on
XS could happily go forever. The trick would be making it interesting.

> I'd like to have some people do some 'lightning talks' about what they
> do with perl. Lightning talks are little five minute talks that you
> finish before you have time to get scared or run out of things to say.

Just need sufficient people to fill some amount of time.

> The one liners sound good, but what does this one do?

> perl -e"@_=a..z.~0"

> It looks like 'fill a..z and concatenate with the binary something
> operator on zero'?  tye is a pretty scary coder.

Close, however . has a higher precedence than .., so it's really:

    @_ = 'a'..( 'z' . ~0 );

which is

    @_ = 'a'..'z4294967295';

So you'd best have a decent amount of RAM convenient if you run it.
Perl 6 and its lazy lists wouldn't have a problem; it would just take a
while to run if you then decided to print it all.

A more efficient (RAM-wise) equivalent in Perl 5 that would print it out
could be:

    for ( $_ = 'a'; $_ ne 'z'.~0; $_++ )
    {
        print "$_\n";
    }

But I wouldn't run it myself =)


cheers,
-- 
Iain.