[Melbourne-pm] Perl crypto code

[Jacinta Richardson]

Michael Bombardieri wrote:

> I'm posting this email here because there isn't a perth-pm list that I
> know of. I'm a computer science student in Perth, but I used to live in
> Melbourne (Preston).

Welcome!  We have many other non-Melbournites on this list too, so don't be
embarrassed.  There was a Perth PM, but in the end it only had about 5 members
and none of them ever posted (well... except for me and I live in Melbourne) so
when Davorg started closing down dead PM lists, noone of them argued for it to
keep existing so it got closed down.  If you want to restart Perth PM, it's very
easy to do so.

> I have 2 questions to ask here:
> 
> 1. What is the general consensus on the state of Perl6? I read that it
> supports / will support strict data types kind of like C, which sounds
> like a great idea. Also, that it will have its own preprocessor. I
> haven't tried out Parrot/Pugs, so forgive me if this is a dumb question.
> Are there people actually using Perl6 at the moment or is it still too
> infantile to do anything useful?

Perl6 is still in production.  Lots of people are working with it and playing
with it and doing cool stuff in it; but it's not production ready right now.  A
good mailing list if you'd like to get involved in it from a users point of view
is the perl6-users at perl.org list.

List-Subscribe: <mailto:perl6-users-subscribe at perl.org>

The language spec is still not completely nailed down, but it's a hell of a lot
of fun.

> 2. How difficult is it to build Perl modules? I've been thinking about
> integrating some crypto code into Perl via a Crypt::bla module. I know
> that some CPAN modules are written in Perl and some in C. Are there any
> good tutorials for writing modules?

Grab our Programming Perl, and Object Oriented Perl course notes from
http://perltraining.com.au/notes.html  also our "Starting modules with h2xs"
perl tip: http://perltraining.com.au/tips/2005-09-26.html

The first covers Packages and Modules fairly thoroughly and the second covers
any OO basics you might be missing.  If you spot any errors please let me know.
  Building modules in Perl is really easy (and encouraged).  If you want to
package them up and send them off to CPAN then you'll probably want to start
with h2xs as mentioned in the tip, as it ensures you get the basic files up and
ready.

Good luck with it!

	J

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