[tpm] Next Meeting Thursday 26 Mar (tomorrow!) - Two talks: Harbinger and Lispy Perl

[Michael Graham]

(These details are also on the TPM web site: http://to.pm.org/)

The next meeting is Thursday, 26 March (tomorrow!).

    Date:   Thursday 26 Mar 2009 

    Time:   6:45pm

 Speaker:   Abram Hindle

Topic #1:   Harbinger: Making your desktop sing with the help of Perl

Topic #2:   Lispy Perl 

    Cost:   Free!

   Where:   2 Bloor Street West (NW corner of Yonge/Bloor, skyscraper
            with the CIBC logo on top) Classroom 11 on the 8th floor

Description: 
   
            
  ===================================================================

     Talk 1:
     **** Harbinger: Making your desktop sing with the help of Perl

     We use a variety of user interfaces during our day to day lives,
     but what if software you were familiar with suddenly started to
     sing?  Imagine stealing events from your spreadsheets, your
     simulations, your office tools, your editors, even your
     video-games. Could these events make music?  Could the delay and
     reload of a Quake 3 shotgun come out as gong sound?  Could the
     machine gun in Quake3 be converted into an piano roll?  Could the
     frantic scratching of the eraser in GIMP produce beats or the
     shudder of crystal?  With Perl, C, your favorite sound
     generator/player and your exciting or mundane everyday software,
     you too can turn your office or desktop environment into a
     noisemaker.  We present to you Harbinger, a Perl based musical
     event middle man. Harbinger is built to massage events streamed
     from other applications into musical events for software such
     CSound, Pure-Data or hardware attached to your midi ports!

     Talk 2:
     **** Lispy Perl 

     Ever thought of making another language? Ever thought of
     compiling that language down to Perl?  Do you like s-expressions?
     Do you like lisp or scheme? Did you ever want to program in Perl
     in with a different syntax altogether, yet still integrate with
     Perl? In this presentation Abram will demonstrate how to abuse
     Perl's SourceFilter such that you can make it parse a whole new
     language, generate and compile that code and language down to
     Perl Code and execute it.  Why not? Perl has closures, Perl has a
     garbage collector, it might have an attitude problem but throw in
     a couple of parentheses and you've got yourself a flexible
     alternative syntax in which to express ideas. Even better, if it
     compiles down to Perl, you can interact with Perl directly. We'll
     deal with design issues, little quirks of Perl and abuses which
     make developing a language in Perl easier.


  Note:

    The elevators in the building are "locked down" after 5:30pm
    to people without building access cards.  Leading up to the
    meeting someone will come down to the main floor lobby every
    few minutes to ferry people upstairs.

    After 19:00, you can reach the access-card-carrying guy via
    a cell phone number that we'll leave with security in the
    front lobby.  The room and floor numbers will be left with
    security too.





-- 
Michael Graham <magog at the-wire.com>