Slashdot Mirror
Perl 5.8.1 Released
langles writes "Perl 5.8.1 has been released. Read the official announcement,
then download it from a CPAN mirror near you.
If you've been following the Perl5 Porters List, you'll know this version was very well tested before they released it. However, there may be some modules that will need to be fixed before they will work with this release." The announcement also contains full details on incompatibilities and known issues, so give it a once over before upgrading, especially if from a pre-5.8 version.
Damn, Slackware 9.1 is out of date already...
1. invade iraq
2. Profit!
3. ???
fp
...as I've encounted a few script problems with the last few perl incarnations. Could have been the libraries however.
But I have an honest confession.
Python has become my scripting language of choice over the last 2 years.
Does that mean I have a problem?
TO put things in perspective, I was an 0311 for 4 years so maybe that's why I have these recurring nightmares of perl necklaces and pythons tcling me.
The langles writes "Perl 5.8.1 was released. Read the official advertisement, then download it of a mirror of CPAN close to you. If you had followed the Perl5 luggage handlers enumerate, you will know that this version was very well examined before they released it. However, there can be some modules which will have to be fixed before they work with this release." The advertisement also contains the complete details on known incompatibilities and questions, thus give-the once more before the evolution, particularly if of a version pre-5.8.
Sorry guys, but in the new .NET centric paradigm, there simply isn't any need or use for Perl anymore. .NET has killer regexp support.
And I, for one, welcome our new Perl 5.8.1 overlords!
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
(nt)
and now they release both a new perl and a new slackware, after 3 months of unemployment. I say they do it to pester me.
the pun is mightier than the sword
A good enough reason to upgrade
I got tired of the old 5.8.0 failing after putting DB 4.1.25 down
Oh, and slashdot is a few hours late (naughty slashdot), I noticed perl 5.8.1 was out in the early hours.
cytocide pterygopalatine booklet cyclitic pseudepigraphical untied chroatol clergy impassionment provokingness skemp requisitory trivirgate Keltoi praecordium acroama napped spermatocyst tandour Proganosauria mullid proctostomy tremulant Cannstatt papillated smidge undesirability Baloskionaceae chalicothere coreigner flightshot metagrammatize resupinated oxyrhynch flintwood diacid whapuku nonthoroughfare unnational subpeltated hydrophorous babbitt midden undangerous contraption ceratothecal abilo recuperance Nazirate ptomain argentometric polysensuous Aristides Phallales musicomania cinchonization overstayal shuffling supereternity recongratulation meece manorialize brachycranial Scirophoria oast planeta rimrock rabid removal anoil overlave bontebok principally polygyny adsbud necklace appearer plaza gianthood relicary virucidal rupestrine pyramidale middlewards Pandemos treeiness hypocraterimorphous micromelus moratorium questorial elaeagnaceous Javanee Zaparan pantisocracy Paulinus benzophenothiazine dehydroascorbic Sindhi racemize recrudescent germinate urase nonserif cryptocrystalline aegirinolite donkeywork tilde hircocervus armorproof beartongue undeclaimed septenarian retractiveness substance strangership improvability mateless ranchless Dasypodidae pileolated invalidate Sodomite astonish pentastomoid rompish readaptability lettering journeycake extracalendar longboat jerez scrobicular epichordal reabsorption overproportionated neck gaspiness allocaffeine unstraying reformatory streptomycin taplet saddik untrace pyramidicalness coquina encarpium slant Serrano monorail technochemistry Perisporiaceae strophomenoid ascus britten professorially Otaria barracuda obcuneate uncircumscribable glittery soak photorelief roughhewer Almohades thapsia doated nonseptic bhakta overpersuade tetradactyl spinose rutherford eupatridae vertebrally crenotherapy indisciplinable untrenched esophagus unreckonable liquidless cumulatively subcentral daisybush overyoung jollop vertigo foldboat bootlegging mosstrooping rubidium Sissu perthiocyanic misproposal storybook dod gossamery multitudinousness axonometry homalosternal hookmaker cenogenesis observationalism tastefully nonheritable Sinism preinspector personifiable momentarily stageably cystic continuality downtroddenness neuropterist reasy callitype Nabalism autotetraploidy endotoxic giddybrain immunization unaverted antiquarian mirific antisquama lecher athyrosis qualmishness vinculum unlimitably thalamite scruplesomeness nonfictional gainfully archhypocrisy Toxoglossa unimpressed dealfish cassiterite jouster sphincteroscopy dialectological specchie untyrannical Viminal departmental uncloister synechthry aniconic phloretic earwitness precoil Centaurea strind aggrieved nonblack wallow superelated manifest pigroot oxazole Coyotero Mesozoa thoracocyllosis mollifiable soldanelle misdeformed voicelike Varangi Palliyan sarcocystidean tarnishproof expertness vigneron megotalc paddybird Margie ferriprussic fayles musical Melcarth mortmainer Ah usherette unplentiful encyclopediacal haploidic hyperotretous chirk theopneust unboxed unpieced caricatural fodder zag miltsick stylization meeken brekkle multimillion quercitron chinawoman counterstimulation grike Stereornithes Areopagitic forche womanishness electronographic aspen Colinus Osteichthyes phagocytal constricted tyrannizingly oleocyst toyer hanker proctalgia gorgeousness monocyte ginned pathophobia erythristic kral digamist causticness attemperately Campephilus tenesmic promotor recollection integrity plankbuilt entropion acidulate overhollow unvictualled Spermophilus vulturous metage flatman cacophonical dittay rostriferous kosin moldery stod cardiameter cording receipts logicize dime newssheet atemporal excusal duple growing bookrack vierling paxillose nonsolid straightforwards bobbinwork diammine adscititiously counterman firebrat guillemet hypertragical Jasminum neckercher sugarsweet Christine elaeoptene tot unlive polymathy anthologion supermorose arenilitic preconversation multimillion eutomous overgrown Aimore semialien Borocaine la
perl is dead
Python 2.3.1 final was released this week. Where was the Slashdot story about that one?
We'll have the full details posted on Slashdot momentarily...
responding to the rumour that some of yOUR attention spans are limitdead buy endless corepirate nazi ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys
you can anticipate all you want. our advise is to be as far away from the walking dead contingent as possible, when the big flash occurs. you wouldn't want to get any of that evile on you.
as to the free unlimited energy plan, as the lights come up, more&more folks will stop being misled into sucking up more&more of the infant killing barrolls of crudeness, & learn that it's more than ok to use newclear power generated by natural (hydro, solar, etc...)methods. of course more information about not wasting anything/behaving less frivolously is bound to show up, here&there.
cyphering how many babies it costs for a barroll of crudeness, we've decided to cut back, a lot, on wasteful things like giving monIE to felons, to help them destroy the planet/population.
no matter. the #1 task is planet/population rescue. the lights are coming up. we're in crisis mode. you can help.
the unlimited power (such as has never been seen before) is freely available to all, with the possible exception of the aforementioned walking dead.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. more breathing. vote with yOUR wallet. seek others of non-aggressive intentions/behaviours. that's the spirit, moving you.
pay no heed/monIE to the greed/fear based walking dead.
each harmed innocent carries with it a bad toll. it will be repaid by you/us. the Godless felons will not be available to make reparations.
pay attention. that's definitely affordable, plus you might develop skills which could prevent you from being misled any further by phonIE ?pr? ?firm? generated misinformation.
good work so far. there's still much to be done. see you there. tell 'em robbIE.
the rest of the wwworld is laughing/crying at/for US in sympathy/disgust, as we fall/jump into the daze of the georgewellian corepirate nazi life0cide, whilst criticizing their ip gangsters, which are also members of the walking dead.
as for va lairIE's patentdead PostBlock(tm) devise, a 'product' of the SourceForgerIE(tm) hedgemonIE no DOWt, it just doesn't work.
A quick pass through the changes uncovered:
;)
... now it will never die! :)
Miscellaneous Enhancements
map in void context is no longer expensive. map is now context aware, and will not construct a list if called in void context.
This must have been added to *end* the ceaseless wars over whether using "map" in a void context is lame, or not. This argument after repeated dowsing attempts, would constantly spring back into life with renewed vigor on comp.lang.perl.misc and other places.
Now it doesn't matter. Argument over. I think I'll miss it. Sort of. I can't remember a time when people weren't fighting about this. Next I suppose we'll be sorting out the whole "who would win, the Enterprise or a star destroyer?" mess
For those who don't know what I'm on about: "map" applies a subroutine or code block to each element in a list. Some people would use it to iterate over lists, instead of using "for". Perl is now smart enough to notice if you're not using the result of "map", and so won't generate the result list in that particular case.
The whole argument came down over whether to say:
map { do_stuff; } @list;
or
do_stuff for @list;
So the "for" people would, rightly, say that the "map" was inefficient if you weren't using the result list created by map, and the "map" people said that Perl should just figure it out and do the right thing.
Actually, now I think about it, this is going to make the argument *worse*, as now they are functionally equivalent, and it will just come down to taste! No! They don't know what they've done
In any sane language reading from a closed file would be flagged as an error anyway.
Perl modules for artificial intelligence must be kept current with the new Perl release.
The Perl AI Weblog has some sample Perl AI code for the main Alife module of the Open-Source AI Mind in Perl.
Register your own Perl weblog if you are writing AI or other good code to share in Perl.
Does that mean the guys at perl.org are saying "I, for one, welcome our new Slashdot overlords!" as well?
luckily, they have the bandwidth to get slashdotted.
perl, slackware, gaim, etc... what about debian?
- both "pearl" or "purl" spellings now allowable
- builtin Java VM for the "hard bits" developers had trouble writing.
- a formal written apology by Larry Wall for the Perl syntax
Larry Wall is a Christian. Sorry, next language.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
How are you going to market this Perl thing? What? No marketting? That's fucking stupid. What about the case? You're not putting it in case? Are you retarded? You should give the contract for the case to Frog Design - you'll SHIT YOUR PANTS when you see what they can do. Errm.. wait - I did shit my pants.
After going trought Perl hell often enough I started lobbying customers to use different solutions than Perl. This gives content customers in long term (and longer contracts ;)
and less headache from trying to get the meaning of some Perl gibberish an intern (usually now burger flipping expert) wrote 3 years ago.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Perl release you!
Yes, this is an excellent point. Case in point. Basically, everything can be done in any Turing-complete language (which is something I wish the "But you can do everything in Visual Basic!" sales people would get...).
My feeling is that, when people say something like "This language's code is easier to read", they don't mean as much the language's syntax, as the coding practices that the language's structure encourages.
See "There should be more than one way to do it" as opposed to "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it", for instance. Different philosophies that fit different languages that fit different coding practices. You'll note that both principles do correlate with the main selling point of their respective language, namely, Perl's ability to be the shortest path from 'nothing' to 'job's done', and Python's knack at remaining damn readable through thousands of lines of code even for programmers not yet involved in the project (among other things).
Down the road it's only a matter of goals, and picking the most appropriate tool to reach that goal. The tricky part, of course, being that 'appropriate' is a relative thing, and sometimes a somewhat unfitting tool is more appropriate in terms of practicality than something you don't yet know and would have to learn from scratch.
Oh, and zealotry is sclerosis of the mind.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
im on dial up, need diffs between rc5 and release
OR BETTER YET
CVS ACCESS
What different between Larry Wall wrote program in Python, and the same one Guido Van Rossum wrote in Perl? Just Python code few lines longer. The real difference is that Larry's code works from the first run time, but Guido's still not and he is still figuring out why... ;-)
I would like to celebrate this good news with Perl geeks just because Perl is not VisualBasic or VBScript or other M$ product. ;-). But I would like wish to all Perl hackers to have the same productivity, fast and hight fun during developing as we, Pythoneers have!
Hope, with Perl 6 you will... And all Slashdot members even will enjoy Structured Text as we can, instead to write HTML tags... ;-)
Has anyone ever tried coding in Perl to get the job done quickly and then converting that code into Python for further maintenance? That might leverage the strengths of both languages.
kthxbye
8 bits are all I need, baby!
The second option is preferrable.
;
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my @questions = qw(Java Python Perl C);
my @punchlines = (
"None. Change it once, and it's the same everywhere.",
"One. He just stands below the socket and the world revolves around him.",
"A million. One to change it, the rest to try and do it in fewer lines.",
'"CHANGE?!!"'
);
print "Please enter a number between 1 and 4: ";
my $selection =
$selection -= 1;
print "How many $questions[$selection] ";
print "programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?\n\n";
sleep 2;
I didn't succeed in creating an account, but wanted badly to say a couple of things about perl...
I've used perl for about 2 years and I absolutely love it. It puzzles why some people detest it so much. Every programming language requires getting used to, perl is no exception. I've written small programs in C++ and Java so I'm not speaking from ignorance about other programming languages.
With perl, I've been able to perform tasks both big and small. Sometimes, with a couple of lines, I can achieve pretty amazing results, such as reading in huge inputs and converting them to the desired format. I never thought I could be creative with something as technical as text formatting. I discovered that creativity with perl.
Say what you like but perl has empowered me.
and that's the fucking point.
It's not even a troll, I just need the karma.
Honestly though, intellectual wanking such yours belongs to KURO5HIN. Slashdot is the home of the fat, pimpy linux geeks, the decadent child molesters and those lacking any kind of critical thinking skills (these things are not mutually exclusive.) Have you looked around? Slashdot is 80% trolls, and the editors dare not ban them because the site would be so boring then nobody would come here. Wtf do you think generates the traffic? NEWS? I DON'T FUCKING THINK SO.
Henceforth I will no longer respond to your posts.
Mensa member, beware of the high IQ
Speaking as someone who has an IQ of 165, who the fuck cares? I was invited to a Mensa meeting once, and without a doubt they were the most pretentious twits I've ever met in my life.
Only a pretentious twit would include the fact that s/he's a Mensa member in their sig. I'd bet you also make note of it on your resume as well.
There's enough crap out there you gotta sort through it somehow--and I'd prefer to use something from a bright. I'm sure Knuth's book is infected with decimal anyway--there's two strikes.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Complete rewrite. As a side-effect, no longer refuses to startup when run by root.
Okay, okay, I know, root bad, now shut up. I don't know how many freakin times I've been hacking away at a perl script, as root and had to actually log in as a different user just to read the damn documentation. Thank Wall for small miracles.
Not that I often read documentation, but anyway.
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
I have to call BS on that one. I did look into the history of someone who admits to working for Microsoft (Dave Obsjano or something), but I highly doubt this person is paid to post to slashdot. I just don't think posts to slashdot figure in during the annual review.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It's been over two years and $200,000 and it can't run any variety of Perl. WTF is going on in that project, anyway? Larry ought to appoint a project leader or something.
anybody with an iq of 165 should understand that his sig is just a troll. or maybe iq isn't the measure for intelligence it's made out to be.. hm.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
it's called Ruby ;-)
There are too many languages now a days. Please eliminate 3. I am not a crackpot!
.net what .net was to Java. It embraces the model and extends it just a little more. Soon you will be able to write in one language and compile to perl byte code (actually parrot byte code) C code, .net programs, Java programs, etc. Perl is beginning to be a meta language. A way to define a way to get the job done that can then be converted and used any place it's needed.
With Perl 5.8.1 we finally get usable threads that efficently communicate and cooperate. There is a fix for the memory leak that existed when using shared queues, arrays and hashes in Perl 5.8.0. This starts a whole new era for Perl programs. My little language is finnally growing up (sniffle.)
Perl has been a great language for people who just want to "get it done." It get's the job done and usually get's it done fast. It's
great at making what would be a complicated thing easy. If you want to reference your song data by artist album and track number you just say $song_data{$artist}{$album}[$track_number]. What is happeneing behind the scenes is complicated, that's actually a hash of hashes of arrays possibly pointing at another data structure underneath but conceptually it all optimizes out to simply storing by artist album and track number. Most programmers aren't used to having that option. They don't understand it and when they go to figure it all out they get mired in the way the references are being stored and what is pointing at what and lose sight of the simplicity, efficiency, and power of the whole thing.
One of the arguments I've heard here a lot is that Perl is "messy", that it's too hard to understand and that any large projects become a pile of unintelligable stuff. I think that's mostly because the people who usually program in perl are young and inexperienced and not a symtom of the language itself. I've seen many truely crappy C implementation in my day. I've also seen very well done Perl code.
If you use strict; and put things in objects when approprate (it's not hard, really!) you end up with very clean, easy, reusable code. Since the data structures in perl tend to get complicated (since it's often useful and usually easy) you really need to document your data structures. This is one thing that people tend to forget when programming. The code tells you what it's doing. The data structures don't tell you what the data in them means. Document it!
Perl is growing. Perl 5 has been great at integrating into different environments and with different libraries and you can now tackle a huge variety of tasks using just Perl. It's about to get better too. Perl 6 will be to
Oh, and the 3 languages I'd dispatch with?
1. C#
2. PHP
3. LISP
Most projects written in them should really be done in Perl.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Mental Note: Remember to spell check when I type after 3 AM.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
'Perl 5.8.1 was released today...' ... overated'
'Really? That language invended by Larry Brick?'
'...Larry Wall...'
'Is it still used? It seems archaic since it doesn't scale well and is hard to read. Even it's reputation for getting things done is well
'Yeah...sad but true. It's used on lots of web/internet type things...'
'Reckon Perl 'programmers' -haha i made a joke- get kicks out of writing obscure code that only they understand cos it means they're smarter than the rest'
'Well all programmers get a kick like that sometimes....'
'Maybe they should try Malbolge instead. They'd be tripping afterwards...'
I hate it when I'm overtired and don't cap off a tag and screw up grammatically from editing...
Heh, reminds me, I actually wrote a quick program in perl once to do a statisical anyalsis on die rolls that proved the difference between odds and cumulative odds.
;)
Granted, it could've been mucho ugly if I hadn't written it out the way I did with and with much commenting.
But man was fun to provide a functional program to make a point, and one that anyone off the street could read and comprehend easily. Would actually run through a half million loop iterations to prove the odds check too.
And the answer is:
./lightbulb line 13, near "= ;" ./lightbulb aborted due to compilation errors.
... it will just sleep for a bit and then exit. I see what it's intended to do, but I suspect this must be some sort of subtle statement about Perl, or perhaps all the languages mentioned ... but I'm not sure what exactly. Either that or it's just broken ;)
syntax error at
Execution of
The odd thing is, this code doesn't even attempt to read the response from STDIN, and then doesn't try to answer the question
It doesn't change the idea of whether map in a void context is lame, only about its cost. The great thing is now the arguments can't point back to the cost issue, and only deal with the pure idealism of whether map is a good substitute for foreach.