Slashdot Mirror
On Perl 5.6
bryan schwab writes "Perl 5.6 is in development, here is a list of
all the new features" The article is an interview with the "Patch Pumpkin" - one of the
guys from ActiveState in charge of putting together the development release. Seems there is a lot
planned for the next release.
I think you'll find that either the Parse::RecDescent module or the Parse:Yapp module will do what you want. They're really very neat, although I've only ever spent much time reading up on the first of them.
Also, the guy worries me. He works for ActiveState. Blech.
Sarathy's involvement with Perl well pre-dates his employ at ActiveState. His working at ActiveState is what led to the two very diverse Win32 ports of Perl to combine. If it seems as though there is undue amount of attention being spent on WinNT/95/98 versions of Perl, it's because the others are for the most part stable. And the internal work being done is to the benefit of the Perl core, not just one port or the other.
rjrayIf you were on p5p, I'm quite certain you wouldn't be joining the other Illuminati wannabes with these unsubstantiated delusions of evil conspiracies and take-overs. Please try to simmer down, and do a little research. You'll see that all is well. Or talk to one of us directly if you'd prefer.
Oh those evil dastardly fiends, "taking over" by porting it to their platform. And we all know that Perl never had any platform-specific extension modules available until the Supervillians snuck in and started trying to poison it, nosirree.
You are truly sad, but thankfully irrelevant. I'm coming to realize that one of the real strengths of free software that it not only survives the fickle demands of the marketplace, but also raving paranoid delusional zealots who feel the product needs or demands their evangelism.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
How is porting perl an attempt to "take it over"? An increase in the platform support for Perl is definitely a Good Thing (tm).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
0) Tsk tsk on those of you who believe everything Microsoft say. When they said they were paying Activestate to make Perl work better on NT, you forgot to translate that back into honest English: they're paying Activestate to implement fork() on NT so that NT can become more like Unix (a slower buggier more crashprone Unix). Yes, Microsoft for "bring up to baseline of minimum acceptable functionality" is "make it work better". Another way of saying this is "make NT suck less for Perl users". Perl is all about making your OS suck less.
1) Perl's version numbering is changing because major changes in functionality (e.g., the introduction of threads and a compiler) were hidden in the thousands decimal point of the version number. Hopefully this new numbering system will make it more obvious that things have changed. It's a small cosmetic change, not technical, but it's something people wanted.
2) Lexical warnings. Perl's philosophy is "there's more than one way to do it". With warnings as they were, there were only two ways to do it: all warnings enabled, no warnings enabled. Now you can say "I know it looks to the compiler as though I only use this variable once, but don't issue a warning". If you don't see yourself wanting to use it, don't panic--unless you explicitly use the new warning doodads, your programs will emit as few or as many warnings as before.
3) Sarathy is a smart smart guy. He's not an NT flack. He's a smart Unix guy who happens to be employed at Activestate because that's about the only place a guy can be hired to work on the Perl internals. He does far more work on the Perl core to benefit everyone than he does Windoze-specific work. If you're going to be at the Perl+Apache+Linux+... uberconference that O'Reilly are organizing, I urge you to seek him out (he won't be hard to find) and have a talk about your concerns. He'll be the first to agree that NT sucks hard.
4) Unicode reading (via UTF8) is implemented as an add-on module, so that only the part of your program that needs to know about Unicode takes any speed hit. It's also simple to turn programs that used to read ASCII text into programs that read Unicode text: just add "use utf8" at the top. We don't anticipate slowdowns anything like those that one Slashdot reader reported in Tcl.
5) The Unicode support only extends to reading and processing text, not to Perl's interaction with the system (filenames, error messages, etc.) I believe that Windows deals with UTF in the same way that many Unices deal with long files: a separate set of OS functions are provided. The Unicodification of Perl is being extended to use these parallel functions, if present. Generalizing this is hard because, like Unix and long files, everyone does it different. That doesn't mean that Sarathy's work precludes this happening for any other operating systems that provide Unicode support like this. In fact, having the first work done will make support for other operating systems easier. And the best bit is that Microsoft are paying for it.
I don't know about you, but I'm all for fleecing Uncle Bill.
Nat
Perl's expressions are far from regular. They are NP-Complete.
--
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
****Gfx Scrollbar Special case hit!!*****
Well, perhaps concentrate on making Perl better rather than worrying about what Microsoft does.
As for the porting to Windows, that shows the weakness of the "free" operating systems. If they are weakened by a program being ported to Windows, it means they aren't very strong on their own merits, just by having some software Windows doesn't have. If that's their only strength, they are doomed to failure, as it will all eventually be ported to Windows.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't believe any regex featurs are going to help you. If you use s///, you're just way to naive. You should step away from programming - go play quake or something like that.
Abigail
One place where you can read more about this is in Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages, a white paper by Brian Kernighan and Christopher Van Wyk.
Another interesting metric is taken from The Practice of Programming, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike (1999). It is difficult to reproduce the table here, because slashdot doesn't permit tables, preformatted tags, xmp tags, or even nonbreaking spaces. Sigh. (And no, this feature lack has nothing to do with Perl. They just chose for it to work this way.) I will try to uses hyphens instead of spaces, but no promises.
You'll have to read their analysis of these data for more explanation. I should point out that the STL obviously has a bug under Microsoft's version of the deque.But this really should call into question the speed claims of the Java people. And it's my understanding that this benchmark did use the fabled JIT tech. It was a Markov chain generator, by the way.
If it accurately reflected the language, then the site would be pretty ugly. It would, however, probably find a way to bake your bread online and make you a sandwich too; there would be modules for condiments and ...
whoops, shouldn't post when I'm hungry.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
As far as casual programmers like myself go, I really appreciate a numbering system that's more "industry standard." I mean, sticking a couple of decimal places out in front of a major revision number is pretty confusing for those of us who can't keep up. Until I read this piece, I'd though 5.005 was only marginally different from 5.004. (Raster, Mandrake: if you're reading this -- why is E still at .16? Are you planning 83 more releases between now and the one where it's finally ready?)
Now, if they'd add support for *irregular* expressions, that's something I could really go for; programmin' Yoda-style!
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Where previously I had to settle for using something like s/<.*?>//g; to discard all tags, I can now pretend to be intelligent and search and discard seperate matched tags? Lots and lots of cool implications for HTML, CGI, and XML developers there.
Good thinking guys!
... and today's pet project has
Certainly there exists a class of problems that lends itself to more than one PC (program counter; it means program counter damn it) executing simultaneously in the same text and data. Personally, I prefer everything unshared unless I say otherwise, not the other way around.
But it's pretty scary stuff for all but the most rigorous of seasoned programmers. To my mind, handing a script kiddie multithreading is like handing a six year old a loaded Uzi. That's not to say that in the hands of a trained professional, these aren't useful. But in the wrong hands, they're more like a sneaky murder-suicide device.
It's getting a bit dated, and certainly carries its own agenda, but several years ago, John Ousterhout gave a talk on Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes) that you might like to check out.
If you're curious about threading in Perl, the best place to start is probably the perlthrtut manpage. Some low-level documentation is also available.
I'll be giving a half-day talk on multitasking (both forking processes and spawning threads) in August at the Perl Conference in Monterey. I've got about 100 slides for 3 hours of talk, which should be, um, brisk. :-)
You can look up information on the conference on the web. It's at the end of August in Monterey, CA.