use Perl

First I'm glad to see that the perl.com interview is online. That was a fun interview, with chromatic asking many interesting questions, and I hopefully catching most of them with satisfactory answers.

The current issue of TPJ also covers Pugs, saying that we are working at a "breakneck rate". That is a very true description of the last few hour of hackings; unstopped by the fact that OpenFoundry is down for weekend maintainence (meanwhile use this mirror instead), the #perl team still did lots and lots of things, in preparation for tomorrow's 6.0.10 release:

• The dreaded double-evaluation bug on p6c is now fixed.
• The equally dreaded prefix function parsing bug that eats more parens than it should is now fixed.
• Ingy asked for clarification on p6l for %*Config, and got a surprisingly mind-expanding answer from Larry. I think Larry is on some kind of really neat drug -- which turns out to be blue sugar cubes.
• ...but ingy hacked together $?OS anyway.
• Ingy further translated chapter 1 of YAHT into kwid.
• Postfix -- now assumes the perculiar perl5 semantic I knew nothing about, namely returning undef if the value was undef; this is in contrast with postfix ++, which always numifies the returned value.
• metaperl wrote more junction tests, which I made them to pass.
• Stevan added even more tests, bringing the total to 1010.
• push, unshift, grep and map's invocant form (@array.push(1)) now works.
• nothingmuch contributed many many tests for existing and upcoming syntactic constructs, such as anonymous blocks, given, try/catch, etc.
• luqui pointed out that "@abc" still interpolates without the spaces. Fixed.

Also, stevan volunteered for me to prepare changelogs for 6.0.10, so I can get a release out as a present for perlchina folks -- I'll meet with 12 perlchina folks in ~9 hours and have some more Beijing ducks. That should be fun. See you tomorrow!