use Perl

I went there again today. The girl at the shop came to me and asked: "Sir, can I offer you a cup of tea while you are browsing" which was very sweet.

Got the stuff I wanted and paid. "Receipt in the bag?" she asked.

"Can I take a look?"

Guess what? It's still the fscked pound sign, plus an item I bought apparently became "Rose &..."

After some digging, apparently they are using the whole integrated service provided by Cyertill. Does anyone know people who work there?

Best Practical is sponsoring a Devel::Cover hackathon with Paul Johnson next Tuesday in London.

We've already got a long list and lots to do, but would love to hear about what you want from Devel::Cover.

If you are around London and would like to attend, please send mail to clkao DooT bestpractical.com. Note that the hackathon is during work hours, so you might need to make it a work-excuse to come!

In any case, we should be around #perl-qa during the hackathon, see you there!

UPDATE: Devel::Cover 0.56 is released! See what we've made during the hackathon!

Some power of Mystery dragged me into hacking v6.pm over the weekend. It now passes 785 tests from the pugs test suite.

It's a very interesting process to make the tests pass, and in fact it's quite trivial most of the time. It is also a great chance to learn Perl6 - by implementing it!

If you have a few spare hours and want to have some fun, in the meantime helping out the perl6 project and reusing your perl5 skills, you can start with the parsed but failed tests - they have perl5 version of the perl6 code generated in the .tc file. To run the test, checkout the latest pugs and simply do

make build_perl5; perl util/src_to_blib.pl
util/prove6 t/01-sanity

There might be a few modules missing, install them from CPAN. You will see the tc files after you run the tests. I think subroutines/

you can also see the test output at the output, and identify what fails to parse at all. Starting with t/statements/ might be a good idea.

And, of course, get on irc.freenode.net #perl6, see you there!

I got dragged into an art project for helping out firefighting messaging between some small mipsel devices running linux.

The distribution comes with microperl in its package system, however it wasn't built with select() by default, which makes it pretty much useless for writing network applications. So I was hoping to cross-compile standard perl and modules to mips, but it seemed really painful. I gave up and ended up just enabling HAS_SELECT for the cross-compiled microperl.

Now I have to use Socket.pm to actually do the networking bit. It turned out lots of crucial bits are written in xs, so I reimplemented them in pure perl. (Ya, I know it's bad to pack platform-dependent structure manually)

So I have a tiny application controlling a local led display and buttons IO device, as well as broadcasting and processing events over network, all in a few hours after I get the microperl and socket working!

Anyway, it's quite fun hacking and I am looking forward to the show itself!

Autrijus and I have been hacking a bit. The following code now works:

use SVN::Core--Perl5;
use SVN::Client--Perl5;

say SVN::Core.VERSION;
SVN::Client.new.log('http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs' , 'HEAD', 'HEAD', 0, 1,
                        sub { say join(',', @_) });

It shows you the latest commit of pugs.

What's the big deal? Well,

• It's Perl6
• It uses an XS Perl5 module, SVN::Core
• The method (log) has a callback written in Perl6.

That means you can start using Perl6 to write code gluing cpan modules.

It has never been so easy to get the source of Perl, with development history. I have managed to fix a few other vcp bugs and mirrored the perl repository from Perforce at activestate with svk.

Web interface:

http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/perl/log/p4-trunk/
http://svn.clkao.org/svnweb/perl/log/p4-5.8/

Repository at svn://svn.clkao.org/perl/p4-trunk/

They will be kept synced daily. I'll see if perl.org is interested in hosting it once the new svk/svn::mirror are released.