use Perl

I'm leaving use.perl. This will be my final post here. use.perl has become less than useless, more like an embarrassment. For two weeks there were no frontpage news. This is not what those curious about Perl should find. The only real news were tucked away in a little side box and pointed to the journal entries. And the journal capabilities are a bit basic, to say the least. Technology has moved on.

That's another reason I like Japanese drama series. They usually have around 12 episodes, often fewer, and that's that. They're not drawn out forever.

The conclusion first: Nested arrays and hashes in Perl are slow. They get slower the more levels you nest. For most applications this won't be a problem, but if you cache values in a hash, you might want to use as few levels of nesting as possible.

Read the details.

By the way, I've enabled comments on my blog - let's see how that goes...

I thought about that, but somehow it feels wrong to stomp on someone else's namespace; especially it's not clear what would happen if someone on 5.10 (or later) would use "install feature" in the CPAN shell...

This is a tree map for the minicpan mirror, containing only the latest versions of all CPAN distributions. Within the application, you can mouse over the rectangles to see which files and folders they represent, but here I've just annotated a few interesting blocks. Somehow it feels like a city layout...

See the blog entry.

I've released any::feature. (It will take a while to appear on CPAN; look at the development repo on github.) It can be used like Perl 5.10's 'feature' pragma and will try to "do the right thing", regardless of whether you use Perl 5.8 or Perl 5.10.

So far it's a proof-of-concept and will only handle the 'say' feature.

Actually, the line

print scalar keys %Foo::;

will autovivify the symbol table, so if you use that anywhere in your test program, it will print "*main::Foo::" all three times.

Maybe you could write a Text::Pipe plugin that does what you need? See this test file for an example using syntactic sugar of how text pipes are stackable.

(Oops, clicked the wrong "Reply" button before...)

Maybe because this is for Japan and the Japanese Perl Association? English doesn't get you all that far in Japan.

Maybe because this is for Japan and the Japanese Perl Association? English doesn't get you all that far in Japan.

Sounds really good; I'll get a copy when I'm back in Japan. Perl in Japan truly is interesting...

That's cool; I hope to be able to attend. Hopefully it's going to be late September rather than early September because I heard that Tokyo is still pretty hot in early September.

Good luck with the JPA - is there an English web site somewhere? (I realize it's the Japan Perl Association, but connections to the outside world are important as well, I guess...

I've had quite a bit of feedback about the accessor generator benchmarks; mostly requests to add this or that module to the benchmarks. Adding the code, rerunning the benchmarks and updating the blog entries took quite a bit of time, so I thought I could automate the process.

I've followed up the previous benchmark, which tested mainly object creation, with one that performs a million get/set operations on the same object.

Full post