use Perl

"This comment in mg.c scares me: /* Not sure why the av can get freed ahead of its sv, but somehow it does */" -- Marc Lehmann, uncovering ancient evil.

• Review tickets in the Parrot RT queue
• Answer questions from newcomers
• Fix bugs
• Add features
• Improve the documentation or tests or...
• Recruit and encourage new developers

If you're curious about Parrot, please join us. You don't have to be an expert programmer. If you can follow the build instructions (or report where they fail for you), manage a source code checkout, and work an IRC client, you're plenty qualified. There are plenty of ways to get involved in almost any capacity you can conceive.

"Your faithful Dynamic Environmentalist"

-- closing signature of Bob Rogers in 'RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding'

After taking the maintainership of Win32::API, I have been busy trying to build several useful environments to be able to test the module, including combinations of:

"So I don't really have an answer for you. When faced with a similar situation, I punted and did a PerlIO_fdopen(fileno(stdio)) instead of a PerlIO_importFILE(stdio). This way you know you are creating a unixio layer which gets ref counted properly." -- Craig A. Berry, somewhere in the sprawling PerlIO layers saga.

Wellington.PM are holding a quiz night on Tuesday December 12th at 6:00pm start.

Don't imagine that you need to be a Perl expert to take part - in fact that probably wouldn't help at all. The questions will cover a range of topics related to computers; programming; the internet; and free and open source software. The emphasis is on fun. The teams will be organised at random, so you really don't need to do anything except turn up on the night. Please bring friends and workmates along, but don't assume you'll end up on the same team.

With patch Change #29430 the regex engine should now be sufficiently abstracted that it is reasonably feasable to write a plugin to use a different regex engine in perl. The documentation for most of the interface is contained in the perlreguts module although one needs to understand the flags in the regexp.h in order to make it work.

"... On the sixth day of Chritmas my true love sent to me,
Six versions of Perl,
FIVE LANGUAGES COMPILING!
Four bytes of bytecode,
Three POST nodes,
Two ASTs,
And a Partridge with a parse tree."

-- Jonathan Worthington, 'Naming PAST-pm compiler tool chain'

The Perl 6 Design team met via phone on 29 November 2006. Larry, Damian, Allison, Patrick, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the notes.

I've created a Perl Community calendar on Google Calendar. I've wanted to do this sort of thing for a long time to help track that stuff for The Perl Review's print listing. I've given up on writing my own calendar application. Google Calendar has a decent interface that I don't have to support, and it provides feeds: XML, iCal, and HTML.

singingfish writes "The Catalyst development team are pleased to announce that the 2006 Catalyst Advent Calendar ( this linkRSS) is now running. Every day from now until the 24th of December we will be presenting examples, explanations and tips on using Catalyst, the flexible Perl web framework.

[we could] not increment the reference count (and hope the SV is still around when the lvalue subroutine is called) -- Gerard Goossen

Hope and programming don't mix well usually. -- Rafaël Garcia-Suarez

The Perl 6 Design team met via phone on 22 November 2006. Damian, Allison, Patrick, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the notes:

rizen writes "We at MadMongers (Madison Perl Mongers) are fortunate enough to have two of our most distinguished members giving a talk on Perl::Critic next Wednesday, December 6th. Chris Dolan and Andy Lester will be giving a tandem speech on the topic. We encourage everyone in driving distance from Madison, Wisconsin to show up, as this is guaranteed to be the best talk of the year. Not only that, but it's the last talk of this year. =)