use Perl

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. =)

"...of course [that] can't be a bug as there are no specs ;)"

-- Leopold Toetsch, in '[perl #40968] [BUG] :multi doesn't seem to work right'

Vienna.pm is pleased to announce the website for YAPC::Europe 2007.

"Sadly, the hallucinogens are essential, not external."

-- Mark J. Reed in 'List assignment question'

The Perl 6 Design team met via phone on 15 November 2006. Larry, Damian, Allison, Patrick, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the notes:

Event:   Technical Meeting
Date:    Wednesday 22nd November 2006
Times:   from 7pm onwards (see below)
Venue:   O'Neills, 90 Hurst Street, The Arcadian Centre, Birmingham
Details: http://birmingham.pm.org/cgi-bin/brum.pl?act=tech-next

"This is like sitting your mother down to teach her computers and beginning by explaining little endian vs big endian and the intimate details of protected mode memory" -- Michael G. Schwern, firmly believing that there must be a better way of installing perl.

Just off the heels of the Chicago Perl Hack-A-Thon, which focused very much on Parrot, I have a great interview with Chip Salzenberg. Chip is a past Perl 5 Pump King and is the current Parrot Pump King.

Parrot, as many of you know, is a virtual machine that is intended be a platform for running Perl 6. Actually, the Parrot virtual machine hopes to run many languages other than Perl 6. There is currently beginning implementations of many languages on Parrot including Ruby and TCL. Parrot is different than many other virtual machines that we know of. It is register-based, as opposed to the common stack-based architectures, and it is designed to run dynamic languages.

I'm in the process of taking over the maintainance of Win32::API module from Aldo Calpini, the original author.

I'm collecting patches, related web pages and information as I'd like to make Win32::API work with the current VanillaPerl/Mingw environment.

I also updated win32.perl.org Wiki to announce this.

So, anyone interested in getting your patches, suggestions, rants, ... please get onboard now and communicate with me. If you already have your bug reports filed on http://rt.cpan.org/, be sure I'm working on those (if I ever get to manage all of these bugs;-D )...