use Perl

$ make hello
cc     hello.c   -o hello

And you end up with an executable.

However, I was surprised when I tried the following for a yacc grammar (again there is no makefile):

$ make foo
yacc  foo.y
mv -f y.tab.c foo.c
cc     foo.c   -o foo

Handy.

Also, in relation to Yacc, here is a footnote from the O'Reilly Lex & Yacc book:

Yacc's use of dot to show where you are in the rule can get confusing if you have rules with dots in them. Some versions of yacc use an underscore rather than a dot, which can be equally confusing if you have rules with underscores in them.

I have a feeling that you could keep going on like this.

To be updated.

Rachid Taha. You know it's not kosher.

I dined with Dave Cross, Casey West and some of the Italian Perl mongers. But we chatted afterwards and I even got a photo.

This was after the Italian Code Jam. It was a great day. I really enjoyed Larry's talk which (I think) was entitled "What I have learned in my 50 years" although it had at least 10 other titles as well (including The Perl of Perl). It went on a windy path through ballistics, computer science, Perl culture and Lord of the Rings (eagles were Tolkien's exception handlers) to a destination of Perl 6.

I have been luke warm on Perl 6 up to now but the new syntax and functionality look great.

Needless to say he was asked the million LOC question; When will Perl 6 be out. Larry's answer paraphrased: alpha code next summer hopefully.

There was a little time before the talk so as a diversion I asked people to run the following one-liner from the first slide:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install jmcnamara & _ x ord $ ;' | tail -1

Try it! You'll need to have CPAN.pm configured and it will probably take a little while the first time it runs. The explanation is here.

If you are here and you read this, say hello.

If you are there I'll see you in the bar.

Che bellino.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;

my $workbook  = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new("demo02.xls");
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();
my $chart     = $workbook->add_chart_ext('chart200.bin', 'Chart1');

$chart->activate();

$worksheet->store_formula('=Sheet1!A1');
$ worksheet->set_column('A:A', 20);

$workbook->add_format(color => 1);
$workbook->add_format(color => 2, bold => 1);
$workbook->add_format(color => 3);

my @data = (

            ['BIFFwriter.pm',   275],
            ['Big.pm',           99],
            ['Chart.pm',        269],
            ['Format.pm',       724],
            ['Formula.pm',     1410],
            ['OLEwriter.pm',    447],
            ['Utility.pm',      884],
            ['Workbook.pm',    1925],
            ['WorkbookBig.pm',  112],
            ['Worksheet.pm',   3945],
        );

$worksheet->write_col('A1', \@data);

__END__

And the result. Hurrah!

The chart was produced in Excel with some spurious data, extracted from Excel and then added to a Spreadsheet::WriteExcel file with new input data.

For now this is hackery and a little fragile but it is promising and surprising satisfying.