George Greer

• Website: m-l.org/~perl/
• About: Data swizzling practitioner.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Why you don't need File::Slurp…
  I use a one-liner slurp at $WORK. I am sooo tired of copy+pasting it into scripts when I start them (and perhaps remembering which is the most recent if I've changed it lately). I would much prefer it be as...
• Commented on Perl5 Census Japan 2013
  Good to see that 5.8.x and lower is less than 25% of the total. Tools like 'perlbrew' and 'cpanminus' definitely help me try out new versions fast....
• Commented on Fat Versus Thin Core
  Anyone is free to package up their own "batteries included" Perl distribution (or Task:: cpan list) so there is little reason for those with the most scare skills and limited time to do so. That's especially true since local::lib and...
• Commented on Testing is a Feature of Your Service
  Best day I ever had while using a remote service was the day when half of requests would randomly fail. My scripts became much more robust that day since I could reliably find all the points of failure on my...
• Commented on A Simple Plack/DBI Example
  For disambiguation I generally do: DBI::->connect(...)...
• Commented on My Top MySQL Gripes
  The SQLite behavior works great for databases where you don't care how long a string is or how big a number or what format the date is in but you just want it in the database. I did get bit...
• Commented on git svn vs. svn2git (vs. "svn2git")
  git-svn is Perl code, so we'd all love it getting a little love. The extent of my experience with it was a temporary hack to allow me to back-date Subversion the commits when doing a "git svn dcommit"....
• Commented on Chadbourne Hall
  The receipt email I received on 6/2 mentioned both the dorm and address in the first paragraph and room number in second paragraph....
• Commented on Ninja Code
  Technically two bugs: the s/// replacement also has one. (Or perhaps that was a typo in transferring?)...
• Commented on Truth about Booking.com
  This reminds me generally about a story a few years ago of the United States housing industry: how it has refined the building of a home down to such efficient detail that they can put up decent houses quickly and...
• Commented on Whither perlsphere.net?
  WorksForMe(tm)...
• Commented on Perl and Parsing 12: Beating up on the "use" statement
  Interesting that the qw() syntax succeeds in the indirect-object "use" but very little else does. There's little value in breaking old programs that do this syntax, though. I would prefer version-specific grammars so that under "use 5.016" this is a...
• Commented on Perl, Perl 5, Perl 6, and names
  Relevant: http://www.curmudgeonlysoftware.com/2011/05/23/perl-from-the-outside/ At some early point in my learning process I started hearing about Perl 6, a subject that seems to cause confusion even within the Perl community. Unsurprisingly, this confusion is magnified for newbies. I now know that Perl...
• Commented on Announcing Marpa::XS
  Any crazy ideas of experimenting with the perl parser using Marpa instead of yacc? Or perhaps less crazy being PPI?...
• Commented on Coding Style As A Failure Of Language Design?
  I think it would be cool if Perl 6 was flexible enough to make whitespace/style violations a syntax error. I would not, however, want it to be any sort of default for the language itself....
• Posted Testing perl with Valgrind to George Greer

  Since there isn't much I've noticed blogged about the perl interpreter itself, I'll add some notes that could be of interest. In particular, like CPAN Testers, there are some people contributing tests of perl itself albeit with a lower profile and without the snazzy web site. Toward the goal of…

• Commented on Signal-to-noise ration as a metric of low-level code readability?
  Some discussion over on Reddit....

Comment Threads

• J. Bobby Lopez commented on Perl5 Census Japan 2013

  "Japan Perl Association director; Livedoor, Inc; Tokyo, Japan" - I answered my own question. Thanks again :)

• Nick Patch commented on Why you don't need File::Slurp…

  If I recall, File::Slurp had issues with the PerlIO :encoding layer and required manual decoding of the slurped data instead, which is why I have avoided it. Not sure if this is still an issue.

• Leon Timmermans commented on Why you don't need File::Slurp…

  If I recall, File::Slurp had issues with the PerlIO :encoding layer and required manual decoding of the slurped data instead, which is why I have avoided it. Not sure if this is still an issue.

  Looking at the code, that's still an issue. I hadn't realized that, but that's a rather serious issue.

  It also doesn't quite handle :crlf correctly either. This is a mess :-(

• Leon Timmermans commented on Why you don't need File::Slurp…

  Functionally it's identical to read_file(binmode => ':raw'), otherwise it's perfectly portable.

  Because File::Slurp can be rewritten in XS if speed is the overriding concern (and it will be faster than your 2-lines).

  And it would not be faster than what I just posted. It really wouldn't. It's speed limited by the actual IO, that's the whole point.

  Because File::Slurp is self-documenting.

  All …

• Vincent Caron commented on Why you don't need File::Slurp…

  There's a flaw IMHO, read() may not return the whole file content (and actually it won't with large files), depends on OS buffering. The usual boilerplate includes a while() and buffer concatenation.

  With a small fix that could still be a oneliner though.