Aristotle

chromatic:

Posting grand pronouncements about what Perl 5 has to become or the new name it absolutely must adopt won’t do anything. That’s irrelevant.

“What people manning the booths at non-Perl conferences say is the perception of Perl among those outside the echo chamber is irrelevant; I know the REAL problems Perl is having: they are the ones we think mu…

I’m putting this here mostly as future copy-paste fodder:

my %sql_type = do {
    my $ti = $dbh->type_info_all;
    my $tidx = shift @$ti;
    my ( $n, $t ) = @$tidx{qw( TYPE_NAME SQL_DATATYPE )};
    map {; uc $_->[$n], $_->[$t] } @$ti;
};

Now you can say things like $dbh->quote( $latitude, $sql_type{'DOUBLE'} ). This is useful in situations where you cannot use placeholders, e.g. when generating some kind of fixture.sql file from CSV data.

{
    # ... something that needs to be done twice ...

    if ( not state $first_iteration_done++ ) {
        # ... something that must only happen after the first time ...
        redo;
    }
}

In general, some form of “if state $flag” can be used as a “have I been here?” idiom that avoids the need to mention the flag’s identifier anywhere else. Without state, one must repeat oneself some distance away at least to declare the flag in whichever outer scope has the appropriate lifetime.

One of the first module I took over as a maintainer on CPAN was Proc::Fork.

It is a beautiful interface.

It did get a bit uglier in relatively recent times when I added the run_fork wrapper, an unfortunate necessity in certain cases.

But for small single-file-redistributable programs that can be offered to people who are merely users of a Unix system, who do not have any sort of CPAN setup or installation experience, it always felt like a burden to pull in a dependency for something as… insubstantial as this little bit of syntactic sugar:

run_fork {
    child {
        # ...
    }
    parent {
        my $kid = shift;
        # ...
    }
}

Just the other day, it occurred to me that with given/when, it is easy to construct an idiom for forking that is just as concise, if not self-documenting to the same extent:

Chip Salzenberg:

According to John P. Linderman:

Barring some sort of formal definitions, the C code determines the language (pretty much what happened to trigger this whole thread) rather than the language determining the parser, and that just seems wrong.

WRT Perl 5, I’m afraid that horse is not only out of the barn, but has wandered off the ranch, joined a wild herd, and sired several foals.