Leon Timmermans

• Website: codespeaks.blogspot.com/

Recent Actions

• Posted Using peppers with Crypt::Passphrase to Leon Timmermans

  Crypt::Passphrase

  Crypt::Passphrase is a module for managing passwords. It allows you to separate policy and mechanism, meaning that the code that polices authorization doesn’t have to know anything about what algorithms are used behind the screen, and vice-versa; thus making for a…

• Posted My 2023 in Perl to Leon Timmermans

  2023 was a rather productive year for me on CPAN. Aided by taking some time off I managed to release a whopping 18 new modules.

  Passwords

  • Crypt::HSM
  • …
• Commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes
  It's always the & prototype that's useful IME, the other never really are....
• Commented on Mite: an OO compiler for Perl
  > You need to remember to mite compile your code after making changes before running your test suite or packaging up a release. This can be annoyingly easy to forget to do. (Though Mite does also include extensions for ExtUtils::MakeMaker...
• Posted Some tricks for prettier xs to Leon Timmermans

  XS has a reputation of being ugly and cumbersome, but in my experience, it doesn't have to be. Let's take for example this snippet from my Thread::Csp::Promise class:

  MODULE = Thread::Csp PACKAGE = Thread::Csp::Promise PREFIX = promise_
  
  SV* promise_g…
  

• Posted My new modules in 2021 to Leon Timmermans

  Perl

  I had a reasonably productive year, releasing several modules that I think/hope are useful for the wider ecosystem.

  Crypt::Passphrase

  This module manages the passwords in a cryptographically agile manner. That means that it can not only verify passwords using diffe…

• Posted The Witch and the Witch-hunt to Leon Timmermans

  A lot has been said about the recent CAT report and updates. It feels to me like we're not getting anywhere because the critical matters aren't being addressed.

• Commented on Open Letter to the Perl Foundation Board
  The CAT's charter says the CAT must be trusted and viewed as consistent and impartial and to maintain the trust of the community, the CAT must make its processes and actions transparent while not sacrificing privacy but right now a...
• Commented on Reimagining perl5-porters email list for 2021 and beyond
  To be honest, a lot of the conversation has already moved to github. I'm not sure the rest really needs a better place....
• Posted Perl7 is a fork of values to Leon Timmermans

  Before reading this, you should watch this video where Bryan Cantrill explains a value-conflict between Joyent and Node.js, I believe we have a similar problem.

  In it he defines a list of project values:

  ="https://image.slidesharecd…

• Commented on Perl 7 Thoughts
  Worse yet, the `set_prototype` has to happen in a `BEGIN` block to take full effect :-/...
• Commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet
  No apologies needed, but taking things to p5p may be a good idea indeed....
• Commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet
  Being a former bioinformatician myself, I can only concur it should work that way; but that's not how academic computing works today and it's unlikely that it will work that way tomorrow....
• Posted Perl 7, not quite getting better yet to Leon Timmermans

  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon - Karl Marx

  Sawyer just anno…

• Commented on Smartmatch in 5.27.7
  The new keywords are whereis and whereso. Oops, fixed that. These keywords really aren't intuitive to me. Unfortunately when/whereis/whereso are not among the keywords exposed as functions in CORE::, so it is hard for me to see how to write...
• Posted Smartmatch in 5.27.7 to Leon Timmermans

  What happened?

  In the latest development release of perl, smartmatch changed quite a bit.

  Almost everything you believed about smartmatching is now wrong

  No really, everything. All previous rules are gone except a single one: you can smartmatch against any object that o…

• Commented on Test2/Test::Builder Update from the QAH
  I think most of the discussion on that table, as well as here, was about the wrong question entirely. As such The fundamental question is "it is better to have a united or a split ecosystem, and for whom". For...
• Commented on More on YAML, syck looks much better
  What I need now a is good YAML testsuite People are working on a cross-language testsuite. Not sure what the current state is, this is a rather non-trivial endeavor. YAML::XS emitting unindented seq elements for a map child ditto If...
• Commented on UTF-16 and Windows CRLF, oh my
  The PERLIO environmental variable may also be able to help you there....
• Commented on Fixed 5.22 problems during my compiler port
  > Also, publicly stating "John broke xyz" probably doesnt help win people over. Yes, that....
• Commented on What's the perl5's future?
  Quite frankly, both cperl and stableperl are more about their authors and p5p not being compatible with each other than anything else. The difference between stableperl and p5pperl is so small that the former is a bit silly (the latter...
• Commented on File::Slurp is broken and wrong
  I believe that the default encoding using by File::Slurp is because of a Perl bug with threads: https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=41121 That bug is truly a PITA, but it's not particularly relevant to slurping as the handle won't be shared between threads....
• Posted File::Slurp is broken and wrong to Leon Timmermans

  If you are using File::Slurp, you should possibly reconsider. Basically, there are three reasons to do so;

  It is wrong in a lot of cases.

  File::Slurp predates IO layers, and as such doesn't take them into account well. A few years ago, after some complaints, an attempt was done t…

• Commented on Call for help with open source project "CLPM"
  In my mind, CLPM still means comp.lang.perl.misc ;-) Spent many hours there in the past :-)...
• Commented on Spam from waag.org
  I got the same message. Weirded me out a little too, but mostly devnulled it....
• Commented on Day 6: Think globally, act localizably (File::umask, Locale::Tie, Unix::setuid)
  Thanks for your input. I'm not sure what you meant by "saved IDs". You may want to read Setuid Demystified first before writing any kind of setuid wrapper....
• Commented on Day 6: Think globally, act localizably (File::umask, Locale::Tie, Unix::setuid)
  Unix::setuid is a poorly worked out idea. Firstly because it doesn't report errors in any way (despite typically being used in security-critical ways). Secondly because it omits the saved IDs (which are fairly important). That said, I do like the...
• Commented on We are all Perl's ambassadors...
  What I hate most about the system is that it doesn't offer me a way to get back into contact with the rater. Maybe they are mistaken about something essential, maybe I fixed a legitimate issue they reported. Maybe I'd...
• Commented on Managing Boilerplate with Import::Base
  This is a terrible idea really: any change to your bundle mean breaking backwards compatibility. This sort of breakage-at-a-distance can be hard to diagnose. To some extend you can deal with it using a versioning argument (like Modern::Perl does nowadays),...
• Commented on Strawberry Perl 5.20.1.1 invalid MSI signatures
  Quite frankly anyone asking for a scanned copy of an identification document is an idiot: you can not verify the authenticity using a copy. Even a crappy forge is likely to be accepted. Sending it by non-encrypted email doesn't make...

Comment Threads

• James commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes

  another interesting/useful prototype is `*`,
  

  sub foo (*) {
  my $fh = qualify_to_ref(shift, caller);
  ...
  …

• Aristotle commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes

  That seems interesting in the sense of “may you live in interesting times” 😛

  Another possibly useful prototype is the underscore (“_”), which allows functions to default to $_ when given no argument, like e.g. chr and hex do.

• RonW commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes

  I agree that prototypes are a very useful tool. Try::ALRM is genuinely useful and interesting.

  I see the main limitation on prototypes being that & only coerces on the first parameter. I don't see a downside to & coercion on subsequent parameters. If the prototype says it should be a code ref, then if it looks like a block, treat it like a block, same as if the "sub" were there.

  I don't see much advantage to Dispatch::Fu. While it adds a little syntactic sugar, it's really just an indirect way to do:

  if ($cgi->param("action") eq q{foo} and $cgi->param("userid") !=…

• Brett Estrade commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes

  > I don't see much advantage to Dispatch::Fu. While it adds a little syntactic sugar, it's really just an indirect way to do...

  That's the point, but it's more than sugar! The computational complexity of determining the dispatch "key" is entirely contained in the "dispatch" block and is under the control of the developer. Once the "key" is determined, the proper method is called as O(1)!

  Thanks for all to good info above, didn't know bout the "_" allowing one to default to "$_" - I was actually wondering about that recently!

• Brett Estrade commented on The Hidden Power of Prototypes

  I am not good at coming up with contrived examples as evidenced in this Perl Advent article,

  https://perladvent.org/2023/2023-12-13.html

  But a set of cascading "if" blocks is not the most exciting example. However, any code could go in there to compute the key to then "call".