Karl Williamson

• About: I work on Perl

Recent Actions

• Posted Why you should use ppport.h in your XS code modules to Karl Williamson

  
  As a bonus, less work on your part.

  It's surprising to find that there are modules on CPAN that aren't using
  ppport.h that could stand to benefit from it.

  ppport.h is a file that is part of the Devel::…

• Posted Devel::PPPort has been updated to Karl Williamson

  Devel::PPPort 3.55 has more than two hundred commits since the last major releases. The documentation has been extensively revised to make it clearer how to use, and to contribute. And it has been updated to know about the latest blead; the first such update in 5 or more years.

  Dozens of…

• Commented on Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site
  I like the non-official site somewhat better, but I can't explain why. A glitch from the past was that a lot of links didn't work on autogenerated files. I couldn't find any failures in my brief attempts, so maybe that...
• Commented on Unicode::Properties slated for removal
  The features offered by this module are now all offered by Unicode::UCD which ships with the perl 5 core. Unicode::UCD::charprops_all() returns all the Unicode properties for its code point argument prop_invlist() can be used to get a list of code...
• Commented on How Viable is Perl?
  Tutorials for the board game Go are likely to have been searched for...
• Commented on \d does not validate numbers
  DEVANAGARI DIGIT NINE, for example, is used by millions of people millions, perhaps billions, of times a day as an essential component of their numbers. I don't know if you are being careless with your terminology, or wrongly arrogant about...

Comment Threads

• Ben Bullock commented on \d does not validate numbers

  > That’s what /a is for.

  As a followup to this article, I am thinking about making another blog post showing how \d is used to match numbers in actual CPAN modules. It's used for number validation in more than a thousand modules, for example here is the matches for /\\d\./:

  http://grep.cpan.me/?q=%5C%5Cd%5C.

  and here is the matches for /\\d\+\./:

  http://grep.cpan.me/?q=%5C%5Cd%5C%2B%5C..*%2F%5Bb-z%5D*a

  Noting your comment, I tried s…

• Tim King commented on How Viable is Perl?

  Yes, that makes a lot of sense. (Someone on the TPS blog commented the same thing, too. LOL.)

• Ben Bullock commented on Unicode::Properties slated for removal

  Thanks for your very useful comment which will be a good reference for the unlucky person who used Unicode::Properties and now needs to replace it.

  Not only do much better versions now exist, but the values returned from Unicode::Properties are extracted from Perl circa 2008. I don't think there was any justification at all for keeping that module around.

  Sayonara Unicode::Properties.

  If someone wants the namespace for another module they are welcome to it, please email me at bkb@cpan.org or benkasminbullock@gmail.com.

• xenu commented on Request for Feedback: Perl Documentation Site

  I prefer perldoc.pl, it's much better than perldoc.perl.org, although tbh I'm not a big fan of its design, it isn't *bad*, but it's slightly too gray and depressing for my taste.

  A few random things I like about perldoc.pl:

  - perldoc.pl has much better search, I especially like its special handling of perldeltas. Also the fact that I can input a punctuation variable in the search box and it just takes me to the right place in perlvar. I use that all the time.

  - perldoc.perl.org is buggy, the bug Karl mentioned is still there and it's pretty serious. For example, go to…