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This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them.

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Geizhals Preisvergleich is one of the largest product and price comparison platforms in the German-speaking area.

These are some answers to the Week 290, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 13, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Double Exist

You are given an array of integers, @ints.

Write a script to find if there exist two indices $i and $j such that:

1) $i != $j
2) 0 <= ($i, $j) < scalar @ints
3) $ints[$i] == 2 * $ints[$j]

Example 1

The three of us attended another long meeting:

• We continued refining our plan for TLS in core. We will collect feedback on its feasibility from the maintainers of the relevant modules.
• We reviewed the status of putting the apostrophe package separator behind a feature and approved the PR.
• We confirmed that we want to deprecate smartmatch with a feature. This effectively means that we don’t plan for a “better smartmatch” at this time (but it can still be pursued in future, by way of the air gap strategy, if there is appetite). We will file an issue for this.
• We agreed that “negative” features (rather than outright removal) is our preferred way to deprecate historical Perl quirks as the language continues to evolve.
• We discussed our ongoing inadequacy at dealing with maintenance releases. We wrote down next steps to get back on track, and also started looking into capturing a checklist to document the process.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Read volume 1 here.

In my last post, I talked about some of the big things TPF (The Perl Foundation) does. This time, I'll discuss some of the smaller stuff I've handled at TPF, often with help from others, and my misses along the way. My opinions are my own.

White Camel Awards

The White Camel Awards, started by brian d foy in 1999, were created to honor Perl community contributors, who, like ninjas, do all the hard work but never seem to get noticed. brian personally picked the winners each year until he stepped down in 2018. While many people contribute to the Perl community, their efforts often fly under the radar. I mean, organize a Perl event every year and your name still wouldn't make it outside the venue. Tough, right?

In 2022, I took over the award with TPF, with brian's blessing, to keep this tradition alive.

I gave the talk Maximizing Performance and Cost Efficiency in the Cloud at the Perl and Raku conference this year. Among others, it used data from a benchmarking comparison I did among dozens of VMs on various cloud providers, and I had promised I'd post the full report.

It took me quite a bit longer than expected due to both technical complications and some new releases I wanted to include that enlarged the scope, but here it is now. Should be useful if you want to get the best bang for buck on the cloud.

These are some answers to the Week 288, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 29, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Closest Palindrome

You are given a string, $str, which is an integer.

Write a script to find out the closest palindrome, not including itself. If there are more than one then return the smallest.

The closest is defined as the absolute difference minimized between two integers.

Example 1

Input: $str = "123"
Output: "121"

Example 2

This week, we talked about some recent (and less recent) p5p threads:

• We discussed the sort thread briefly. We are waiting to see where it goes.
• We talked again about TLS in core, and reviewed a document from the CPAN Security Group. We want to talk about this more in depth next week.
• Discussion of the evalordie thread led us to talk about some form of in-core autodie pragma. We didn’t reach any conclusion.
• We noted that a maint release is overdue.

[P5P posting of this summary]

The Weekly Challenge 287, Task 1

You are given a string, $str.
Write a program to return the minimum number of steps required to make the given string very strong password. If it is already strong then return 0.
Criteria:

• It must have at least 6 characters.
• It must contains at least one lowercase letter, at least one upper case letter and at least one digit.
• It shouldn’t contain 3 repeating characters in a row.

Following can be considered as one step:

• Insert one character;
• Delete one character;
• Replace one character with another.

A Simplification

To make the algorithm simpler, let’s ignore deletion. Instead of deleting a character, we can always replace it with a character different to the original one and its neighbours (you can easily verify that it can’t break any of the three criteria: it doesn’t shorten the password, it doesn’t remove more characters than the deletion would have deleted, and it never creates repeating characters).

The Algorithm

Let’s keep a set of strings we need to check, we’ll call them the agenda. At the start of the program, the agenda contains the input string.

NAME

Perl Community Conference / Science Perl Journal, Winter 2024

SYNOPSIS

This virtual Conference on December 18th, 2024 is being called in conjunction with the creation of the Science Perl Journal, Winter 2024 Issue.

We have 6 author committments from some very exciting topics, but we want more! The Summer Issue has 8 authors and is nearly 150 pages. We are looking to double the number of authors, doubling the number of pages is going to be a stretch :-).

DESCRIPTION

Christos Argyropoulos, MD, PhD. is our moderator for this virtual event, which is December 18th, 2024 - Perl's 37th birthday! At this event we will be announcing our Summer 2025 plans, which will include a 3rd Issue of the SPJ.

The following lengths will be accepted for publication and presentation:

• Extended Abstract (1 page, 5 minute lightning talk slot)
• Short paper (2-9 pages, 20 minute speaker slot)
• Full length paper (10-36 pages, 50 minute speaker slot)

These are some answers to the Week 287, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 22, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Valid Number

You are given a string, $str.

Write a script to find if it is a valid number.

Conditions for a valid number:

- An integer number followed by an optional exponent.
- A decimal number followed by an optional exponent.
- An integer number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by digits.

Decimal Number:

A decimal number is defined with an optional sign '-' or '+' followed by one of the following definitions: - Digits followed by a dot '.'. - Digits followed by a dot '.' followed by digits. - A dot '.' followed by digits.

Exponent:

We had a guest this week: Olaf Alders.

• We exchanged Perl (re)branding ideas with Olaf. We will be keeping in touch on that front.
• We discussed the feedback on feature-guarding and unbundling apostrophe. We came up with a strategy to propose that we think should work, which will be posted on the relevant thread.
• We discussed the fact that keeping the current smartmatch operator (as a feature) means we can’t have a meaningful air gap to prevent subtle bugs when moving to a future “good” smartmatch. This probably implies that we would be giving up on any future smart match operator, but there are usually better replacements.

[P5P posting of this summary]

This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them.

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Hi All

Why aren't my links appearing....

Note: The first 3 links point to my personal page: http://savage.net.au

The Perl wiki has been renamed from Perl.html - which was too generic - to Perl.Wiki.html:
https://savage.net.au/misc/Perl.Wiki.html

The Mojolicious wiki is at:
https://savage.net.au/misc/Mojolicious.Wiki.html

The Debian wiki is at:
https://savage.net.au/misc/Debian.Wiki.html

Note: The next 2 links point to my new website: https://symboliciq.au

This will accompany my upcoming Youtube channel

The Symbolic Language wiki is at:
https://symboliciq.au/misc/Symbolic.Language.Wiki.html

The Personal Security wiki is at:
https://symboliciq.au/misc/Personal.Security.Wiki.html

These are some answers to the Week 285, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 8, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: No Connection

You are given a list of routes, @routes.

Write a script to find the destination with no further outgoing connection.

Example 1

Input: @routes = (["B","C"], ["D","B"], ["C","A"])
Output: "A"

"D" -> "B" -> "C" -> "A".
"B" -> "C" -> "A".
"C" -> "A".
"A".

Back from holidays all three of us were in.

• We discussed the recently reported closure memory leak in 5.40, which existed in older perls and was fixed in a way that caused other breakage instead, and we agreed that if it isn’t fixable we need to address it by at least providing guidance on how to code around it
• We discussed the removal of apostrophe as a package separator, and agreed that it should likely be feature-guarded, but the verdict on the fallout is not yet in
• We continued the discussion on how to simultaneously encourage low ecosystem churn while helping users enjoy all the latest goodies
• We agreed on writing a few position paper articles to explain our thinking and the attitude we think a PSC should take

[P5P posting of this summary]

This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Without our sponsors this event would not happen and we would like to thank them, starting with our diamond sponsor:

Deriv, a leading online broker with 25 years in the industry, is proud to sponsor the London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024.

As a company with strong ties to the Open Source community, our connection to Perl is more than just practical—it's a passion. Over the years, we have actively used Modern Perl and contributed to shaping its future, including beta testing key developments like Object::Pad, which are crucial for advancing the language's capabilities.

Perl is the backbone of our back-end operations, proving to be a robust, reliable, and versatile language that meets our needs. Its community-driven growth, notably through CPAN, continually boosts its capabilities and reflects our values of collaboration and innovation.

The following script leaks memory in perl v5.40, and it did not in v5.38:

use Scalar::Util 'weaken';
my $z;
{
    my $x;
    my $y;
    my sub my_sub {
        $x = shift;
        return sub { $y };
    };
    my $subscriber = {};
    $subscriber->{foo} = my_sub($subscriber);
    weaken($z = $subscriber);
}
say 'leak = ', int defined $z;

These are some answers to the Week 284, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 1, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Relative Sort

You are given two list of integers, @list1 and @list2. The elements in the @list2 are distinct and also in the @list1.

Write a script to sort the elements in the @list1 such that the relative order of items in @list1 is same as in the @list2. Elements that is missing in @list2 should be placed at the end of @list1 in ascending order.

Example 1

Input: @list1 = (2, 3, 9, 3, 1, 4, 6, 7, 2, 8, 5)
       @list2 = (2, 1, 4, 3, 5, 6)
Ouput: (2, 2, 1, 4, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Example 2

Everyone was present this week.

• We devised a strategy to deal with smartmatch, starting with reverting its removal. A separate email with details will follow.
• We spent too much time talking about putting the apostrophe package separator behind a feature. That too will be outlined in a separate email. A github issue will follow.
• We want to revert the open undef patch, for a variety of reasons, such as breaking autodie. We decided the steps to handle this.

[P5P posting of this summary]

This year's London Perl and Raku Workshop is just 4 weeks away. We now have a pretty full schedule, so the call for presentations is now closed, however we might have room for one or two more talks depending circumstances on the day. If you really think you have talk you want to give then get in touch.

As part of the workshop we would like to ask attendees if any are willing to volunteer for helping out on the day. This will likely include:

• Room monitoring and video equipment operation
• Registration of attendees
• General assistance of organisers and attendees

We are probably looking for three people to help out on the day. Please contact the organisers if you would like to help out.

The London Perl and Raku Workshop will take place on 26th Oct 2024. Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not happen:

• Deriv
• CV-Library
• Geekuni
• Geizhals Preisvergleich
• Datensegler e.U.
• SpareRoom
• Oleeo