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I've been writing a lot of software lately that deals with direct hardware access (specifically analog and digital hardware for the Raspberry Pi). This means that I've had to learn some C, as well as get proficient with bit manipulation and the bitwise operators.

As part of my learning, I thought I'd write a module to do this bit manipulation for me, hence Bit::Manip was born. (There's also a Bit::Manip::PP for those who can't/don't want to use XS. It should be indexed shortly).

Here's a scenario based example of how the software can be used.

You have a 16-bit configuration register for a piece of hardware that you want to configure and send in. Here's the bit configuration

Still stuck in weaver land here in the Dist-pen

Today I am going to look at [GenerateSection] section plug-in. This one look very interesing to me as it lets on generate a section from with-in the 'weaver.ini' file.

Now in my case I would love to have a common header and footer for my Tutorial pod without having to add the same section over and over again in each POD doc. I am hoping that this plug-in will get most if not all of what I need.

Right now I am just going to go for a simple all text version for now as I am not 100% sure how to get extra variable content into Dist::Zilla and Pod::Weaver.

Strawberry Perl 5.24.1.1 and 5.22.3.1 are available at http://strawberryperl.com

More details in Release Notes:
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.24.1.1-64bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.24.1.1-32bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.22.3.1-64bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.22.3.1-32bit.html

I would like to thank our sponsor Enlightened Perl Organisation for resources provided to our project.

So we all know the COMPSCI 101 method of swapping two variables:
  $tmp = $x; $x = $y; $y = $tmp;
And we all know the better way of doing it:
  ($x, $y) = ($y, $x);

And yet, I found the following in PRODUCTION CODE, that a contractor was PAID ACTUAL DOLLARS TO WRITE:
  ($tmp_x, $tmp_y) = ($x, $y);
  ($x, $y) = ($tmp_y, $tmp_x);
Weird that they knew about parallel assignment but not that you could just apply it to two variables directly.

Anyhow, this wasn’t nearly as bad as the code I found in a different module (same vendor) to swap all the 1s and 0s in a string. Now this is a somewhat less trivial problem than simply swapping two variables, but
  $str =~ tr/01/10/;
does the job nicely. Alas, in the same vein as the variable-swap, the method that vendor went with was:
  $str =~ s/0/2/g;
  $str =~ s/1/3/g;
  $str =~ s/2/1/g;
  $str =~ s/3/0/g;

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week.

Enjoy!

Back to do some more Sections here in the Dist-pen today.

Today I am going to look at three plug-ins the very simple [Extends] the equally simple [MooseExtends] the little different [MooseConsumes]

The first two do what you would expect. Create an 'EXTENDS' section in your POD that lists all the modules that your '.pm' file is based on.

The first one [Extends] loops though the '@isa' and plucks the information from there. Now for kicks I installed this one and added it to my 'weaver.ini' and I got

=head1 EXTENDS
=over 4
=item * L<Moose::Meta::Class::__ANON__::SERIAL::37>
=back

Hi!

Here is my latest post about Sparrowdo configuration management tool written in Perl6 - Sparrow plugins vs ansible modules - an attempt of informal comparison of sparrow and ansible eco systems.

Regards.

Alexey

I've been rather quiet lately because between building Tau Station and working with some clients, I'm running around faster than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

I'll be in Brussels for the February 4/5 2017, FOSDEM, talking about Building the Tau Station Universe in Perl. I was planning on giving a talk about testing, but I was specifically asked if I'd talk about Tau Station. While I love the project, I tried to think of a way it wouldn't sound like a 40 minute infomercial at an open source conference.

Jonathan Leffler has sent me a very slightly updated set of SQL BNF files for SQL-92, SQL-99 and SQL-2003. I've put them on-line.

So it is Moose day here in the Dist-Pen

So I am finally back to Moose after many many days with Dist::Zilla and Pod::Weaver as to today I am going to see how I can use the Moose::MOP, Dist:Zill and Pod::Weaver all together.

What I am look at today is the [Consumes] section plug-in which is suppose to run out read the meta-classes of my Moose objects and then print out all the Roles that a class consumes. I am not sure what results I will get but is should be fun to see.

[Generic / OVERVIEW]
++[Consumes]
[Collect / ATTRIBUTES]

I recently ran across an article (http://neilb.org/2016/08/08/quoted-words-arrayref.html) by neilb, advocating for a qa() operator that returns an arrayref instead of a plain array:
  our $cars_ref = qa(sedan hatchback coupe);
I love this idea, and I would use it a lot.

I’d like to add onto this proposal another qw()-style operator to quote the keys of a membership hash. I suggest qk() for “quote keys.” So
  our %is_color = qk(red blue green);
is the same as
  our %is_color = map { $_ => 1 } qw(red blue green);
or
  our @colors = qw(red blue green);
  our %is_color = map { $_ => 1 } @colors;

Unlike my previous entry (symbolic “xor”), I wrote this line of code ALL THE TIME. Taking a cue from neilb, I looked on CPAN to see how often other people do this. It turns out the answer is “a really, really lot”: http://grep.cpan.me/?q=map%5Cs*%7B%5Cs*%5C%28%3F%5Cs*%5C%24_%5Cs*%3D%3E%5Cs*1%5Cs*%5C%29%3F%5Cs*%5C%7D%5Cs*qw

Hi! Sparrowdo is a modern configuration management tool written on Perl6. If you wonder how sparrowdo makes a difference you may read this article - Sparrow plugins evolution - an informal introduction to core part of sparrowdo - sparrow plugins.

A Perl BoF (Birds of a feather) meeting has been officially organized for this years linux.conf.au Conference in Tasmania Australia.

Further details can be found at: https://linux.conf.au/wiki/conference/birds_of_a_feather_sessions/perl_bof/

Or drop in to #australia on irc.perl.org

It is C round up day today in the Dist-Pen.

In my last post I had a look at [Contributors] section plug-in and today I am going to look at not one but three plug-ins

• CommentString
• CollectWithAutoDoc and
• CollectWithIntro

CommentString
This simple plug-in lets you do your own 'Comment' sections like we have seen with [Name] and [Contributors]. It works in much the same way as the [Collect] plug-in, you supply the 'name' for the section and then a 'key' to match on.

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week.

Enjoy!

Why doesn’t Perl have a symbolic logical xor operator (spelled “^^”)? As far as I can tell, the only reason is that C doesn’t have one...

At a minimum, it would remove the need for parentheses in expressions like
  $flag = ($subflag1 xor $subflag2);
instead allowing
  $flag = $subflag1 ^^ $subflag2;
…like you can now do with and and or, as long as you spell them “&&” and “||”.

Would I use this a lot? No. (I would have for maybe the 2nd time yesterday, which is what made me think of it.) But as someone who loves completeness, the absence of a symbolic xor absences from Perl has always bothered me.

Finally got the full setting to compile and load and 'say "Hello World"' works.
I'll write a bigger update once everything is cleaned up and commited.

Still stuck in Section mode here at the Dist-Pen

Carrying from my last post today I am going to look at the [Contributors] section plug-in. This particular plug-in is of little value so for to my 'Database::Accessor' project as I have no other people working on it with me but one can always dream big that I may have some helpers as time goes on. So it is is work a look.

I wanted to see if anyone else is using this plug-in so I did a Reverse Dependency look up and found that there are thirty-six other distributions that use this so I have few places where I can go an peek and see how it is being used.

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week.

Enjoy!

Hi ! Sparrowdo is lightweight and very flexible configuration management system written on Perl6. I have started a blog site where going to drop technical notes and others news related sparrowdo project, welcome to https://sparrowdo.wordpress.com !