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]

These are some answers to the Week 286, 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 15, 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: Order Game

You are given an array of integers, @ints, whose length is a power of 2.

Write a script to play the order game (min and max) and return the last element.

Example 1

Download the Perl TiddlyWiki

Read about TiddlyWIkis

Cheers

The Dancer Core Team is happy to announce that Dancer2 1.1.1 is on its way to CPAN. This is a maintenance release that deals with the following issues:

[ BUG FIXES ]
* GH #1712: Fix use of send_as in templates (Andy Beverley)

[ DOCUMENTATION ]
* PR #1706: Document missing logging hooks and log format option;
  fix typo in logging test (Jason A. Crome)

Happy Dancing! Jason / CromeDome

Just Aristotle and Philippe this time (Graham chipped in on IRC):

• we discussed the apostrophe situation: we will watch 5.41.3 break CPAN, and then evaluate the actual fallout. We like the idea of guarding this with a feature (which might need to be split in two, for the string interpolation case)
• we had a long discussion about backwards compatibility and use VERSION. Should "did you use VERSION?" become the new "did you use strict and warnings?"

[P5P posting of this summary]

These are some answers to the Week 278, 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 July 21, 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: Reverse Word

You are given a word, $word and a character, $char.

Write a script to replace the substring up to and including $char with its characters sorted alphabetically. If the $char doesn’t exist, then DON'T do anything.

Example 1

Input: $str = "challenge", $char = "e"
Ouput: "acehllnge"

Example 2

Input: $str = "programming", $char = "a"
Ouput: "agoprrmming"

Example 3

In which thousands become millions, as we achieve a near-linear solution.

Perl v5.40 introduced native true and false keywords. Unfortunately not all CPAN modules are ready to use them. One of those not yet ready is Mojo::Pg.

Normally you'd want to pass booleans to your queries as just 1's and 0's. However, since Mojo::JSON's true & false stringify to 1 and 0, my 5.38-using codebase is full of Mojo::Pg queries with Mojo::JSON's true and false as arguments.

This is a problem if I want to upgrade the perl interpreter of that project to Perl v5.40, because if I write "use v5.40;" in the file that contains those boolean keywords, Perl's builtin booleans will be used instead, which don't stringify to 1 and 0, but to 1 and the empty string, which can't be used by DBD::Pg in boolean fields and makes DBD::Pg throw an exception.

The solution I found was to subclass Mojo::Pg::Database, and wrap the query method, so that if Perl's builtin booleans are found, they are replaced in the query with native Pg booleans.

The source of the module and a lot more information can be found in my blogpost, here.

Just Graham and Aristotle this time.

• Discussed tracking perl authorized releasers updates and storing historical data
• Dual-Life modules need some cleanup to get a more normal release process that can be done more regularly. Cleanup has been done on Storable.
• Time::HiRes by default doesn’t seem terrible, if possible
• X509 in core could make sense as part of a more complete interface to OpenSSL
• Discussion about how it would be possible to have support for Markdown or other new Pod extensions in a more backwards compatible way. Possibly a way to define alternate formats for =begin/=end sections.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Problem

I have not been able to figure out how to run an async thread in the background while using a REPL like reply. The moment I run the main loop, it takes over the input from the REPL. Here's what a typical failed REPL session might look like.

These are some answers to the Week 277, 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 July 14, 2024, known in France as Bastille Day, 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: Strong Pair

You are given an array of integers, @ints.

Write a script to return the count of all strong pairs in the given array.

A pair of integers x and y is called strong pair if it satisfies: 0 < |x - y| < min(x, y).

Example 1

Input: @ints = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Ouput: 4

Strong Pairs: (2, 3), (3, 4), (3, 5), (4, 5)

Example 2

This week, the whole PSC was in attendance.

We merged HTTP-Tiny#6, and then discussed a number of topics:

• some improvements on the process for releasing blead-upstream dual-life modules are needed
• the instructions for releasing a new Perl are difficult to follow and partly redundant, the process takes longer than it should, and more of it could be automated
• the pumpkin permission list has grown over time, and probably needs to be trimmed
• more talk about Markdown documentation
• thoughts on how to strike a better balance with the verbosity/brevity of meeting minutes

Sometimes one needs an extra ounce of performance. Why not combine the high level semantics of Perl with the punch of assembly?

This repo includes various examples of how this can be done.

This block of code is valid Perl:

if (my $var1 = calc1()) {
    say $var1;
} elsif (my $var2 = calc2()) {
    say "$var1, $var2";
}

As you can see, $var1, which is declared in the if clause, is visible inside the elsif clause too.

Perl never ceases to amaze me!

(Also appears in my blog)

These are some answers to the Week 276, 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 July 7, 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: Complete Day

You are given an array of integers, @hours.

Write a script to return the number of pairs that forms a complete day.

A complete day is defined as a time duration that is an exact multiple of 24 hours.

Example 1

Input: @hours = (12, 12, 30, 24, 24)
Output: 2

Pair 1: (12, 12)
Pair 2: (24, 24)

Example 2

After over a month without a PSC meeting, this was the first meeting of the new, shiny PSC. Today, we:

• welcomed Aristotle, and said goodbye to Paul
• discussed the current projects in flight, the PPC process and the onboarding tasks (preparing for next year already!)
• talked about POD, docstrings, and the Perl release process

Brett Estrade, did it again with yet another excellent talk at TPRC 2024 about the use of OpenMP for parallelizing Perl/C code. This is an area that is extremely interesting as OpenMP is a rather straightforward way to parallelize code using simple compiler pragmas in Inline::C sections of code. Furthermore, as I discussed at TPRC2024, the combination of the Many Core Engine (MCE) and OpenMP allow the Perl user to endow a specific piece of code with both process and thread level parallelism, bleeding the hardware for performance without losing the benefits of Perl for high level coding.

Since this an area that may not be familiar to many users, I decided to start blogging about Perl/C parallel application programming at Killing It With Perl . The first post in this series is about a rudimentary control of the OpenMP environment , e.g. setting up the number and scheduling of the threads and you can read all about it here.

I remember when one one of my grandchildren helpfully decided reorganise a bookshelf whilst by himself. Upon being discovered, sitting in front of an empty shelf with books strewn all around him, his instinctive reaction made me feel proud to be his grandpa. He looked up and said, “Oh dear! Oh dear! what happened?”, as if this calamity had occurred spontaneously, astonishing him as much as the angry parent who was going to have to tidy it all up. It is hard to hide amusement when you watch your kids have to deal with their kids.

Advanced Disaster Management Strategy for Grandchildren and Programmers

These are some answers to the Week 286, 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 15, 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: Self Spammer

Write a program which outputs one word of its own script / source code at random. A word is anything between whitespace, including symbols.

Example 1

If the source code contains a line such as: 'open my $fh, "<", "ch-1.pl" or die;'
then the program would output each of the words { open, my, $fh,, "<",, "ch-1.pl", or, die; }
(along with other words in the source) with some positive probability.

Example 2

Technically 'print(" hello ");' is *not* an example program, because it does not
assign positive probability to the other two words in the script.
It will never display print(" or ");

Example 3