blogs.perl.org

This week we:

• Reviewed some recent email threads:
  • Returning values from require multiple times - seems not useful as compared to using do FILE or the new load_module builtin
  • CPAN.pm observed to use lots of memory, but also complicated to fix. It might benefit a new smaller simpler tool being provided by Perl core
• Perl 5.39.5 is due soon and we have release managers up to 5.39.8, but we’re still in need of folks to do up to 5.40.0

These are some answers to the Week 255, 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 February 11, 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: Most Frequent Word

You are given a paragraph $p and a banned word $w.

Write a script to return the most frequent word that is not banned.

Example 1

Input: $p = "Joe hit a ball, the hit ball flew far after it was hit."
       $w = "hit"
Output: "ball"

The banned word "hit" occurs 3 times.
The other word "ball" occurs 2 times.

Example 2

We skipped the meeting last week (2023-11-02). This week was a quiet week too, so we don’t have much to report.

We talked a bit about the PPCs currently being implemented. PPCs 14 (English names) and 21 (optional chaining) have people implementing them - we hope to have some progress to publish soon.

In the second part of this series about fast parsers for sequencing applications,  I will review the code for the regex based parser. This is shown below (I use v5.38, as you should! because the year is 2023 and you should not have to type use strict; use warnings)

Hello everybody! For this week's weekly challenge I thought the challenges looked really easy, but they both had a couple slight complicating factors. Also, this was the first time I've used sub signatures.

Similar Words

For this one, we're looking for words that share all characters. We print out each pair of countries.

After written about the origin and goals of Graphics::Toolkit::Color -- let's take a look at the public methods and make it a little study of good API design. But lets work our way up from a few examples:

This week we discussed:

• Release process needs better docs, maybe some more automation.
• "inward goto" has been deprecated since 5.12. We have set an end date for it and will announce in 5.40 that we'll remove it in 5.42.
• Our call for a project manager to get SSL into core has not gone unheeded. We're happy to accept Nicolas Mendoza to the role.
• We need to review our notes about keeping multiple CPAN indexes from PTS in Lyon and publish them for all to see

I don't really keep up with online resources, and I blogs.perl.org to be (like perl) a nice and stable home. I've watched resources come and go - I've lost untold content in the process (geocities, myspace, LtU, hello??).

I recently discovered dev.to because of a nice benchmarking article published by a long standing community member:

Benchmarking Perl Core Class in v5.38 By John Napiorkowski

https://dev.to/jjn1056/benchmarking-core-class-573c

So I guess this is like some kind of substack for developer blogging? I only recently discovered that resource also.

Crossposted from my blog

My upgrade of my home server from Debian 11 ("bullseye") to Debian 12 ("bookworm") went almost without a hitch. Yesterday I realized that the Postgres data hadn't been migrated from the old DB to the Debian package of Postgres 15. But luckily, the good Pg people provide a Debian package of 9.6 (the version which held my data) for Debian 12. I could install that one, fire it up, dump all data into SQL, fire up Pg 15 from Debian and import it there. Now I run such an SQL dump daily, just to have the data available as SQL files.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile for Perl to provide prebuilt binaries/packages of old Perl versions for current OSes, but then, there are so many build options that it's not worth the effort in general.

I noticed the other day we had an old utility script txt2html.pl that gave a warning
/usr/local/bin/txt2html.pl
$* is no longer supported at /usr/local/bin/txt2html.pl line 1512.
Apparently $*=1 was how multi-line regex searching was done in old perls.

$a =~ m /foo/ms;

$ sudo cpanm HTML::TextToHTML

In my google search on the warning, I found this call for help:
https://github.com/resurrecting-open-source-projects/txt2html/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
so added a github Issue and emailed the author saying the updated and migrated txt2html.pl was already available on CPAN.

• Reviewed recent mailing list threads - multiple namespaces, moose + warnings conflicts. Determined there’s not a lot the perl core can do (at the moment)

• Reviewed PR#21532 (Module loading function)

• SSL out of the box still needs someone to project manage whatever various bits need to be done. A specific email on the subject will be sent to the list.

• PR#18059 to fix up perl version number macros is still outstanding and needs fixing up so it can be merged

Introduction

I have been leaning very heavily on Perl's prototype feature for creating new modules. The imptetus for this can traced back to the day I looked at the source code for Try::Tiny, and realized that it was implemented using prototypes. The main reason for using prototypes for many new modules I've created recently is my focus on making a thing I do repeatedly available in a more Perlish or idiomatic way.

Required reading if you have not and are about to dive into an article about prototypes: Far More Than Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know about Prototypes in Perl by Tom Christiansen.

The following article demonstrates 2 CPAN modules I have written that focus more on Perl programmer UX and why Perl prototypes can provide a way forward for a great many ideas that people have. Prototypes misunderstood, yes; but more so, they are misunderestimated. They are infact, very powerful and when used for their intended purpose; a lot of hand wringing can be avoided during feature discussions.

Hi all,

Please note that Komodo IDE is now open source. Komodo IDE is a very feature-rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Basically a sophisticated source-code editor. Notable features why I used Komodo IDE:

• Syntax highlighting
• Code intelligence (autocomplete, code refactoring etc.)
• Run and debug programs easily
• Debug with breakepoints and inspect the variables and their values in the GUI
• Integrates with version control

You can read more about Komodo IDE here.

The blog post announcing Komodo IDE going Open Source is here.

The blog post also contains an explanation why it is made open source. One of the reasons is that there is already a lot of free and good editors available, e.g. Visual Studio Code. Though, as I was using Komodo IDE for at least 7 years now, I still very much like it and it’s OOTB feature set.

Hi everybody! In this week's weekly challenge, we're searching for anything but the minimum or maximum in a dataset, and searching for senior citizens on a plane.

Min And Max

This challenge is a very interesting one, because obviously the easiest solution in terms of development is to sort and filter the first and last element. However, that is O(n log n) and it's very little added complexity to do the O(n) solution with a single-pass filter.

This week we discussed the following topics:

• load_module has a PR in progress; needs continued nudging on a few last issues so we can move forward and merge it
• Pod “U<..>” for underline has better docs; again that could possibly be merged now if all are happy
• We spent further time thinking about other ideas for extending and improving Pod: further details may be published in due course
• We briefly discussed how to break the logjam on PPC0013 and continue work on join/etc…

These are some answers to the Week 255, 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 February 11, 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: Odd Character

You are given two strings, $s and $t. The string $t is generated using the shuffled characters of the string $s with an additional character.

Write a script to find the additional character in the string $t.

Example 1

Input: $s = "Perl" $t = "Preel"
Output: "e"

Example 2

Input: $s = "Weekly" $t = "Weeakly"
Output: "a"

Example 3

DBD::SQLite 1.73_01 (with SQLite 3.42.0) is a release candidate for the next stable DBD::SQLite. This release is mainly to upgrade the bundled SQLite library.

I'll wait for about a month and release 1.74 in the middel of September if there's no blocker nor request to wait for more. Thank you for your patience.

Hi everybody! I'm finally back with another PWC/TWC blog post for week 230.

Separate Digits

For the first challenge we want to split all the numbers in the array into single digits. Here's the code:

use v5.36;
my @nums;
push(@nums, split(//, $_)) for @ARGV;
say $_ for @nums;

It very simply splits anything in its arguments into individual characters and pushes them onto a new array.

Count Words

Our second challenge asks us to count the words that start with the given prefix. Here's a 4-liner (minus boilerplate) to help us out with this one: