What's new?
A little over ten years ago, when Perl 5.18 was approaching its release date, I released match::simple. This was mostly in response to the smartmatch operator (~~) being deprecated, but also a solution to the incredibly arcane rules for how the smartmatch operator operated.
match::simple was intended to be... simpler. The operator looks a little funky because it uses some clever trickery to fake being an infix operator:
use match::simple; if ( $this |M| $that ) { ...; }
Quite a while ago, I blogged about how Perl projects should have websites to increase not only their visibility, but the visibility of Perl as a whole.
Perl has had the CPAN and awesome websites like MetaCPAN and its predecessor search.cpan.org for a long time, so unlike how things happen in other programming language ecosystems, many Perl projects have felt no need to start their own websites for documentation, package downloads, and community — all these things were already provided.
However, I do feel that this centralization keeps Perl content on the Internet very isolated and makes Perl less visible than other programming languages.
Let's play with overloading a little.
A simple class:
package Local::Overloaded { use Moo; has number => ( is => 'ro' ); use overload '0+' => sub { my $self = shift; return $self->number; }; }
And let's test it:
use Test2::V0; my $obj = Local::Overloaded->new( number => 42 ); is( 0+$obj, 42 ); done_testing;
This test fails.
Why?
Consider a simple module like this:
package MyApp::Util::Maths; use strict; use warnings; use constant PI => 3.14159265358979; use constant EULER => 2.71828182845905; use base 'Exporter'; our @EXPORT_OK = qw( PI EULER add ); our %EXPORT_TAGS = ( arithmetic => [ qw( add ) ], numbers => [ qw( PI EULER ) ], all => \@EXPORT_OK, ); sub add { my ( $x, $y ) = @_; return $x + $y; } 1;
I'm tobyink on CPAN, IRC and PerlMonks.