-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Perl.com Newsletter: Taking Lessons From Traffic Lights Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 15:24:20 -0700 From: Perl Newsletter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Perl Newsletter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.perl.com update -------------------------------------- The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers ============================================================ Sponsored by Macromedia, Creators of ColdFusion Problems meeting tight deadlines? ColdFusion 4.5, the leading Web app server, has the solution with an integrated suite of visual tools, powerful server technology, and an open language environment. Download your FREE evaluation copy today at http://www.oreillynet.com/nlr/network/04/allaire/coldfusion ============================================================ Hello, world. This is Simon Cozens, www.perl.com managing editor, stepping in to write the perl.com newsletter this week. It's been quite a busy week for Perl, so without further ado, let's see what's been happening. * Perl at large. A few weeks ago, I reported on the establishment of a mailing list for Perl beginners - [EMAIL PROTECTED] From what I hear, it's been extremely successful, with 1300 messages coming in last month. We'll be bringing you a lot more about the beginners list in our featured article next week. This week, Casey West, the founder of the list, and Ask Bjorn Hansen, the curator of perl.org, announced a "daily tips" mailing list. If you subscribe to this list by sending an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED], you'll receive a handy Perl programming tip in your inbox every day. They've also been working on a web site for tutorials and beginners' articles about Perl: http://learn.perl.org/ Currently, there's not much there, other than the FAQ for the mailing list: http://learn.perl.org/beginners-faq But they're looking for people to add content. If you think you could contribute a tutorial or guidance, why not subscribe to their workers mailing list - send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - and help out? As announced in the Perl Journal, the 2nd Annual Perl Poetry Contest is under way. As before, there are four major categories: "porting" a favourite poem or song lyric to Perl; writing a Perl program which performs a useful task; writing a poetry-writing program (which may itself be a poem); a haiku, (5-7-5) tanka (5-7-5-7-7) or limerick relating to Perl. The judge this year is Kevin Meltzer, and entries are invited by July the 1st. Full instructions for submitting entries will appear shortly on http://www.tpj.com/ Finally, our resident Perl historian, Elaine Ashton, noticed that Fast Company Magazine (http://www.fastcompany.com) has declared Perl one of the "best-of-the-best" innovations of the information age. She's scanned the relevant page and put it on http://history.perl.org/misc/overthehump.html * What's new on www.perl.com? As well as being a busy week for Perl, it's been a busy week for us here at perl.com. Firstly, I've temporarily handed over the reins of the perl5-porters summaries to the ever energetic Leon Brocard, who's given us this week's summary. If you want to know more about the proposed Perl Legal FAQ, internationalising the Perl interpreter, resuscitation attempts on pseudohashes and much more, get yourself over to http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/p5pdigest/THISWEEK-20010520.html The Perl 6 Summaries live! Bryan Warnock has done a sterling job catching up on the past three weeks worth of activity on the various perl6-* lists. This is particularly impressive since there was so much going on - there have been around 800 messages so far this month, mainly in response to Larry and Damian's articles on the design of Perl 6. http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/p6pdigest/THISWEEK-20010501.html Our feature article this week comes from Michael Schwern, Perl's very own Kwalitee Assurance man. One of the ideas tossed around for Perl 6 has been to rename the method call operator ("->") to ".". Of course, this causes a problem - what do we now call string concatenation? While watching perl6-language tie itself in all sorts of knots trying to come up with a substitute, Michael stepped back and had a long think about language design. His article details his train of thought as he examines how people think about signs and semantics in general and the semantics of computer languages in particular, all told through the metaphor of traffic lights. It's a very thoughtful and ingenious piece, which I would consider essential reading for anyone who wants to be involved in the work of helping to design Perl 6. You can find it at: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/22/trafficlights.html My predecessor Mark-Jason Dominus has written an article for one of our sister publications, the O'Reilly Network, in his popular "Red Flags and Program Repair Shop" series. Mark will give a tutorial on that very topic at this year's Perl Conference. His article is at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2001/05/18/perl_redflags.html He's also released a preview of the tutorial on his web site, at: http://perl.plover.com/yak/flags/preview/ You can also find out more details about the seven (yes, seven!) talks he'll be giving at the Perl Conference from: http://perl.plover.com/yak/tpc2001.html And with that, I should get back to preparing my talks for the Perl Conference! SC ============================================================ The 3rd O'Reilly Open Source Convention, July 23-27, 2001 Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina Fueling the Open Source Alternative The Perl Conference 5, XTech2001 Conference on XML (in association with GCA), the 8th Tcl/Tk Conference, the 1st Conference on PHP - 14 tracks keep you informed on the latest innovations - Register by June 22 and Save http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/ ============================================================ Taking Lessons From Traffic Lights http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/22/trafficlights.html?wwwrrr_20010522.txt Michael Schwern examines traffic lights and shows what lessons applied to the development of Perl 6. Exegesis 2 http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/08/exegesis2.html?wwwrrr_20010522.txt Having trouble visualizing how the approved RFC's for Perl 6 will translate into actual Perl code? Damian Conway provides an exegesis to Larry Wall's Apocalypse 2 and reveals what the code will look like. Off The Wall: Larry Wall: Apocalypse Two http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/03/wall.html?wwwrrr_20010522.txt Larry Wall produces the next episode in his series of "Apocalypses": glimpses into the design of Perl 6. This week, he explains how Perl 6 will differ from Perl 5 in terms of chapter 2 of the Camel Book: fundamental data types, variables and the context and scoping of the language. Reversing Regular Expressions http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/05/01/expressions.html?wwwrrr_20010522.txt There are some cases where searching a regular expression is faster backwards. Pete Sergeant introduces us to sexegers, regular expressions (regexes) operating in reverse. ============================================================ Sponsored by Thawte ** FREE Apache SSL Guide from Thawte ** Planning Web Server Security? Find out how to implement SSL! Get the free Thawte Apache SSL Guide and find the answers to all your Apache SSL security issues and more at: http://www.thawte.com/ucgi/gothawte.cgi?a=n122531080018000 ============================================================ Sister Sites: --------------------------------- O'Reilly Network http://www.oreillynet.com The Source for Open and Emerging Technologies XML.com http://xml.com/ XML from the inside out. 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