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Perl Programming

Perl New Version 5.5.660 83

Posted by jamie from the don't-look-at-those-high-bits dept.
aarestad writes, "Just saw this on perl.com: the new beta leading to perl 5.6. Read the announcement." It's mostly bugfixes. Pumpking Sarathy says we're on track for a 5.6 final release candidate by Feb.28.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Perl New Version 5.5.660 More

Perl New Version 5.5.660

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  • TCL 8.3 was just release a couple weeks ago too. TCL is a competitor to Perl which I happen to love. Not trying to start a flame war here!
  • I was just wondering, what are the best resources for learning perl? Is there any books out there you guys/gals reccommend? thanks
    -motardo

  • Slashdot (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Which version(s?) of perl does Slashdot run with?
  • Does it work under Linux?
    Does it cost a fortune like everythign else Rational makes?
    Do you work for Rational?
  • They did. It's called Python.
  • Does it work under Linux?

    Nope

    Does it cost a fortune like everythign else Rational makes?

    Yes

    Do you work for Rational?

    Nope. I actually dislike Rational, as was very sad that they aquired the original Purify developers. But I still think Its

  • bonus (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    only 6 thousandths away from 5.5.666!
  • Learning Perl used to be the canonical choice, but now you'll want to check out Elements Of Programming In Perl, published by Manning.
  • The most commonly recommended is Learning Perl [amazon.com]. If you are not biased against a dummies book then Perl for dummies [amazon.com] is the one I used and liked.

    Note:

    1. Claimer: I am earning my doughnuts and Mountain Dew from perl these days
    2. Disclaimer: I don't work for Amazon :-)

  • Is /. turning into Freshmeat? (Score:3)

    by Mekanix ( 127309 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2000 @02:30PM (#1250064)

    I mean, why all these release updates?

    Bjarne

  • This is irrelevant. Windows just hit version 2000... does that really big number make it more stable? Dunno - we'll see.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I am enough of a masochist that I *enjoy* watching my program malfunction because I indented a line incorrectly

    I don't see that this is any more painful than watching your program malfuction because you forgot an end-brace.

  • Yes. It came from a project called "Blacker" project. Here's the Linux Magazine article [linux-mag.com] where he states that.
  • This is just a bugfix release. As a rule, new versions will almost *never* break compatibility with older versions. Only certain M$ products *cough*Excel*cough* do that.

    Each version, a few things might be dropped/added. But usually the archaic forms are kept for a few releases until everyone's migrated.

    void recursion (void)
    {
    recursion();
    }
    while(1) printf ("infinite loop");
    if (true) printf ("Stupid sig quote");
  • Look, some popular software titles (X, linux, Apache, Perl) are important enough to be considered news. That is how it has always been here.

    yeah, but it's a fricken beta. when 5.6 ships, then announce it.

    :P

  • (I can't find Tom's Perl->Slashdot formatter, so make whatever you can of the script below.)


    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

    # a filter for enabling C++-looking "OO" style in Perl.
    # not tested; have no idea if it works; probably clashes with about a dozen other forms. As usual, provided without any warranty. Heh.
    # syntax:
    # :object.property
    # => $object->{property}
    # :object.method()
    # => $object->method()

    while (<>) {
    s{:(\w+).(\w+)\s*([\([^\(\)]*\)]?)}{$3?'$'.$1.'->' .$2.$3:'$'.$1.'->{'.$2.'}'}egi;
    print;
    }


    Happy now?

  • A more complete list of what has changed (Score:3)

    by Mneme ( 56118 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2000 @03:34PM (#1250083)
    For those who want to know what is actually new in Perl 5.6, you want to look at perldelta [perl.com]. (The message linked to above is just what was new since the last beta).

  • Thanks! (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Eventually I'll have to learn Perl. But I might wait for release 6.6.666, so that it runs on Windows properly. ;)

    Seriously, though, I think this is news, because Perl hasn't changed version numbers in a while. I guess this'll be cooler when it's a stable version, but...

    Remember, Linux, Apache and Perl are always news here, because Slashdot runs on all three. And if Slashdot ever tackles that "slow under load" problem, that'll really be news! :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].

  • As with the other posters, I recommend "Learning Perl" (The Llama book), from O'Reilly and Associates. I also recommend, even if you're just learning, that you also have a copy of "Programming Perl", also from ORA (The Camel book). It is a nice reference to have, if you're curious about more information that the Llama book doesn't offer you.

    HTH.


    This is my .sig. It isn't very big.
  • If you do a search on ftpsearch you should be able to come up with some hits for the o'reilly Perl CD Bookshelf. (Hey, don't bitch at me, I didn't upload it there) WTF is up with computer book prices anyhow? Most are C$50+ for paperback! What's up with that? It's almost as bad as the price of textbooks. Especially since the books are made obsolete whenever new versions of the software come out.

  • People, read the detailed link (Score:5)

    by tilly ( 7530 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2000 @05:27PM (#1250089)
    As was pointed out [perl.com] there are a number of changes. This is not just a bug-fix. The biggest new item is Unicode support. If you have to do things like match patterns in multi-byte character sets, this will be really cool. If you don't it will still be a nice feature since a lot of things (eg the web, file-systems, etc) are moving towards Unicode as internationalization becomes more and more important.

    The biggest "missing features" continue to be solid multi-threading, compilation, and solid 64-bit support. If you want the first one, rethink whether the fork model works. If you want the second think about embedding an interpreter. If you need the third I suggest getting used to opening pipes to and from programs that can handle large files...

    A "cool feature" that was discussed (I have ignored the Perl development list for the last half year so I don't know if it is in) was embedding Perl and a directory structure in a zip format. Imagine shipping an executable which had an encrypted zip appended which was Perl, with your scripts, and a directory structure of all of the modules your script used... :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • This is a big deal! :-)
    Promising an actual living fork() so I can play robot wars in the background without getting too clunky and memory short.
    New and possibly recursive regex code on which you can coredump but will be very nice for tag matching of all sorts.
    Sigh, the only immediate problem is can only install on NT. wait till March for '98.

  • Re:learning perl... (Score:3)

    by joneshenry ( 9497 ) on Wednesday February 23, 2000 @06:36PM (#1250093)
    Start with Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. This book is superior to Learning Perl because it will teach you skills that will apply to all languages and utilities. This book starts from the very basics of using regular expressions.

    Next try Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan. This will introduce the higher level concepts of Perl that will explain what about Perl makes it suitable for various tasks.

    Before one can use Perl effectively one must wade through a substantial fraction of its excellent man pages. Actually, Perl's man pages are written in its own lightly marked up documentation format perldoc which can be translated into man pages, plain text, html, whatever. I read it "straight" by downloading the latest development Perl source.

    Perl is basically a fusion of the C library functions and Unix system calls with excellent abilities to handle regular expressions. For this reason is is quite probable that one can learn more about actually using Perl by reading W. Richard Stevens book Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment then any beginners Perl book.

    For my money if one had only about 40 US dollars to spend on one Perl book, I'd get Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington's Perl Cookbook and try to make do learning from the Perl manpages.
  • Come on, sure a new version of Perl is great news, but it is really worthy of a front page listing on Slashdot? Certainly on freshmeat, but not on Slashdot.

    There must be better stuff than this being submitted, or have you guys ignored everyone enough that no one is making good submissions anymore?

  • offtopic (so sue me) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But this article is definitely the reason some people set their minimum threshold to 0 or higher, and people like me at -1.

    Where's the maximum threshold? On Slashdot, It seems like the troll comments are better than the highly moderated ones at least half the time! Don't get me wrong, there are good comments from people with great thoughts and opinions, but it seems like a lot of them are just trying too hard and not speaking their true voice because they want karma/community acceptance/whatever (JonKatz theme). A troll doesn't care what you think.

    I'm looking forward to Signal 11 [slashdot.org]'s upcoming gallery of the greatest /. trolls...

  • ...though it's considered experimental. From perlfaq3:

    How can I compile my Perl program into byte code or C?

    Malcolm Beattie has written a multifunction backend compiler, available from CPAN, that can do both these things. It is included in the perl5.005 release, but is still considered experimental. This means it's fun to play with if you're a programmer but not really for people looking for turn-key solutions.

    Merely compiling into C does not in and of itself guarantee that your code will run very much faster. That's because except for lucky cases where a lot of native type inferencing is possible, the normal Perl run time system is still present and so your program will take just as long to run and be just as big. Most programs save little more than compilation time, leaving execution no more than 10-30% faster. A few rare programs actually benefit significantly (like several times faster), but this takes some tweaking of your code. You'll probably be astonished to learn that the current version of the compiler generates a compiled form of your script whose executable is just as big as the original perl executable, and then some. That's because as currently written, all programs are prepared for a full eval() statement. You can tremendously reduce this cost by building a shared libperl.so library and linking against that. See the INSTALL podfile in the perl source distribution for details. If you link your main perl binary with this, it will make it miniscule. For example, on one author's system, /usr/bin/perl is only 11k in size!

    In general, the compiler will do nothing to make a Perl program smaller, faster, more portable, or more secure. In fact, it will usually hurt all of those. The executable will be bigger, your VM system may take longer to load the whole thing, the binary is fragile and hard to fix, and compilation never stopped software piracy in the form of crackers, viruses, or bootleggers. The real advantage of the compiler is merely packaging, and once you see the size of what it makes (well, unless you use a shared libperl.so), you'll probably want a complete Perl install anyway.

    (back to me) I also noticed GNU/Hurd is now supported. Hmm.. mebbe it's time to try that (the Hurd) out.

  • I also recommend Learning Perl, even if you are using Windows. Learning Perl on Win32 Systems does not get that great of reviews and at the entry level you are probably not going to be using anything unique to the Windows environment. BTW, if you aren't used to working from a console environment, Perl is going to be a good new experience for you (if you are going to be working in a Windows command console instead of Linux (or Unix or BSD...), you'll want to set up the console to have higher initial memory than the default so that you aren't dealing with that tiny little console). As far as getting more books, you may want to hold out until you've worked through the first book... I've always been able to find answers to more in-depth material in the Perldocs pretty easily. If you like Perl and start using it, then get hold of Programming Perl. Have fun, I've really enjoyed Perl!
  • I was just wondering, what are the best resources for learning perl? Is there any books out there you guys/gals reccommend? thanks.

    Lots of people will recommend 'Learning Perl', but I strongly recommend not buying that book. Unless you have problems falling asleep, then this book will be useful. I would recommend Nigel Chapmans "Perl: The Programmers Compagnion", a truely excellent book - specially if you already can program in another language. Half of the authors of Learning Perl prefer Nigel Chapmans book.

    I've heard good things about Andrew Johnsons "Elements of Programming with Perl". I haven't read the book yet though, so I hesitate to recommend it. On the other hand, it mentions my name and discusses some code of me... (of course, that could be held against the book as well).

    After learning Perl, it becomes more difficult. There are a lot of Perl books, but most of them are just a waste. I've more than 15 Perl and Perl related books in my bookcase, but there are two I've actually found useful: Mastering Regular Expressions, and The Perl Cookbook. The former is three years old, and hence doesn't discuss any of the new and advanced regular expression stuff though. But it gives a great insight on how to avoid writing inefficient regular expressions. But the best Perl book remains the Perl Cookbook. Despite it being an O'Reilly book.

    -- Abigail

  • Start with a four year degree course in Computer Studies ... study the fundamentals of computer hardware ... then pick the "Advanced" book for whichever language you choose, because _everyone_ knows the easy stuff.

    Recognise this: "Perl makes easy things easy, and hard things possible"? Don't start with a regular expressions tome or an advanced manual, start with a friendly, accessible book that will tell you what you want to know to get you started. Learning Perl is ideal.

    Your code might not pass muster with the Self-Important Pseuds (whatever happened to the real gurus [tuxedo.org] who knew how to be humble?).

    But hell - your script will work, and you won't be scared off by people fearing for their jobs.

    Enjoy Perl - it's great!
    --
  • Eventually I'll have to learn Perl. But I might wait for release 6.6.666, so that it runs on Windows properly. ;)

    I don't know about you but I use the windows version (activestate) of perl everyday and am VERY happy with it.

    Anyone know how it fares up in a production (WWW server) enviroment?

    Jay

    -- polish ccs mirror [prawda.pl]
  • I also read the original announcement [mpe.mpg.de] and the "fucking" summary. They said it was *MOSTLY* , but not all, bugfixes.

    If you read the whole original announcement, you find among other things, renaming "byte::" to "bytes::". Do you call this a bugfix? And what exactly is "default mkdir() mode argument to 0777"? Changing default mode arguments is definitely *NOT* a bugfix. Fixing a memory leak is a bugfix, but what about "generalize "%v" format into a flag for any integral format type: "%vd", "%v#o", "%*vX", etc are allowed"?

    The reason I asked is because I have some doubts about the way Perl is evolving. When I used it first, about eight years ago, it seemed to me a pretty cool little language, but I never had the chance to use (and learn) it more extensively. A couple of months ago, I bought "The Perl CD Bookshelf" from O'Reilly and was surprised with all the features that had been added to Perl. Adding unneeded features is the quickest way to add bugs to a system. Look at the MS-Office or MS-Windows releases for the last ten years or so for further examples.

    Seeing this announcement, if you only read the slashdot homepage, you think it's just bugfixes. If you go further and read the "announcement" itself, you see it labelled as a "development version", with "mostly bugfixes". Well, as I see it, if you are developing, you are not fixing bugs, you are adding new features. With new features come new bugs. Looking further, at the "original announcement", you need to be a Perl guru to understand all the notes.

    I really like the Linux system, having a set of versions for adding features and a separate and parallel set of versions just for bugfixes. Although this system is sometimes not followed very religiously, it's an excellent basic principle. So, my original question still stands: is this version intended for fixing bugs or for adding new features or a little of each? Are they adding new bugs to Perl faster than they are debugging?

    This rather long comment could have been avoided if you did what you preach and had actually read the whole original announcement [mpe.mpg.de]. Clueless moderator, clueless AC, perhaps they are the same?

    Moderators, take note:
    1)Read the moderation guidelines before moderating anything

  • And if Slashdot ever tackles that "slow under load" problem, that'll really be news! :)

    I consider degraded performance under a heavy load to be quite preferrable to failure under that load. I've seen systems that do both. Hey, I've worked on a couple of systems that have gracefully degraded under loads well outside their specs, so I'm biased. Honestly, while Slashdot being slow is noticable, I have not seen it reach the point of being unusable. I do hope the guys can throw some additional hardware at the problem, but for now I'll muddle through.
  • I would start out with Programming Perl by Larry Wall (author of Perl), Tom Christiansen and Randal L. Schwartz. Published by O'Reilly (booya). And then move on to some of the other books. In my opinion, O'Reilly is the only way to go.

  • One problem with bad books is that the reader doesn't realize what is being misrepresented.

    I'd trust what Mark-Jason Dominus said [plover.com] or what Tom Christiansen said [perl.com] about the Perl for Dummies book.

    I haven't looked at it yet, but I've heard good things about Elements of Programming with Perl. [perl.org] I've also been told that MacPerl: Power and Ease [macperl.com] does a good job of teaching perl programming as well as teaching the MacOS specific areas of MacPerl.

  • By far the best book on perl I've found is "Perl 5 Complete" (E Peschko, M DeWolfe) ISBN 0-07-913698-2. It manages in its 1062 pages to cover pretty much everything (complex variables, object-oriented programming, PerlTk GUI, regexps, CGI, debuggers and all the basics). It is doing this with schematics to show what's going on and it is also a good perl reference. It is probably not for the casual perl beginner, because it is dense. If you're an ambitious beginner it will probably work though. Another good bok is "Perl 5 How-To" (Asbury et al ISBN 1-57169-118-9), a good cookbook style of a book. Some O'Reilly books: "Programming perl" is OK, "Learning perl" I usually find do not have the answers I need, and "CGI programming on the world wide web" (a bit old now) is in my opinion not very good. /Jorgen
  • Especially since the books are made obsolete whenever new versions of the software come out.

    This is exactly why computer books are expensive. If you make "Milking cows for dummies", you've got a high upfront cost (writing the book), but you can make that back over a long period of time, as cows in 1990 are the same as cows in 2000 and 2010.

    On the other hand, if you make "Cowsoft Milker 2.0 for dummies", then you have the same upfront cost, but you can only sell the book until Milker 2.1 comes out. Sometimes you can revise the book, but this is an additional cost.

  • I think the original poster calling compilation a "missing feature" was similar to the FAQ referring to it as "experimental", pieces are there, but they don't quite work. The other "missing features" mentioned are in a similar state.

  • Lots of people will recommend 'Learning Perl', but I strongly recommend not buying that book. Unless you have problems falling asleep, then this book will be useful.

    Well, that book put me to sleep, but I then handed it to a colleague who needed to learn perl, and never did get it back. For what it's worth, that person was an intelligent non-programmer. Apparently that book ended up on a Great Journey and has landed on the desks and shelves of many people just like my so-called, book-stealing friend.

    I've more than 15 Perl and Perl related books in my bookcase, but there are two I've actually found useful: Mastering Regular Expressions, and The Perl Cookbook.

    I think the only perl books I don't have now but might want (I have these two) are Perl in a Nutshell (looks like a really handy reference) and possibly Object Oriented Perl, because it was written by Damian Conway, whose papers and projects I have found very useful in the past.

  • For inclusion in Perl 5.6, Randall L. Schwartz wrote perlroot.pod as a standard file to go with the distribution. It's a very good tutorial on Perl objects. I can't post it here or in my page because permission is only granted for inclusion in the Perl distribution (or that is what I understood), but you can look for that file in the Perl source tree.
  • I've got to chip in and disagree with this mail, because when I made the decision to learn perl, I used Learning Perl and Perl in a Nutshell, and the whole process was painless and fun. The only problems Learning Perl poses are 1) the first chapter goes in a bit too deep if you're learning from scratch, and 2) there's not much OO info in there, but by and large it's a wonderful book that I go back to regularly to remind myself of certain things. I'd also recommend the Perl Cookbook, because I find that learn more effectively by studying examples... Anyway, you should definitely go for it and learn perl - it's great fun. It's geek Esperanto!
  • I knew only a good deal of JavaScript when I decided I was going to teach myself Perl. I went out and picked up "Programming Perl". Who better to learn from than Larry, I thought. Doh! I'm glad I have the book now but it is definately not for beginners. I'd consider it a must-have reference, though. So then I got "Elements of Programming Perl" after the /. review a few weeks ago. I love it, for the most part. I think the exercises could be emhasized a bit more, but other than that it's very clear and concise. It's well structured and easy to understand (coming from me, that's an endorsement). I highly recommend it.
  • I mean, why all these release updates?

    If you don't like it, don't read it.

    I don't have the time to check Freshmeat all the time, so it's good to see important things here.

    - Stephan.
    --
    Carpe diem!
  • If you read the Linux Magazine article, you know much of the scoop. In short, Larry wasn't working for the NSA. Rather, he was working for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica on a project called BLACKER. BLACKER was a project to develop an A1 Secure (TCSEC pre-TNI) Wide-Area Network. As part of the A1 requirements, we had to do configuration management. We had machines on two coasts. Larry, being lazy and impatient :-), decided to adapt inews to keep news articles in synch, and to allow appending "approvals" to existing articles. This gave him the CM databases. For reports, he tried to use awk, but discovered that it couldn't handle multiple files or formats well. Thus, Perl was born to produce BLACKER CM reports. I then started writing Perl scripts to do other activities (such as maintaining our documentation library in sych with the code), as Larry and I were sharing an office (and a carpool) at the time. Larry has told the rest of the story (and yes, I forgave him long ago. Don't get up to the bay area often enough to see him anymore :-() Daniel
  • TCL is a competitor to Perl? In what way? TCL lists itself as a language for issuing commands to other applications and as a library of commands...where as Perl is (was) designed for manipulating text strings. Now I will not argue that Perl and TCL have overlapping areas now, but they are not intended for the same purpose or mission (even if some are using it that way). Lost Hobbit
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:Thanks! (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Ah yes, there is a Perl for Windows, and many other platforms... But did you catch the numerological significance of my post?

    Oh well, nevermind guys. Here's a hint: I was going for "Funny" rather than "Flamebait", and I didn't mean to post at 2 anyhow, (was using Lynx, somehow missed that checkbox though) but I guess I'll start putting "HUMOR:" back into the subject line. That usually helps.

    For some real opinion, I think Slashdot should use something fast instead of Perl. However, I'm impressed that they manage to make so much stuff static, and make the rest of the code pretty fast regardless, so maybe they can handle it.

    And I've seen Slashdot unusable under load, and not from network bandwidth. Ping times are very fast, response times from the web server are very slow. Go figure.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].

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