Perl 6 Quick Reference Guide

Jodrell writes: "(via PerlMonks) Bernd Dulfer has posted a Quick Reference Guide to Perl 6, based on Larry's Apocalypses and Damian's Exegesises, as well as Parrot. The Guide is available in POD and RTF formats."

POD?

[DamienMcKenna]

Pardon my ignorance, but what's a .pod file?

Re:POD?

[pizza_milkshake]

> Pardon my ignorance, but what's a .pod file? Plain old documentation.It's what all perldoc's files are stored as, iirc.

Re:POD?

[Rysc]

POD stands for Plain Old Documentation, and is perls inline documentation scheme. I presume a .pod file would be readable by perldoc, same as any other POD documentation.

perl6/parrot works great

[d_i_r_t_y]

i've written a few short scripts in perl6/parrot since its initial releases (i write perl for a living) and i have to say i think it's great! hyper-operators are cool! and prototyped subroutines are long overdue. de-referencing with '.' - in perl - is a little weird though. the new regular expression stuff is nothing short of revolutionary methinks.

as one who's working on 125K lines of perl app, i'll reserve my final judgement of perl6 for the apocolypse that deals with OO in perl6. OO in perl *does* work, though it takes (too much) discipline and good documentation.

all very exciting methinks. especially the potential of the parrot VM. can't wait for what's to come.
matt

Re:perl6/parrot works great

[PythonOrRuby]

A few other things:

Optional strong typing should making debugging much easier, while leaving the easy stuff really easy.

Parallel iterations are one of the things that culd really sell Perl6 among skeptics. C, C++, Java, C#, etc. programmers may scoff at regular expressions, and say "oh but we already have objects and garbage collection and type checking and all of that, so why would we want to learn Perl?" Well, how in any of those languages do you do something like:

my int @a = 0 .. 5;
my str @b = 'A' .. 'F';
for @a; @b -> $a; $b {
print "$b is $a\n";
}

parrot

[pizza_milkshake]

i must say that parrot is neat -- i've checked out latest current version, 0.0.2 iirc and written some little parrot assembly files.

i've always wanted to learn plain old assembly, but i could never rationalize it... assembler is more of a pain than C and it isn't portable. parrot, however, being a software-based assembler *is* portable and fast.

i guess i'm kind of rambling, but my point is: the parrot project is a very cool one -- especially if you're a an admitted programming language junkie like me. if you haven't taken a look at parrot, check out www.parrotcode.org

Re:parrot

[matzim]

i must say that parrot is neat -- i've checked out latest current version, 0.0.2 iirc

Actually, it's 0.0.8.1! (http://www.parrotcode.org is a little out of date.) The latest releases are in JGOFF's directory on CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) or you can look it up on http://search.cpan.org/.

Die! Nitwit! Die!

[fm6]

People who use "Reference Guide" in a title should be shot. A Reference is a collection of reference material, a Guide is a task-oriented description of the product. I can see calling something a "Reference and Guide" (though nobody does), but WTF is a "Reference Guide"?

That's a rhetorical question. It's a clear sign that the author couldn't think through the problem of what, specifically, the book is. Doesn't bode well for the technical content itself.

Re:Die! Nitwit! Die!

[j7953]

Slashdot's summary is wrong. The document is called "Perl 6 Quick Reference."

OK then

[fm6]

That's actually a highly descriptive title. Flame retracted.

POD and RTF formats

[aminorex]

Oh joy. Now at least 12 people can read it!
Maybe someone will translate it to WordStar format
and the readership will double! Hot diggity.

Octopods

[fm6]

Not that bad. RTF is readable by WordPad and Word, so all Windows people and most Mac people can read it. You can even read it with StarOffice, assuming it doesn't have too many weird formatting constructs.

Also, Perl comes with a bunch of utilities for translating POD into other formats, including HTML.

Re:POD and RTF formats

[matzim]

Uh...

$ pod2html perl6_qref.pod >perl6_qref.html
$ pod2text perl6_qref.pod >perl6_qref.txt

(Though I'd suspect that if you really want to be using Perl 6 right now, you'd already know what to do with POD documents. IMHO.)

Re:POD and RTF formats

[busunsl]

I choose pod because it's natural for Perl.

And I choose rtf because OpenOffice.org understands it. Oh, yes, and MSWord understands it too.

If you want to provide a WordStar version feel free! Or write a converter, so I can provide it.

Re:POD and RTF formats

[aminorex]

Sarcasm != Flamebait.

I don't understand why everybody doesn't use docbook
for everything. POD is a perlism, and documents in
POD are inaccessible to people with a new interest
in Perl motivated by 6/Parrot. RTF is a
pseudo-standard. If you want to be accessible, you
have to produce HTML. If you want POD and RTF as
well, docbook is your bitch.

html-ified version online

[mshiltonj]

Perl 6 Quick Reference Guide [mshiltonj.com]