The Perl Journal December 2002
A new mailing list has been launched to provide user documentation for Perl 6. The team is tackling the Apocalypses in order, defining semantics and providing test cases for Perl 6 functionality as it is decided. As Michael Lazarro, who suggested the list and has been guiding its evolution, wrote: "Project Rule #1: If it isn't documented, it isn't done."
Early discussion on the list centered around style and format. The team is aiming for an informal tone and a cohesive, book-like style as opposed to a "recipe" format. However, it's hoped that the layout will be somewhat more skimmable than the existing Perl 5 documentation: Most pages will be brief and focus on a single subtopic.
You can subscribe to the documentation list by e-mail to perl6-documentation-subscribe@perl.org. The list archives are also online at http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-documentation @perl.org/.
Yet Another Society has appointed a committee to organize the Yet Another Perl Conferences in Europe. The committee's first announcement was that Paris has been chosen as the venue for YAPC::Europe 2003.
The new committee consists of nominees from past YAPC::Europe conferences: Leon Brocard and Greg McCarroll from London, Ann Barcomb from Amsterdam, and Richard Foley and Norbert Gruener from Munich. Norbert Gruener has been appointed chair of the committee. Questions or comments can be e-mailed to committee@yapceurope.org.
In other conference news, a Geek Cruises ship will be launching for Hawaii on June 1, carrying both the Perl Whirl '03 and the Mac Mania II assemblages. And a month later, OSCON 2003 will be held in Portland, Oregon, from July 7-11.
ActivePerl 5.8 has been released in beta, and ActiveState is maintaining a repository of modules at http://www.activestate .com/ppmpackages/5.8-windows/. Realizing that a few xml-related modules were missing from that list, Randy Kobes announced the creation of an auxiliary repository at http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg .ca/ppms/. "Using this repository may not work with self-built perl-5.8s," Kobes warns, "as ActiveState sets the NAME of ARCHITECTURE in the ppd file to MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-5.8, to distinguish it from that of perl-5.6, which isn't binary compatible with 5.8. In such cases, what you could do is grab the .ppd and .tar.gz files, adjust the architecture name to match your own, and then adjust the path to the local .tar.gz file."
The Apache Hello World Benchmarks, presented by the consultants from Chamas Enterprises, compare the execution times and memory requirements of various application software running on an Apache sever. The first benchmarks were posted in July and included mod_perl, Embperl, PHP, Python, Mason, AxKit, and various other systems; later updates added data for the C Apache APIs to show the maximum execution speed of the benchmarks.
In the first test, an emulation of a heavy web page template "with some application logic and loops, some HTTP parameter passing, and much variable interpolation in the output stream," mod_perl was outperformed only by the Apache C API. In a simple "Hello World" test, mod_perl came in fourth of 22 platforms tested; it was beaten by the Apache C API, static HTML, and the mod_include SSI module. Mod_perl led the pack once again in a database benchmark. The final two tests were XSLT benchmarks, in which Resin (http://www.caucho.com/resin/) was the best performer. The benchmarking suite, along with a breakdown of the results, can be found at http://chamas.com/bench/. Josh Chamas is currently working on benchmarks comparing mod_perl1 and mod_perl2.
Mac::Carbon, a collection of modules for accessing the Carbon API under Mac OS X, is now available on CPAN and SourceForge. The modules are an OS X port of the Toolbox collection used in MacPerl. The current release is version 0.01, "but a lot of it works," writes Chris Nandor (Pudge), the MacPerl maintainer. Forthcoming releases will include ports of the Mac::AppleEvents and Mac::OSA modules. More information is available from the macosx@perl mailing list (http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name =macosx).
Clinton Pierce has released an update of his BASIC for Parrot, this time using QuickBASIC rather than GW-BASIC as a model. Version 2.0 boasts richer syntax; support for user-defined types; and performance improvements. "The compiler itself is rather hideous Perl, but the output and the runtime libraries are all pure PASM," Pierce wrote in his announcement to the perl6-internals list. The 2.0 release is available at http://geeksalad.org/basic/ basic2.zip.
Keith Barrett decided to compare the relative frequency with which various programming skills are listed as requirements by prospective employers. He searched by keyword on the job listing sites Monster.com and Dice.com, and found that "Perl" usually turned up between 600 and 800 hits. The most popular keywords (UNIX, SQL, and Oracle) turned up about 3000 to 4000 hits, varying by site. "Python" returned only 46 results on each page. The full results are listed at http://www.advogato.org/ article/584.html.