The Perl Journal July, 2004
Mark-Jason Dominus has launched a mailing list delivering a weekly Perl programming puzzle to subscribers. The quizzes come in two degrees of difficulty—"normal" or "expert." An example of an expert-level quiz:
Write a subroutine, 'subst', which gets a string argument, $s. It should search $s and replace any occurrences of "$1" with the current value of $1, any occurrences of "$2" with the current value of $2, and so on. For example, if $1, $2, and $3 happen to be "dogs," "fish," and "carrots," then subst("$2, $1 and $3") should return "fish, dogs, and carrots".
To subscribe to the quiz mailing list, send e-mail to perl-qotw-subscribe@plover.com; past quizzes are temporarily archived at http://www.urth.org/~metaperl/domains/semantic-elements .com/perl/.
Jeff Goff has stepped down as release manager and Keeper of the Keys and Source for Parrot, passing the title on to Steve Fink. In announcing the transfer, Dan Sugalski said, "Steve's been active with Parrot since near the beginning, and I have every confidence in his being able to keep the project moving forward."
A security hole in the Safe module was discovered and reported to the perl.perl5.porters newsgroup by Andreas Jurenda. The problem lies with Safe::reval(), which executes given code in a safe compartment. "But," explained Jurneda, "this routine has a one-time safeness. If you call reval() a second (or more) time with the same compartment, you are potentially unsafe." Version 2.09 of the Safe module, available at http://search.cpan.org/author/ ABERGMAN/Safe/, fixes the problem.
The 2002 recipients of Perl Foundation funding—Damian Conway, Dan Sugalski, and Larry Wall—have posted accounts of their accomplishments during the grant period (which ended in July) at http://www.perlfoundation.org/gc/grants/2002.html. Damian Conway, who supplemented his grant period with a final speaking tour, posted a final blog entry at the beginning of October, calling his grant tenure "the toughest year-and-a-half I've ever experienced, but also the most rewarding." During that time, Conway accepted 56 speaking engagements across four continents. He also wrote 21 new modules; 88 "node" entries on the Perl Monks site; four Exegeses; 192 newsgroup messages; and over 5000 e-mails in response to Perl questions.
The Perl Foundation solicits contributions to the grant fund at http://www.perlfoundation.org/contribute.html.
Another way to raise money for the Perl Foundation is by entering Nicholas Clark's Perl Advocacy Spoofathon, which offers six donations of 100 guineas each (a total of about $160 in American dollars) to be paid to the Perl Foundation in honor of the best spoof essays submitted. The three fixed essay categories are: "INTERCAL Is Better than Perl," "Brainf**k Is Better than Perl," and "Befunge Is Better than Perl." The three remaining donations will be awarded in honor of the best "$foo Is Better than Perl" essays submitted.
"There have been several badly researched $foo is better than perl articles in the recent past, that have irritated myself and many other people in the perl community," explains Clark on the Spoofathon web page (http://www.perl.org/advocacy/spoofathon/ why.html). "I can't stop third parties writing these articles. But I do hope I can start to make people treat them with the seriousness that they deserve."
There is no fixed essay deadline; the judges, Michael G. Schwern and Greg McCarroll, will announce the awards at their discretion. Entries can be submitted to spoofathon@perl.org.
ActiveState has released version 3.0 of their Komodo IDE, optimized for Perl and other open-source languages. New features include powerful code and object browsers, extended debugger capabilities (using the open-source DBGP protocol, coauthored by ActiveState), and a multilanguage (Perl, Python, and Tcl) interactive shell. See http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/ for more details.
Several new Perl books have been released in the past month. Tim Jenness and Simon Cozens coauthored Extending and Embedding PERL (Manning Publications Company), dealing with the use of Perl in C programs. Programming Perl in the .NET Environment, by Yevgeny Menaker, Michael Saltzman, and Robert Oberg, is available from Prentice Hall and is designed for use as a textbook, beginning with a tutorial on the Perl language and ending with enterprise application integration. Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason, published by O'Reilly, covers the HTML::Mason framework. Authors Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams describe Mason as "a powerful text templating tool for embedding Perl in text." The book's web site is at http://www .masonbook.com/.