The Perl Journal November, 2004
Larry is archiving the most recent versions of the Apocalypses at http://www.wall.org/~larry/apo/, and the Synopses at http://www .wall.org/~larry/syn/. As Larry noted on the perl6-language list, recent changes include:
infix:<<+>> # op name always quoted now
circumfix:<<[ ]>> # multipart ops are now # slices, no ... needed
circumfix:{'[',']'} # same thing
ActiveState has updated its Perl Dev Kit to version 6.0, introducing graphical user interfaces for most tools and visual guides to build options. Two new bundles are also included—PDK Deployment Tools and PDK Productivity Tools. According to ActiveState, the PDK Deployment Tools offer "new graphical user interfaces for all application builders to simplify the creation of Perl executables. Technical enhancements include shared library options and a dynamic DLL loader. The deployment tools also feature PerlMSI, for creating Microsoft MSI installation files." The PDK Productivity Tools include a graphical debugger, Visual Package Manager "for administering Perl installations locally or remotely," and the new VBScript Converter: "Capable of recognizing all popular VBScript type libraries, including Microsoft Excel, Windows Scripting Host, Lotus Notes and more, the converter allows developers to leverage the huge VBScript libraries available on MSDN, other web sites, or in-house, by converting them to Perl code for integration into larger applications. Alternatively, users can record VBA macros with the Microsoft Office macro recorder, then translate them to Perl."
Also new is the PDK Filter Builder, "for interactively creating text processors that do custom filtering and replacement operations. It can be used as a pure visual tool by simply outputting modified text, or to generate Perl code that performs the filtering, for adding to a toolkit or embedding into applications. Filter Builder displays the filtered results on the fly, allowing rapid iterations and...what-if interactions." See http://www.activestate.com/PDK for details.
Matt Fowles has succeeded Piers Cawley as summarizer of the Perl 6 mailing lists, heroically undertaking to recap all three lists. In his inaugural report (http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/10/ p6pdigest/20041017.html), he pointed to a thread advising newcomers seeking to become involved in Perl 6 development: "Pratik Roy wondered if he could join into the work on Parrot or if he would remain an outsider looking in. Many people rushed to suggest ways in which he could help. So, please don't feel afraid to contribute. At worst, a patch of yours will be turned away with an explanation as to why. At best, you will start being referred to by first name only in the summaries." The advice for Pratik included: writing tests; writing documentation; checking the TODO list at http://www.parrotcode.org/todo.html; and working on the implementation of Python on Parrot.
A related effort, Michael Pelletier's "Parrot Forth" language—which he calls Parakeet—has advanced to version 0.3 and been added to CVS. As Michael explains: "Parakeet is a stack language like Forth. You could call it Forth by many people's definition, but it isn't standard Forth. Parakeet is Forth that is extremely machine specific to the Parrot VM. Parakeet also has a lot of features not found in standard Forth, like local variables, nested words and classes and (as a result) nested compile-time and runtime lexical word, class and variable scopes. Parakeet is fully dynamic and unprototyped; all variables and bindings are looked up at runtime using Parrot's lexical scratchpad stacks. In many ways its level of object dynamics approaches that of Python, while still retaining that Forth minimalistic thing. Parakeet is written in PIR and compiles new words directly to PIR. There is no 'inner loop' above the Parrot VM and core words are not 'threaded' (in the Forth sense of the word), they are directly inlined into the new word's body."
The Toronto Perl Mongers group has posted audio recordings of its sessions at http://hew.ca/talks_audio/. You can find sessions there on generating passwords; using Zope and Plone; the WWW::Mechanize, HTML::TokeParse, and Getopt::Declare modules; and automated testing with Class::DBI, among many other topics. In his announcement to perlmonks.org, Fulko Hew added, "I also hope to encourage the Perl community to create a central repository where we can all archive this stuff. A place with a lot of disk space, and a lot of bandwidth. If anyone has suggestions, or can volunteer such a web server, let me know."