(Just thinking out lout a little bit more after writing Re: Starting a New Script ...)

A long time ago, in a galaxy company far, far away ...

Co-worker IH asks: "Who wrote this code?"

Me: "Hmm, definitively not me. And far too structured to be written by HK."

IH: "Yes, I agree. Looking at the names of the identifiers hints at DF, or maybe JF during his first months [when he learned from DF]. It's full of three letter acronyms."

Me: "But JF would have added at least some comments. There is not a single comment, and not a single bit of code that's not absolutely required. Tight, but elegant. DF?"

IH: "Yes, definitely DF. But what does it do?"

Me: "Well, let's start analysing it ..."

And of course, we were right. DF wrote the code, and nobody else touched it after that. Just for fun, we tried that with other pieces of code the team members wrote over the years, and we were often right. We could even guess who wrote the original code, and who changed it later.

When we later explained our little game and its origin to non-IT people, we compared it to wine tasting, and to guessing an author from a piece of text.

In the next episode, same galaxy company, but a different team:

JF, a hardly ever swearing co-worker, asks: "What the *BEEP*? Which *BEEP* *BEEP* has written this *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* piece of code?"

Me: "Show me."

JF: "Here you are."

Me: "Argh! Get it off my screen. It hurts my eyes! It hurts my brain! Get it off! GET IT OFF!"

Me, after wiping off some tears: "Well, it roughly looks like code generated by $StupidMouseClickingCodeGenerator. But why the heck did the author use that *BEEP* tool? It's completely useless here! We are on a completely different target system!"

JF: "If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Some clueless worker from the client?"

Me: "Nope, the client does not access that part of the code. It's part of our setup routine. And the client would use tools for the right target."

JF: "So AG?"

Me: "Yes, definitely AG. Who else would use a hammer for a brain surgery?"

JF: "AG definitively needs to learn $ComputerLanguage."

Me: "And our system. It's three months, and still AG has absolutely no clue of what happens here. You will tell AG. I can't do that without insults and swearing."

And of course, we were right again.

Using revision control systems makes the guessing game a lot less interesting (svn log, svn blame), and using strict coding rules and code templates generates more uniform code across the team.

But still then, without looking at the logs, you can see differences in the way team members write code. And you can often identify who wrote a piece of code: "Soft factors" like the length and complexity of subroutines, naming of identifiers, style of the embedded documentation (POD, doxygen), systematic spelling errors in identifiers and documentation, preferred algorithms, and so on.

Alexander

How do you start a new script? Do you just open a blank editor page and start typing?

I have written a Perl Code Builder that may be of some interest to somebody. To run it, you specify any number of capabilities this script should include, out of a catalog of a couple of dozen areas. Available capabilities range from a few simple trig functions and file read/write loops to a fairly elaborate PostScript code writer. You then open this "outline" script and finish rounding out the half-written pieces of code to do the current job. Since writing this, I have never started a new script from a blank slate.

Would this be of interest to anybody? If so, I will make it freely available.

Do similar things already exist? If so, I have missed seeing them.

Lloyd Rice

I always wanted to have live formatting as I type Perl code.

The usual advice to pipe a text selection through perltidy is just too slow, and furthermore you might want to have only a visible snippet formatted to keep control, and tidy can fail here (emacs is mostly very tolerant)

The following code called with M-x my-indent-block is re-indenting the surrounding block you are in. The devadvice binds it to the cperls electric-semi feature which automatically does a return and and indentation of the following line (see M-x customize-group RET cperl-autoinsert-details for details)

before

for my$scalar(1..10){print"$scalar"."txt";}
[download]

for my $scalar (1..10) {
   print"$scalar"."txt";
}
[download]

(defun my-indent-block ()
  "reindent surroundig expression"
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (backward-up-list)
    (cperl-indent-exp)
    )
  )



(defadvice cperl-electric-semi
  (after my-electric-indent-context)
  "indent whole context surrounding block/context"
  (my-indent-block)
  )

(add-hook
 'cperl-mode-hook
 (lambda ()
   (local-set-key (kbd "M-C-q") 'my-indent-block )
   )
 )

[download]

Problems:

• Defadvice is a kind of wrapping, I tried to bind it to cperl-indent-line to always indent the whole block whenever and indentation is triggered (there are many ways to do so in cperl-mode) but this is causing an infinite recursion , since cperl-indent-exp calls cperl-indent-line. (this is for sure solvable with some kind of flag, but I'm tired now :)
• Toplevel In filescope this doesn't work cause there is no up-list! Thats good, because I didn't want to reindent distant code, without visual control. But it's still pretty easy in elisp to catch the error and to react otherwise, one option is to just reindent one paragraph or the whole file if that option is set.

Natural keybindings

cperl-indent-exp is normally bound to M-C-q , but is only useful after you've put the cursor in front of the block to highlight (here the for ), that's why I remapped it to work from inside the block.

M-q should be the far better choice ( I hate 3+ finger combinations). In cperl-mode it's bound to cperl-fill-paragraph which wraps text to 80 colums ONLY in POD, here-docs or comments, but isn't useful in code! ( well as long as you are not trying to obfuscate )

But now I'm not sure how to combine the old cperl-heuristic to distinguish between code and text with this new features, without patching cperl.

Nice to have for my-indent-block

my $a           =  {
         a      => 1,
         b      => {
              c => 3,
             }
        };
[download]

Hello, dear esteemed monks!

I have made a test script that makes cover -t include untested modules into the summary, thus lowering the overall coverage level and the developer's exaggerated ego.

Not even sure how I didn't come up with something like that earlier. So... Here it is:

dallaylaen/todo.t

UPDATE The script doesn't spawn more processes now and runs on Windows. No warnings issued.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# This script tests nothing (except the fact that modules load w/o war
+nings).
# However, it tries to load them all.
# This means that untested modules would also be included into
# code coverage summary, lowering total coverage to its actual value.

# I.e. having a well-covered module and a totally uncovered one will r
+esult
# in 50% coverage which is probably closer to truth.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More;
use FindBin qw($Bin);
use File::Basename qw(dirname);
use File::Find;

# Try to load EVERY module in t/../lib
my $path = dirname($Bin)."/lib";
my @files;

find (sub {
    /\.pm$/ or return;
    -f $File::Find::name or return;

    $File::Find::name =~ s#^\Q$path\E[/\\]##;
    push @files, $File::Find::name;
}, $path);

# Save warnings for later
my @warn;

foreach my $file (@files) {
    # This sub suppresses warnings but saves them for later display
    local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub {
        push @warn, "$file: $_[0]";
    };

    ok ( eval{ require $file }, "$file loaded" )
        or diag "Error in $file: $@";
};

# print report
foreach (@warn) {
    diag "WARN: $_";
};

# If you are concerned about cover -t, then probably warnings during l
+oad
# are not OK with you
is( scalar @warn, 0, "No warnings during load" );

done_testing;
[download]

Suggestions, improvements are welcome!

I started my foray into Perl in ~2001 when I started my job as a network engineer at an ISP. I had never heard of Perl before that. The predecessor that I took over for had written (looking back) a really shitty, redundant "application" to do the management of clients in what some might say is Perl 4 code.

I quickly realised that automating most of the sysadmin duties out of the way so I could engineer my core network peering via BGP was critical. I picked up a "Learn Perl in 21 Days" book off of a shelf, and practised everything in it. Two-arg open it had, and no mention of strict, my or anything. I mastered the simplicity of that book in about four days.

I quickly grew fond of Perl, writing up scripts that automated basic things, as to rid myself of sysadmin duties so I could focus on what I loved; networking.

Wasn't long before I found PerlMonks, and for eight years, I lingered around as an observer. Why I didn't join, I'll never know. Over time, I did start taking part in the newsgroups and email lists, then one day in 2009, I either saw a question that I could answer, or had a question... I can't remember. (I had been an active member in many other forums, particularly cisco-nsp, NANOG, and numerous FreeBSD lists).

In retrospect, of course, I should have joined earlier, but I didn't. Not long after I joined was the whole hack fiasco. I stuck with it. I started answering questions that I could to give back. I absorbed the criticism given to me in my mistakes, which was crucially valuable in how I approach things today.

Due to the people of PM, and the culture of PM itself, I believe that I am a more genuine person online, am willing to admit mistakes everywhere, willing to correct others (politely), and willing to apologize when I've been an asshole.

To me, Perlmonks is a place where we can learn, have fun, get angry at each other, but at the end of the day, we're all here for one reason... to help the newb while helping each other.

No matter how much one knows, there's always more to learn.

Thanks to all those here (way too many valuable people to mention personally), the p5p team, the pumpking (SawyerX at time of writing, took over for Ricardo Signes in the not-so-distant past), Larry, and everyone else who has had any part in aiding and abetting the Perl community by answering questions, writing distributions, writing books (special shout out to merlyn) or just throwing their two cents in.

Cheers,

-stevieb

ps. Back when, I'd claim myself as "not a programmer". Although I still am "not a programmer", looking back, the most memorable aspects of my technical career are the CPAN contributions I've made, and the work I've done to further the progress of Perl programmers, old and new.

pss. This post isn't perl5 specific; love goes out to the perl6 crew all the same ;)

Here, because there is simply no point in burying this much effort and venom over there.

if you applied your expertise while sticking to the technical issue at hand your input would be very valuable IMHO.

Let's see, after 12 exchanges where I've politely tried to lay out all that is wrong with the "cpan rating" system: you want me to apply myself to what you think is a valuable cause. Correct?

Don't be offended by the above, save that for later. This is just a reiteration of the reasons I will not be contributing to that system:

1. It is obscure to the point of being almost invisible.

   I've been using cpan weekly, even daily -- it has been a pinned tab in my browser for nearly 13 years -- but whilst I'm sure I've noticed the stars, I've never taken any notice of them. See the next two sections for why.

2. It is remote.
   • The ratings don't show up when looking at the module itself only in the search results list.

     When I'm viewing the documentation, I cannot compare how the reviews of a module have changed with its versions.

     If I review version 0.01 and give it a "bad review"; then the author takes that on board and corrects each and every concern I raise for version 0.02; what do I do? What does he do?

     Can I change my review? Can he change it? Does my review persist or die when he uploads a new version?

     If it persists; that unfair to good authors; if it dies, it is a license for bad authors to reversion often.

   • They have zero affect on what is shown to me.

     I still need to wade through every screen of results to discover if the "best" one is on the last screen.

   • I cannot utilise them to reorder, group or compare the results I get.

     I have to read the reviews and then try and make a value judgement about the veracity of other peoples value judgements...

3. It is numerically & statistically useless.

   What does 4 1/2 stars mean?

   With a restaurant, 1 star means "they serve food that is probably edible"; "if you find yourself outside, starving and in a hurry; it probably won't poison you; but if you have time, cross the road"; "You'll probably not eat here twice".

   But what does it mean for a module? It exists? It installs? It loads? It runs? It produces the right results? It has a crap interface and useless documentation but if you can get past that it produces correct results very efficiently?

   If you cannot give a zero value, let alone a negative, 1 star (should; could logically only) mean: "I tried this module and the experience so incensed me that I actively came back to give it a negative review; but the worst I could do was give it 1 star".

   And 5 stars means either: "This module really saved my bacon" or "I'm the author upselling my own baby".

   And 3 stars should mean: Nothing! A module that "just works" doesn't engender enough emotion to be bothered to go back and post a review; but probably means: "I had enough problems with this module that I felt the need to say/do something; but I don't want to offend the author who has taken the time and effort to freely share his (crap) code".

4. It is intellectually & morally questionable.

   That whole "hidden reviews" thing is suspect.

   If they are "mostly spam" why keep them around; simply delete them.

   However; if there is some other category(ies) of review that can be hidden (as implied by the word "mostly") what are those categories? Who decided them? Who decides which reviews fit into them? What checks & balances are in place to prevent authors; or their mates; or the "in crowd" or ... from abusing that mechanism to suppress reviews they disagree with; or by people they don't like?

5. It is simultaneously both too complicated and too simplistic.

   Let's say I reviewed Moose and expressed my opinion that it is: too big; too slow: does the wrong thing; encourages the wrong thing; is impossible to debug; and creates a nightmare dependency chain that will be the perpetual predominant cost drain for any major project that uses it, once that project moves into maintenance; and gave it a 1 star rating.

   What effect would that have? Zilch!

   Without evidence; its just opinion. And let's just say I was incensed enough to work up data and provide evidence for all of those things; and I posted a 10 page treatise to explain all that; who would read it? No one!

   And the effect of my 1 star? If 19 produces an average of 4.5; then my 1 star would result in a value of 4.325. Would the star system reflect that? And if it did, would anyone notice? The answer to both is a resounding: NO!

   So what would be my incentive for expending the time and energy in producing such a review?

Basically, not only are you asking me to not just express my opinion, but rather work up a technical discussion to support my position -- which is often as not based upon instinct rather than rigorous discovery(*); but to do so in support of a system that you feel has merit and which I feel has less than none.

*example: if I look inside a module source and find the code "badly formatted"; I'm as likely as not to stop looking further.

if you applied your expertise while sticking to the technical issue at hand your input would be very valuable IMHO.

Okay. Here is where you -- along with many others -- are likely to be offended.

I am not a member of a "Perl community"; I'm a Perl user. The only thing I have in common with other Perl users, is my use of Perl. THAT IS NOT THE BASIS FOR A COMMUNITY!

I don't attend Perl conferences; I'm not a member of any Perl Monger's group; I don't "hang out" is #perl; I'm not a "member" of p5p; I don't have an account on Perl.org; nor do I blog about Perl. (Nor anything else!)

I consider "online communities" to be an oxymoron; the ultimate in naïve anthropomorphisation of technology.

community/kəˈmjuːnɪti/noun

a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.

the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.

a group of interdependent plants or animals growing or living together in natural conditions or occupying a specified habitat.

What I see of the Perl users is that they do not fit any of those criteria.

The second is the nearest to something that one might apply to them if you squint hard enough; but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

My affiliation with this site is purely selfish. I prefer to fill my down-time with stuff I find intellectually stimulating. For some its TV or music; for some video games; for some it crosswords or sudoku; for me, its programming. Historically, I came here to learn Perl for a particular purpose. That purpose evaporated, but despite that, Perl rapidly became my go to language for getting stuff done.

I stayed because I found the ready supply of interesting problems stimulated me to becoming very intimately involved in understanding just what it is about Perl that makes it so productive. In a nutshell, I put that down to a combination of: intuitively minimalist design and pragmatic implementation.

But as a whole, I find that the users of Perl are riven with internal conflicts. Less a group of like minded people brought together by their shared backgrounds, goals and aspirations; more a scrum of disparate people all pulling, tugging and warring, trying to bend Perl to what they think it ought to be. If you doubt this, read Re: What's the perl5's future?.

So, besides that I won't lend my efforts to what I consider to be a wholly inadequate, broken and questionable system -- because I can see my reviews being routinely hidden thus wasted effort -- you can probably see that you (authors; the Perl community) almost certainly do not want me to do so.

Has anybody seen Larry Wall's new Slashdot interview that looks like it got posted today?

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/07/14/1349207/the-slashdot-interview-with-larry-wall

I always find Larry's interviews entertaining, this one is no exception.

No, I don't mean to use y instead of x, having an XY Problem. This is about a silly module - but a rather handy one.

I'm presenting just the POD of it. I'm not posting the entire module because... see the COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE block. WARNING: insane code ahead.

y - your own toolbox

    $ export PERL5LIB=$HOME/priv/lib
    $ perl -My=mail,A,:date,frob -le '...'
    Unimplemented at -e line 1.
[download]

• x
• eow
• umble
• imimi
• ...

The german version of this module is named eins.pm. The spanish and italian versions are io.pm proper.

You.

Copyright (C) by you.

This library is concealed software; you should not redistribute it and/or coerce it on your coworkers under the same terms as Perl itself, neither Perl version 5.18.2 nor, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

=cut

Is that copyright ok for you? Did I miss any important wrongdoing? Nonwithstanding the distribution of the whole module being discouraged, it is ok to post snippets that fit nicely into y.pm, e.g.

my($m,$z);
$m=pack"B32",pop=~'/'x$';
printf"$` network %vd broadcast %vd netmask %vd\n",($z=eval$`)&$m,$z|~
+$m,$m
[download]

UPDATE:

In the meantime the talk took place, here the links:

• ACT page
• This Discussion
• Recording on YouTube
• PDF-Slides

Original Post

Here the abstract for my talk proposal for Cluj

... not sure if it's too late to be still accepted

Comments and corrections are welcome

Emacs offers even more ways to do it than Perl's TIMTOWTDI .

This demonstration will show how to combine some .el packages to create a neatly integrated and productive Perl development environment. (well from the authors perspective)

Intended audience : Emacs users trying to navigate thru all these possibilities.

After a short introduction into emacs (v24) for non-users we'll concentrate on builtin Perl support and how to add some other language agnostic projects to approach the author's IDE of what an IDE should look like.

For starters: Overview of Emacs goodies (and some myth-busting)

• open source
• available on all development platforms
• runs in windows and TTY
• start-up time and memory consumption comparable to Vim ( != vi) just try emacs -nw -Q
• package management for a huge universe of extensions
• CUA shortcut emulations for "modern" applications (C-x C-v C-z C-a ...)
• VIM command emulation evil-mode (includes text objects)
• regional undo Undo only in selected text.

Out-of-The-Box support

What comes already builtin for Perl?

** cperl-mode

The Standard mode for Perl features, including

• imenu easy navigation for subs
• auto indentation
• code transformation prettifying regex convert postfix <-> prefix for "if" , "unless", etc
• compile options
• formatting options akin to perltidy
• documentation display

** perldb

Perl debugger integration, stepping through original file

** flymake-mode

Interactive syntax check while typing by running "perl -c" in background

** dabbrev-mode

avoid typos of identifiers by expanding from dynamic abbreviation dictionary

Recommended Extension Packages

** Yasnippet

Yasnippet (Yet Another Snippet Package) emulates the Textmate snippet features, which seem to become a standard now across all IDEs

** Auto Complete

auto-complete.el shows completion alternatives in drop-down while typing from different sources (functions, variables, snippets,...)

** (Omni Complete)

probably covered, this is a very promising project but yet not personally tested

** ECB = Emacs Code Browser

The IDE "look an feel" with many specialized information panes to explore

link: http://ecb.sourceforge.net/

** Regex-tool

A tiny project to interactively test Perl-regexes against text an see the resulting matches.

Demonstrates the extensibility of emacs.

Visions

** PIDE I - "Perl Integrated Development for Emacs"

combining a stable set-up of Perl related el-modules and configs for a quick start with Emacs.

** PIDE II - "Perl Integrated Development for Every editor"

Is an editor agnostic framework possible?

Snippets and Completion-rules could be provided in POD "=for IDE" to support different projects like Moose or Mojolicious or whatever. A simple script could parse them on editor start-up and translate them to editor specific syntax.

I'm on Windows 7 with a perl 5.24 install in C:/strawberry

I lost so many hours trying to understand why dmake always failed with undefined reference, that I thougt usefull to give a recipe to others when I finaly found a workaround. Here it goes:

• download the latest bundle for the Gtk+ stack from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/gtk+ At the time of this writing (july 2016), the package installed using msys2 crashed on the tests with cairo so I return to the gnome ftp site.
• unzip it in, say C:\prog, and rename the top folder to gtk+ so that you have a C:\prog\gtk+\lib folder that contains a lot of *.def, *.lib, *.dell, *.dell.a files
• From the control panel use "System - Advanced system settings - Environment variables" to check or add if missing, the variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH in your user variables. Set it to C:prog\gtk+\lib\pkgconfig;C:\strawberry\c\lib\pkgconfig
• add C:\prog\gtk+\bin to your PATH environment variable
• from the cpan shell, download the following perl packages using the get command
  • Cairo
  • Glib
  • Pango
  • Gtk2
  The compilation and installation of these package will have to be done in the above order.
• Each package is downloaded by cpan in C:\strawberry\cpan\build. To open a command shell in each of these folder, select the folder and while pressing the shift key, show the menu with the mouse right click, and select "open command window here".

  From the cpan shell, the command looks perl_module is another way to open a subshell in the corresponding build/module_folder

• Edit C:\prog\gtk+\lib\pkgconfig\cairo.pc and replace the line having prefix=/devel/target/whatever with prefix=${pcfiledir}/../..

  Repeat this change for the files:

  gobject-2.0.pc
  pango.pc
  gtk+-2.0.pc
  [download]

• open a command shell in the Cairo-1.... folder
• run the commands

  perl Makefile.pl INC="-IC:/strawberry/c/include/freetype2 -IC:/prog/gt
  +k+/include/cairo -IC:/prog/gtk+/include/ -I. -I.\build"
  [download]

• Check that there is no "Warning (mostly harmless): No library found for ... ". Changing the prefix line in the pc file of the first library searched by Makefile.pl allow perl to find all the external libraries.
• Run

  dmake
  dmake test
  dmake install
  [download]

• Open a command shell in the cpan/build/Glib.... folder
• run

perl Makefile.pl INC="-IC:\prog\gtk+\include\glib-2.0 -IC:\prog\Gtk+\l
+ib\glib-2.0\include -I. -I./build"
dmake
dmake test
dmake install
[download]

• On my pc, dmake test failed (tests in t/a.t all failled) but I installed Glib anyway.
• Open a command shell in the cpan/build/Pango.... folder
• run

perl Makefile.pl  INC="-IC:\prog\gtk+\include -IC:/prog/gtk+/include/f
+reetype2 -IC:/prog/Gtk+/include/cairo -IC:\prog\Gtk+\include\Pango-1.
+0 -IC:\prog\Gtk+\include\glib-2.0 -IC:\prog\Gtk+\lib\glib-2.0\include
+ -I. -I./build -IC:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\Glib\Install -IC:\strawb
+erry\perl\site\lib\Cairo\Install"
dmake
dmake test
dmake install
[download]

• Open a command shell in the cpan/build/Gtk2-.... folder
• run

perl Makefile.pl INC="-IC:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\Glib\Install -IC:\
+strawberry\perl\site\lib\Pango\Install -IC:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\
+Cairo\Install -IC:\prog\gtk+\include -IC:\prog\Gtk+\include\glib-2.0 
+-IC:\prog\gtk+\include\pango-1.0 -IC:\prog\Gtk+\include\cairo -IC:\pr
+og\Gtk+\include\atk-1.0 -IC:\prog\gtk+\include\gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -IC:\pr
+og\gtk+\include\gtk-2.0 -IC:\prog\gtk+\include\freetype2 -IC:\prog\Gt
+k+\lib\glib-2.0\include -IC:\prog\Gtk+\lib\gtk-2.0\include -I. -I./bu
+ild"
dmake
dmake test
dmake install
[download]

Notes:

The command given above for perl Makefile.PL has been used for the gtk+-bundle_2.24.10

A newer version could contains new libraries and this would cause dmake to fail with filex.h not found

In that case, you have to add the path to the missing file with -Ic:/this/is/where/thatmissing/file/is in the INC arg given to Makefile.PL.

Perl modules already installed have this header file in

And external libraries to uninstalled perl modules have their header files somewhere in

C:\prog\gtk+\include
C:\prog\Gtk+\include\xxx
C:\prog\Gtk+\lib\xxx\include
[download]

perl Makefile.PL INC="changed to include the new path"
dmake
[download]

until dmake gives no error.

Now if you change the path where your gtk+ libraries have been unzipped (or if you remove C:/prog/gtk+/bin from your PATH environment variable, your perl scripts using Gtk2 will crash.

To gain independance from C:/prog/gtk+/bin, you need to copy some dll from this folder to your perl tree directory. This small script does this (the dll list hold for gtk+-bundle_2.24.10):

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Copy;
my $from= "C:/prog/gtk+/bin/";
my %fm=('C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/auto/Glib/' => [qw(
libglib-2.0-0.dll
intl.dll
libgthread-2.0-0.dll
libgobject-2.0-0.dll
)],
'C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/auto/Cairo/' => [ qw(
libcairo-2.dll
libexpat-1.dll
freetype6.dll
libpng14-14.dll
libfontconfig-1.dll
zlib1.dll
)],
'C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/auto/Pango/' => [qw(
libgmodule-2.0-0.dll
libpango-1.0-0.dll
libpangocairo-1.0-0.dll
libpangoft2-1.0-0.dll
libpangowin32-1.0-0.dll
)],
'C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/auto/Gtk2/' => [ qw(
libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll
libgio-2.0-0.dll
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0-0.dll
libatk-1.0-0.dll
libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll
)]);

foreach my $dest (keys %fm){
     my $files = $fm{$dest};
    foreach my $file (@$files){
        print "will copy $from$file to $dest/$file\n";
        copy("$from$file",  "$dest/$file") or die("failed... : $!");
    }
}
[download]

HTH !

frazap

Dear Monks

I thought I share this small Perl program demonstrating the possibility to do PWM (Pulse Wide Modulation) on Raspberry Pi in order to control the intensity of a led. This is a common introduction example to try for people learning about electronics on Raspberry Pi. Well documented examples for python exists, but not for Perl.

The reason I share this here, is that the current CPAN module Device::BCM2835 doesn't define the necessary function to do this (that I see). So it took me some tinkering before I could control the PWM from Perl. Novice users of Perl may find this example code the thing they need.

The solution I apply is the use of the Inline::C module to call some small wrapper functions I wrote in C around an existing C example I found on the internet. They call in turn the bcm2835 functions needed. This is tested on a raspberry pi B, revision 2 unit, using a single led and a single resistor.

This code assumes you have installed the Inline::C module, Time::HiRes module, and the bcm2835 C library on your device. See Device::BCM2835 module for the appropriate links to the C library. It is not installed by default. Run as root on Raspberry Pi because you need to have access to some low level functions.

Today I'm not proficient in XSLoader to update the Device::BCM2835 module itself, but if I have some spare time, I will look into it. Would be a nice additional skill to master.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated.

Martell

My work currently involves doing ETL (data-munging) using Perl. Because some of the data may have private information (PII), I'm doing my work on a remote desktop, which at this organization is Azure (Windows). It's not really my choice of platform -- but at least I'm able to use the excellent git-bash package to get (more or less) back to a Linux type command line.

The issue I'm having is that transferring files from my volume to the volume where my output is carried on to the next step is unreliable, and I'm wondering if anyone else has come across the same challenge. I also want to check the existing files, as I append a version number to the end of my files so that new files don't overwrite existing files.

• Copying files using File Explorer works, but sometimes a transfer will stall at 99%, at which point I may lose my connectivity to the remote desktop. That isn't a bad thing, although it irritatingly loses the network path in the destination folder, and I have to drill down through seven layers of directories to get back to where I was to check that my copy succeeded before disconnecting.
• Copying via the command line (you knew that was coming next), while logical, also appears to be hilariously slow. A file that might get copied in 15-20 seconds using Explorer takes 15-20 minutes from the command line. I have no idea why, as it should be going from one network drive to another.

The solution I've finally hit on (this is my work in progress) is to use chdir to go into the directory in question, and then glob to get a list of the files. It still takes ten seconds to get a list of files, but I guess that's the best I can do right now.

Thoughts, comments, ideas are welcome. Thanks!

Hello everyone,

A recent thread reminded me of a script I wrote years ago while learning about the flip-flop operator (aka the range operator in scalar context), and I thought I'd share it in case it helps someone else.

The script, which I've included below the output, runs through a sequence of true/false values, tests whether the right-hand-side and/or left-hand-side of the operator is evaluated (marked by an asterisk in the table), gets the return value of the operator, and outputs all that in the following handy table. I hope it illustrates the difference between the .. (two-dot) and ... (three-dot) versions of the operator: two dots will immediately evaluate the RHS if the LHS is true, three dots will wait until the next evaluation.

*** Demonstration of the Flip-Flop Operators ***

__A______B____X___   __A______B____X___
  0* ..  0  =          0* ... 0  =     
  0* ..  1  =          0* ... 1  =     
  0* ..  0  =          0* ... 0  =     
  1* ..  0* = 1        1* ... 0  = 1   
  0  ..  0* = 2        0  ... 0* = 2   
  0  ..  0* = 3        0  ... 0* = 3   
  0  ..  1* = 4E0      0  ... 1* = 4E0 
  0* ..  0  =          0* ... 0  =     
  0* ..  0  =          0* ... 0  =     
  1* ..  1* = 1E0      1* ... 1  = 1   
  0* ..  0  =          0  ... 0* = 2   
  0* ..  0  =          0  ... 0* = 3   
  1* ..  0* = 1        1  ... 0* = 4   
  0  ..  0* = 2        0  ... 0* = 5   
  0  ..  1* = 3E0      0  ... 1* = 6E0 
  0* ..  1  =          0* ... 1  =     
  1* ..  1* = 1E0      1* ... 1  = 1   
  1* ..  0* = 1        1  ... 0* = 2   
  0  ..  0* = 2        0  ... 0* = 3   
  0  ..  1* = 3E0      0  ... 1* = 4E0 
  0* ..  0  =          0* ... 0  =     
  1* ..  1* = 1E0      1* ... 1  = 1   
  1* ..  1* = 1E0      1  ... 1* = 2E0 
  1* ..  1* = 1E0      1* ... 1  = 1   
  0* ..  0  =          0  ... 0* = 2   
  0* ..  1  =          0  ... 1* = 3E0 
  0* ..  0  =          0* ... 0  =     

(* = Evaluated)
[download]

Regards,
-- Hauke D

Back in 2005 I asked why the execution order of subexpression was undefined (in Perl; but it's inherited from C); and over a long and twisted thread I was shouted down by all-comers, accused of smoking waccy baccy etc. I don't think there was a single person that agreed with me that EO should be defined.

12 years later and the C++ Evolution Working Group have finally caught up, and C++17 will probably get a defined order of subexpression evaluation.(pdf)

Perl 6 could have stolen the march. Just sayin'.

Another 24 hrs on. The visible count of your downvotes since The significance of 2010-03-16? -- including the -18 on this post -- is now: -152(+23?). And my XP: +144(+17)! Thanks again :)

In the 5 days since The significance of 2010-03-16? one hundred and seventy five of you have chosen to down vote one of my posts, (or 25 of you 7 of them; or ... ), for a total of -175(*) downvotes.

(*Within the limitations of what the site architect permits me to discover.)

The affect of that collective, heartfelt ire towards me, (or perhaps the subject matter), is that my XP has gone from 161809 on that day to 161936 this morning: +127.

So, if the rating system is perfect; thank you all. And if its not; thank you anyway!