Author: brian d foy

Experimental features now warn (reaching back to v5.10)

Perl 5.18 provides a new way to introduce experimental features in a program, augmenting the feature pragma that v5.10 added. This change marks certain broken v5.10 features as experimental with an eye toward possible removal from the language.

Smart matching in v5.10 led to several broken and conflated features. The given used a lexical version of $_, which broke many other common uses of that variable inside the given, which I explain in Use for() instead of given() and you can see in given/when and lexical $_ …. Continue reading “Experimental features now warn (reaching back to v5.10)”

The vertical tab is part of \s in Perl 5.18

Up to v5.18, the vertical tab wasn’t part of the \s character class shortcut for ASCII whitespace. No one really knows why. It was curious trivia that I pointed out in Know your character classes under different semantics. Whitespace in ASCII, POSIX, and Unicode represented different sets. Perl whitespace was different from POSIX whitespace by only the exclusion of the vertical tab. Now that little oversight is fixed. Continue reading “The vertical tab is part of \s in Perl 5.18”

Ignore part of a substitution’s match

Normally, a substitution replaces everything it matched, but v5.10 adds a feature that allows you to ignore part of the match. The \K excludes from $& anything to its left. This feature has already made it into PCRE. It doesn’t have an official name, so I’ll call it the match reset operator because it resets the start of $&.

Continue reading “Ignore part of a substitution’s match”

Effective Perler discounts during OSCON

I’ll be at OSCON on Tuesday, July 17, but you don’t have to find me to get up to 37% off Effective Perl Programming. That’s a slightly lower price than Amazon. To get that discount, you have to buy the book at Pearson’s booth in the exhibition hall. You’ll need to track me down on Tuesday afternoon or evening if you want me to sign your book.

If you can’t make it to OSCON, you can still get 35% off the cover price by ordering directly from the InformIT discount link or using the OSCON2012 discount code when you check out. Instead of navigating their site, you can go directly to our book.

If you’re not sure you want the book, you can look at a free sample chapter, which is also 35% off during OSCON.

Hide namespaces from PAUSE

The Perl Authors Upload Server (PAUSE) is responsible for analyzing distributions on their way to CPAN. PAUSE indexes the distributions to discover the package names that it contains so it can add them to the data files that many of the CPAN clients use to figure out what to download to install the module that you request. It also compares the package names that it finds to a list of permissions it maintains. Continue reading “Hide namespaces from PAUSE”

Don’t use auto-dereferencing with each or keys

[Update: Perl v5.24 removes this experimental feature, for the reasons I list, among others.]

Perl 5.14 added an auto-dereferencing features to the hash and array operators, and I wrote about those in Use array references with the array operators. I’ve never particularly liked that feature, but I don’t have to like everything. Additionally, Perl 5.12 expanded the job of keys and values to also work on arrays. Continue reading “Don’t use auto-dereferencing with each or keys”