Ok, yes, I’ve been writing Perl for over twenty years. But Perl 5.26 was released this week and for the first time, my name is mentioned in the release notes. Because I have not one, but two fixes in this release of Perl.
The first is this commit which fixes a piece of documentation to make it clear that grep() returns a list, not an array.
The second is this commit which fixes some sample code so that it runs without warnings under use strict.
It’s a small start, I admit, but I have a taste for it now. In a years time, I hope to report that I have more than two commits in Perl 5.28.
And you can help too. Instructions on how to contribute are in the perlhack manual page. There is more information in perlhacktips and perlhacktut.
The people working on Perl all do a great job. But it’s a hard job and it might just get a little easier if more of us helped out.
Also published on Medium.
What’s the difference between a list and an array in Perl?
This blog post is very good at explaining the differences.
http://friedo.com/blog/2013/07/arrays-vs-lists-in-perl