Unicode and Perl

Over the last couple of days I’ve been involved in a couple of discussions where it is clear that other people don’t understand how Perl deals with Unicode. The documentation is clear and detailed (there’s even a good tutorial) but for some reason people still persist in misunderstanding it. Here’s a quick quiz. Can you […]

Just Build Something

About a month ago, JT Smith suggested that we should all stop talking about Perl and just build something. And, purely coincidentally, over the last few weeks I resurrected a project that I have been poking at for about five years and have finally turned it into something that I’m happy to show the world. […]

Pebble and Perl

I’ve been wearing a Pebble watch for a couple of months now. I really like it but, to be honest, it’s the potential that has me most excited. The number of apps currently available is a bit disappointing and the API is taking its time appearing. But even when the API is published, I wonder […]

What New(ish) Perl features Do You Use?

Over on LinkedIn, someone asked me “What core PERL[sic] features do you use regularly that are new since 95?” It’s hard to be sure as the perldelta files only seem to go back to 1997 (for example, when were qw(…), q(…) and qq(…) added?), but here’s a quick list off the top of my head. […]

Texinfo 5.0 in Perl

There was a story on Slashdot on Sunday saying that the new version of Texinfo had replaced the old, C, implementation of makeinfo with one written in Perl. I thought it would be interesting to look at the Perl they’ve written. This is, after all, a reasonably large example of Perl code that will be […]