Since January, Damian Conway has been working full-time on Perl through the funding of Yet Another Society and its Perl Development Grant. The general consensus seems to be that it has been a big success. Conway is constantly releasing modules (new releases, as well as updates, and a half-dozen or so to be included in Perl 5.8.0) and traveling around the world to speak to user groups and at conferences and classes. Read more about what he is up to in the Conway Channel at: https://www.yetanother.org/damian/

Late last year, Yet Another Society earned 501(3)(c) status, and it recently joined forces with Perl Mongers and Perl Monks. The details are not quite clear, but YAS will take over many of the functions of Perl Mongers, including control of the perl.org domain, and general advocacy tasks, while allowing tax-deductible donations. YAS has also joined the Unicode Consortium, with a donation from NetThink (https://www.netthink.co.uk/).

The O'Reilly Perl Conference was held in July. The conference's biggest attraction was the same Damian Conway, who nearly had his own track in the conference. One of Conway's big efforts this year has been in helping to form and explain what Perl 6 will be. At last year's conference, the Perl porters decided to begin work on the next major evolutionary step for Perl, a complete rewrite of the core, the language, and the community.

So far, Larry Wall has put up a handful of Apocalypses, each one mirroring a chapter of his book Programming Perl (now in its third edition), showing how the language will change or stay the same according to each topic. Conway has been producing an Exegesis for each Apocalypse, explaining how the language features will be used. Dan Sugalski, the pumpking for Perl 6 internals, has been hard at work implementing the core language. See https://dev.perl.org/ for more information.

But all is not Perl 6. Jarkko Hietaniemi, the current Perl pumpking, is anticipating a release of Perl 5.8.0 in October or November. Hugo van der Sanden will be the new development pumpking when Perl 5.8.0 is finished up. And earlier this year, Gurusamy Sarathy released Perl 5.6.1.

Chris Nandor has taken over the MacPerl mantle from Matthias Neeracher, the author of MacPerl and GUSI (the POSIX library for Mac OS). A release of MacPerl 5.6.1 is expected before year's end, with a release of 5.8.0 following within a few months. See https://dev.macperl.org/ for more information.

Perl 5.6.1 builds on NetWare as well, and includes a UCS (Universal Component System) interface for accessing NetWare resources, including NDS (Novell Directory Services). The sources are included in Perl 5.7/5.8, and binaries and more information are available at: https://developer.novell.com/ndk/perl5.htm

Ask BjØrn Hansen has been busy setting up a ton of Perl mailing lists in the perl.org domain, all of which are listed on https://lists.perl.org/. He's also set up a news server on nntp.perl.org, that includes all of the mailing lists, with plans to move the Perl Mongers lists (pm.org) there as well.

For his work, Hansen won one of the White Camel awards this year, granted to people who have done Perl work aside from coding. Also winning White Camels were David Adler for his work with the Perl Mongers, and the organizing committee of Yet Another Perl Conference in Europe.

MODULES

As part of his year-long indentured servitude, Conway has written a bunch of modules. Attribute::Handlers and Attribute::Types were written to help make attributes, a relatively new and uncommonly used feature of Perl, easier to deal with. Along similar lines, Filter::Simple makes it much easier to write source filters.

NEXT is a Conway creation to do other kinds of method redispatch that SUPER doesn't do. Regexp::Common attempts to provide a set of commonly used regular expressions that users can load in and use, without having to write themselves (similar in concept to HTML::Tagset by Sean M. Burke).

Conway has had a lot of fun this year. His Acme::Bleach converts the script into binary whitespace (with spaces as 0s, and tabs as 1s), so the script is all whitespace, and still runs. He also wrote a module for writing Perl in Klingon, which is just scary on several levels.

Conway's modules Attribute::Handlers, Filter::Simple, and NEXT, as well as Text::Balanced and Switch, are all included in Perl 5.8.0. Also added to Perl 5.8.0 are Class::ISA by Sean M. Burke, Memoize by Mark-Jason Dominus, Digest::MD5 by Gisle Aas.

Brian Ingerson took the Best New Module award at TPC this year for his Inline module. Along with Neil Watkiss, Ingerson has provided a tool whereby users can embed other languages into a script, and have perl do what is necessary to execute that code. Currently available Inline modules (at varying stages of development) include Inline::C, Inline::ASM, Inline::Python, Inline::CPP, Inline::Guile, Inline::Java, and Inline::Tcl.

To confuse the issue -- perhaps intentionally -- Conway has written the useful Inline::Files, which allows you to embed file data -- to be retreieved via other filehandles -- in a program.

Ingerson has also added Data::Denter (an alternative to Data::Dumper and Storable for saving serialized data).

Philip Gwyn wrote POE::Component::IKC which lets POE kernels talk to each other, so they can eventually become intelligent and enslave us all.

Robin Houston's Want tells a subroutine what kind of context it was called in, including differentiating between list and array contexts, and telling how many return values are expected.

The B module provides access to Perl's compiler; B::Generate by Simon Cozens (who has been working hard on Perl 5 and Perl 6 internals) allows you to do modification of a Perl program's op tree, even creating new ops. Scary. If you don't understand what that means, just trust us that it is, indeed, scary. Using B::Generate, Cozens also wrote optimizer, which allows replacing or adding to Perl's own optimizer. Who needs Perl 6 anyway?

Chris Nandor (pudge@pobox.com) works on Slash for OSDN, and thinks the Red Sox will win the World Series this year if they stay healthy through September and October, especially in their pitching staff. The relievers are really getting worked this year, and the starters need to put in more innings to give them a rest.