Meetings:2006:September

From SPUG

September 19, 2006 -- chromatic presenting "Perl Hacks You Might Not Know"

Talk Description

Perl Hacks You Might Not Know

Perl is a powerful language with many secrets. It’s no wonder that we call the true masters of Perl gurus — they have studied and discovered arcane knowledge and arcana.

In this talk, Perl Hacks lead author chromatic will show off several hacks you probably didn’t even know existed. Some are practical. Some are disgusting. Every one is worth learning for when you find a problem you just can’t solve any other way. Even if you’ve heard of them before, he’ll show how they work — so you can create your own practical mayhem!

Potential hacks include:

   * Source filtering without source filters
   * Using shared libraries without a compiler
   * Creating truly private methods
   * Reading and writing lexicals without permission
   * Controlling the runloop from pure Perl

Speaker Bio

chromatic is the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network, covering open source and free software. In his spare time, he writes books. In his other spare time, he writes software, including Perl 5, Perl 6, Parrot, and other projects that don't necessarily start with a P. He hopes to receive spare time as presents later in the year to do more writing and programming and eventually pick up normal human hobbies, such as sleeping and eating.