OSCON 3.4: Conway Channel 2005

This year, Damian had over a dozen new or greatly improved CPAN modules to discuss, so only had time to touch on them lightly. The following is a quick list, for those that want to investigate further:

IO::Prompt

Improved in several ways, including a new menuing feature

IO::Interactive

Handle all of the special edge case testing to determine if the user is interactive, or piping information in or out; also, provide a special filehandle that will either print or blackhole, depending on the interactive state

IO::Busy

Deal with users who try to type when they shouldn't during long-running tasks

Log::StdLog

Just do simple logging, by providing a STDLOG filehandle that just does the right thing

Debug::Phases

Indicate beginning of Perl's compile and run phases, and report time spent compiling

Sub::Installer

Handle symbol table and strict/warn manipulation for you when you want to just do your own exporting

RegExp::MatchContext

$PREMATCH, $MATCH, and $POSTMATCH, except faster and better

Contextual::Return

Declarative wantarray

Perl6::Export::Attrs

Perl 6-like export syntax for Perl 5

Config::Std

A somewhat improved .INI format, and the ability to preserve comments and ordering when updating a config file

GetOpt::Euclid

Generate command line options parsing from the documentation

Toolkit

Have all the modules and imported functions you want, all the time, with just a single use

Geoff Broadwell lives not far from O'Reilly headquarters in Santa Rosa, California, with a wonderful wife and daughter and four extremely spoiled cats. Geoff happily calls Perl the only computer language he ever really loved, having sampled a fair number before and since. He is on a personal mission to prove that dynamic languages are by far the best programming option for almost every purpose, and believes that the ultimate Linux distro of the future will contain little more than a kernel, an OpenGL and X server, the Parrot VM, and many, many Perl scripts.

oreillynet.com Copyright © 2006 O'Reilly Media, Inc.