colomon writes "On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce theMay 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #29 "Erlangen". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see http://www.parrot.org./ The tarball for the May 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. The May 2010 release is code named "Erlangen" in recognition of Erlangen.pm and the Perl 6 talk that Moritz Lenz, one of our core developers, gave this month. Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include: * Lexical classes and roles were implemented. Additionally, anonymous classes which were never quite right in alpha are now implemented more correctly, and anonymous roles are also supported. * Basic support for named enumerations of the form 'enum Weekday ' has been restored. * First cut of use Foo:from and eval('foo', :lang); needs Blizkost[1] to be installed to work. * Numeric / Real roles much closer to the spec now. * As always, many additional small features and bug fixes make working with Rakudo more pleasant. * Rakudo now passes 32,347 spectests. We estimate that there are about 39,500 tests in the test suite, so Rakudo passes about 82% of all tests. For a more detailed list of changes see "docs/ChangeLog". The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possibl

Hello, good evening and welcome.For the next few months I will be using this blog to help document and publicise my "Ctypes for Perl" project. The project is being carried out for TPF under the auspices of the Google Summer of Code programme, and mentored by Reini Urban. What's a ctypes? 'ctypes' is the Foreign Function Interface (FFI) library distributed with the Python core. It basically allows native C libraries to be called easily from Python; for module authors, it allows the wrapping of C libraries in pure Python.This is obviously a powerful concept. Imagine a world where Perl module authors didn't need to use XS, and module consumers don't need to have a correctly configured compiler set up on their system. This is the purpose of the project: to create an easy, cross-platform, pure-Perl interface to native C libraries. Implementations ctypes is based on libffi. It's small, supports a wide range of systems, and has a very liberal license. It's been distributed with GCC for a number of years, used by gcj for interfacing between interpreted and compiled code.From what I can gather, Python set the trend in dynamic languages using libffi. Looking at the success of the Python module, developers at Mozilla chose libffi to develop ctypes.jsm. Ruby-FFI uses it too, so there's plenty of prior art which will hopefully help me out.The FFI problem hasn't been ignored in the Perl world. There's FFI.pm, the biggest disadvantage of which in my view is being built on libffcall, a libra

"Now suppose," chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, "that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs what we might call ice-oneis only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two, ice-three, ice-four ... And suppose," he rapped on his desk with his old hand again, "that there were one form, which we will call ice-ninea crystal as hard as this deskwith a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a melting point of one-hundred- and-thirty degrees."                                                                           -- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle It gives me great pleasure to announce Perl 5.12.1, the second stable release of Perl 5.12. You can download Perl 5.12.1 from your favorite CPAN mirror or from: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.1/ SHA1 digests for this release are: 75a8a17cec15d68c6bb959b0aa9879d2ded6f90d perl-5.12.1.tar.bz2 83b99f08379782dc06594a85eeb279edc

kid51 writes "In case you haven't heard ... The schedule for presentations at YAPC::NA::2010 in Columbus Ohio has been announced. And the call for a venue for YAPC::NA::2011 is also out now."Read more of this story at use Perl.

'Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, 'why your cat grins like that?' 'It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, 'and that's why. Pig!' She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:-- 'I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats COULD grin.' 'They all can,' said the Duchess; 'and most of 'em do.' -- Lewis Carroll, /Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/On behalf of Perl's development team, It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.12.0.Perl 5.12.0 represents approximately two years of development since version 5.10.0 and contains over 750,000 lines of changes across over 3,000 files from over 200 authors and committers.SHA-1 signatures for this release: f533687077e2da113b48a6c5e578f4a206fbf173 perl-5.12.0.tar.bz2 5341e60d099fdda71bc33b2a36e417fc0926518f perl-5.12.0.tar.gz You can download this release from your nearest CPAN mirror or from: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.12.0/Read more of this story at use Perl.

BooK writes "While YAPC::Europe 2010 preparations are well underway in Pisa, it is time for the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to look for suitable sites for the 2011 conference. Any dedicated group interested in hosting YAPC::Europe::2011 should send a brief statement of intent to venue@yapceurope.org. This should be followed by a complete application. The deadline for applications is June 30, 2010. For details on how to prepare your complete application, consider the examples of previous conferences. If your proposal is selected, it will be added to the others on this page (you will have the opportunity to remove private information first). Be certain to include contact information (including telephone numbers) for at least two members of the group. You may also direct any questions to the aforementioned email address. A decision on the location will be publicly announced at the start of the Pisa conference. Looking forward to your submissions,  Philippe Bruhat (BooK)  on behalf of the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee"Read more of this story at use Perl.

(original post here) In addition to The Perl Foundation being accepted into GSoC 2010, BioPerl is now also part of the Google Summer of Code! The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, which also includes BioPython, BioRuby, and others, has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code for 2010. We are actively looking for students interested in OBF-related bioinformatics projects; new ideas are welcome. Project ideas and other details can be found here: Main OBF GSoC page BioPerl-specific projects This isn't the first year BioPerl has been part of GSoC. A successful project was recently published by 2008 GSoC student Mira Han for developing a phyloXML parser for BioPerl.Read more of this story at use Perl.

Steinn E. Sigurdarson writes "This years Nordic Perl Workshop takes place the first weekend of May in Reykjavík, Iceland. This is the first time the event is held in Iceland, but hopefully not the last. Registration and more details are available on the workshop website."Read more of this story at use Perl.

mhx writes "GPW 12.0 — ”Modern Perl“ The 12th German Perl Workshop will be hosted from June 7th to 9th 2010 in Schorndorf near Stuttgart. The workshop is targeted towards all experienced and beginning Perl developers. Obviously, the workshop is only as good as its talks — your talks. We are interested in all talks about Perl itself or about Perl related topics, and especially talks that would apply to this year's motto “Modern Perl“. The submission deadline for your 5, 20 or 40 minute talks has been extended until March 5th, 2010.     http://conferences.yapceurope.org/gpw2010 The German Perl Workshop is a yearly held conference with mostly german-speaking users and developers of the Perl programming language. The main focus of the workshop held by the Deutscher Perl-Workshop GbR and the Wirtschaftsförderung Region Stuttgart (WRS) is ”Modern Perl“. The CPAN modules Catalyst, Moose and DBIx::Class are playing major roles: Catalyst as a flexible web framework, Moose with its postmodern object system for Perl and DBIx::Class as a layer between applications and databases."Read more of this story at use Perl.

BooK writes "The YAPC Europe Foundation's treasurer has put all the Foundation's financial reports (from 2004 to present) online. For those not interested in the gory details of "what has YEF been doing with the money it got from donations", there's also a global picture. This information is made public because YEF gets its funding from the Perl community, which has a right to know what's done with its money, and also in the hope that it will make the YAPC Europe Foundation's purpose clearer to everyone."Read more of this story at use Perl.