Hack-a-thon and Perl Help Session

Because of the last-minute nature of this meeting, no one was prepared to bring a project for working hack-a-thon style.

Instead we began by talking about what the Houston.pm group does (we had one new person) and a little about people's interests in Perl. We talked a bit about Perl 6 and recent changes to the language. As part of the discussion, we touched on backwards-compatibility issues, which lead to a discussion of the hash-table changes in recent Perl versions.

This lead to Wade doing an impromptu presentation on how hash-tables work, why the DOS attack on hash-tables existed and why the Perl 5 Porters group had to change Perls hashes.

The discussion went further into more complicated data structures (arrays of arrays, arrays of hashes, etc.) and autovivification. We also discussed issues of computational complexity relating to use of arrays and hashes.

Fraser Baker asked a question about the intersection of shebang lines, Apache, and Windows. So ideas were proprosed, but no one had a compelling answer. We suggested he post to the mailing list.

Will Willis asked a debugging question involving long running, deeply nested code. He was looking for strategies to make using the debugger easier in those cases. We suggested using print statements to help get an idea of the shape of the problem and then conditional breakpoints to shorten the manual work of getting to the interesting part of the code. Chris also suggested using the PERLDB_OPTS environment variable to turn on tracing with extra information.

All in all, the discussion seemed pretty lively and a good time was had.

We had 6 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.