Barely Used Perl

Robert Boone presented 3 barely used features from the Perl core modules. Robert's company heavily uses perl. Their customers often have the problem of not having the exact Perl modules expected when trying to use Robert's company's code. Therefore, they are taking the approach of preferring modules that come with the Perl distribution, thus assuring that the customer has the modules out of the box.

The first module was NEXT, which is a Perl builtin module to provide proper inheritance calling for complex object structures.

The second topic was a module called overload, which allows you to change the behaviour of operators (+, -, ., etc.) so that you can do cool object things like adding 4 to an object and have it have meaning. This allows your code to be a lot more intuitive.

The third topic was Attribute::Handlers. An overly simplistic explanation of this complex topic is that it will allow your subroutines to behave differently based on what they should return. It also provides support for better inheritance handling.

We also re-hashed briefly some issues I had after Wade's talk on anonymous code references (September 2007). Todd was attempting to use anonymous code creation when inside an object. We were able to work through the issues ending with a sub in an object that creates references to subroutines in the scope of the object (phew!).

(Thanks to Todd Rinaldo for the summary this month.)

Robert's presentation is now available.