June2006Meeting

June 2006 Meeting

Perl Hacks You Probably Never Knew Existed

chromatic

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 showed 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 showed 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

• Making invocantless methods

• Making multimethods without source filters

This talk is most suitable for intermediate Perl programmers, though there is likely something an experienced Perl programmer doesn't know and it should be entertaining for novices as well.

Podcast link