DOS pattern matching, in Perl

Perl’s file globbing uses the FreeBSD-style globbing, but it works mostly everywhere since Perl handles it internally through the File::Glob module. I’m working on the “Directory Operations” chapter for Learning Perl, 7th edition, where we cover glob. I’m trying to make the book more Windows friendly so I’ve been considering how this stuff translates.

I ran across Raymond Chen’s “How did wildcards work in MS-DOS?”. He lays out the steps for turning what we think of as a pattern (such as “*.txt”) into the CP/M-style pattern that MS-DOS used. He shows how to convert the glob pattern to primitive pattern. Continue reading “DOS pattern matching, in Perl”

Looking for Learning Perl reviewers

[I’ve found enough reviewers and am not accepting more. If you’ve been a reviewer for a past Learning Perl, however, you can volunteer again. If you’re interested in doing this sort of work, pay attention to any of my blogs since I’m likely to start revising another book when I finish this one.]

I’ve got Learning Perl, 7th Edition building on O’Reilly’s Atlas system. That means I can start showing it to other people for comments and reviews. If you think that you’d like to be one of those people, send me an email (the first step being the sort who can find my email address). Continue reading “Looking for Learning Perl reviewers”

We’re starting Learning Perl, 7th edition

The holiday season tends to find me writing Perl books. This time it’s the next edition of Learning Perl, last published for Perl v5.14. This time we’re targeting v5.24, and there are lots of exciting new features that we want to tell the new Perl users.


"7"


We can’t make promises at the beginning of the book, but here’s the rough idea so far:

  • Goodbye, smart match. We gave it a chapter, but now it’s experimental .
  • But, subroutine signatures! People are going to love those.
  • So, an appendix on experimental features. Or maybe a chapter. Mostly on how to enable them.
  • the /r modifier for s///
  • Removing most of the stuff that Perl has discarded without abandoning people using older versions.
  • Key-value slices, and slices, and splice.
  • The double diamond operator <<>>.
  • New Unicode regex stuff

I’ve done this too many times to promise a release date either, but late summer wouldn’t be a bad guess. When I get the current version into something editable and fixed up, I’ll start putting out review versions somehow. I don’t know how that will work yet.

Should we call it “Learning Perl 5”

Should we re-title Learning Perl to Learning Perl 5 for the next edition? How much of a fuss would we cause?

Our trick is to position our book for the major version of Perl that most everyone uses (Perl 5) next to the same sort of book for the mostly different language with the same name (Perl 6).

Up until now, we distinguished the version of the thing called “Perl” in a ribbon on the edge of the book. But, this thing called “Perl 6” is out there and it’s not an upgrade to Perl 5 (unless you think of Perl as an upgrade to awk). The books aren’t going to be compatible and we don’t want people to buy the wrong book.

For most people using Perl as part of their job, they want the current track and not the Perl 6 one. However, at the same time, they aren’t going to realize the difference and go for the highest number.

Who has some good advice for us? We have a Survey Monkey survey (which might show up embedded right under this), or you can leave a comment.

The survey is closed with an overwhelming cry for renaming the book.