« Automating Lunch | Main | Oracle OpenWorld 2007: More than Just Pens and Squishy Toys »
Celebrate 20 years of Perl at Perl Seminar NY
By Eric Gross | December 11, 2007
New York City is not necessarily known as a hotbed for OO perl development. Yet through various groups such as the NYC Perl Mongers and the Jim Keenan-led Perl Seminar NY, our Perl movement thrives and more importantly, really does function as a cohesive community. My guess is that it has something to do with Larry Wall’s biblical-like influence over his minions.
20 years ago, Wall descended from the mountains with the Perl tablets and helped some slay the Golden Calf created by limitations of other languages. As Wall asserts, “Fortunately, I am not Perl. Perl was my servant before it was anyone else’s, so I taught Perl to be a better servant than I could ever teach myself to be.”
In honor of this anniversary, next week’s Perl Seminar NY (details below) will feature one of GridApp Systems’ own, Steve Lembark, who will present, “Developing a Linked List in Perl: How and Why.”
According to Steve,
Perl will iterate a single array quickly using the ‘foreach (@array)’ loop. This works for a large number of cases, but does not handle the case of comparing two lists to one another: the for loop only gives you one loop ‘for free’. This leaves $otherloop[$i] as the main alternative for non-destructively examining the other loop.
Problems start when both lists are long; things start to bog down on computing the offset of entries in a 100K list.
Linked list classes in Perl are up there with Java compilers in rarity. The only linked list class around uses doubly-linked lists, which are flexible but bulky and slow.
There are two ways to handle this: inline code or an object. The inline code is reasonably fast, the object is a bit tricky to implement however. Object:: LinkedList implements an object for handling linked lists. And this represents the heart of the talk on the 18th.
For more info about the Perl Seminar, click here.
More important, at GridApp we love Perl.
Meeting Information: December 18 from 6:15-8:15 PM at the NYPC User Group office (481 8th Ave, Suite 550, between 34/35 Streets)