The talk lasted for about 4½ hours and that's because Damian was rushing through things. It started with the Director(?) of OGI introducing merlyn who in turn introduced Damian. Even though this was a free talk, everyone who attended received free T-shirts supplied by Stonehenge, merlyn's consulting company. Interestingly, the Director mentioned some of the things that merlyn and his company have done for the Perl community and I think many people are under the misapprehension that Randal contributes nothing but caustic remarks. Not true! Amongst other things, Stonehenge has helped ensure that Damian has the funding to keep running around the world and promoting Perl.

Also, the Code::Police module was directly inspired by one of the jokes merlyn told while he was there. Now I'm thinking about writing one that tries to 'correct' alternatives to CGI.pm.

Damian managed to sell me on most of the new features of Perl6 (currying is incredible!) and I'm eagerly looking forward to it. Read the links that lemming provided. Very interesting stuff.

Some of the features that may make it (that I am really looking forward to):

• use strict 'system';

  Failure to check the return value of a system call will kill the script. No more "open FOO, $bar;"

• Protocol modules that will allow open to DWIM: my $homepage = open 'http://www.someserver.com/index.html' or die $!;
• use modules not on our system.

  We might have a feature that will allow one to use a module that's not installed and have it downloaded from the CPAN, unpacked, compiled (if necessary) and installed when needed.

• Lazy expressions (I may have the syntax slightly off). func ( foo() is lazy, bar() is lazy ) {...}

  If foo() and bar() are evaluated lazily, they will not be invoked in func() unless they are actually used in the function. Currently, if the output of those functions are passed as argument to another sub, they will be evaluated before func() is evaluated. However, if you don't use both the arguments, this is not necessary. With lazy evaluation, they won't be evaluated unless actually used. Note that this will require people to write tighter code. Messing around with globals in those subs could cause very unpredictable results.

Cheers,
Ovid

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