Adventures in IRC

Yesterday I spent time in #perl6 for the first time. Basically, I tried updating to Rakudo's Pittsburgh release and it failed for me. So I poked my head into #perl6 to see what to do about it. I gave it "last.of.the.careless.men" as my ID, and it thoughtfully translated it to "last" for me, so I suppose I'll probably try "SF" next time.

Anyway, no solution for the bug, so moritz walked me through the process of submitting a Perl 6 bug report. That done, I hung around on the channel all day, just to see what it was like. (Crazy to see Larry Wall checking a bunch of stuff into the repository while I was watching.)

After dinner, someone came around asking for help with a simple Perl 5 regex. No one else seemed to be using the channel for anything, so I went ahead and helped him there. And naturally, in the process, help me with a regex turned into help me with two regexes and then the entire program to use them. In the process of trying to help him quickly, I dug up and posted my old script for running substitutions on a bunch of files.

About thirty minutes later I started regretting having done that. That code is simple, but pretty awful for how simple it is. It's not properly error checked, I obviously didn't use strict, and it is Windows-specific as written. (BTW, if the code at the above link looks okay, that means I've updated it already. You should check out the earlier revisions for the full badness.)

Anyway, I've decided as penance for posting bad code to the net and Perl 5 on the Perl 6 channel at that, I'm going to clean it up in Perl 5 and then take a stab at translating it to Perl 6 this weekend. (The latter will probably be easier if I can get Perl 6 working again!) It should be a pleasant distraction from the ugly C++ API overhaul I need to do for work.