Quick Bits

I have to report a complete FAIL on trying to install Padre + its Perl 6 extensions on my OS X. The Perl 6 stuff required me to install 5.10.0 from source, and even after I hand-hacked Mac::File so it would install, some other CPAN dependency that didn't install properly tripped me up, and I gave up on it. I may try again at a future date, but since I am unlikely to give up TextMate for Padre anyway, and my free time is actually negative at the moment, it seems a very low priority.

It also seems to have trashed my ability to run the STD.pm from Pugs -- looks like it may have installed its own non-compatible STD.pm? I haven't had time to investigate this yet.

On the bright side, Rakudo's "Chicago" release installed smoothly (and this time I had the good sense not to install it over my main Rakudo installation until I verified that it worked).

I am in awe of this script from pmichaud. Yes, that craziness works just fine in Chicago. I was very confused by the @deck .= pick(*); line, until I remembered that dot is now strictly used for member functions (or whatever the proper Perl 6 term is) -- thus it is really just shorthand for @deck = @deck.pick(*);. Once you know that pick picks random members from an array, then it's more-or-less clear that @deck.pick(*) returns a shuffled deck.

I'm working on trying to establish tests for my STEP extract script. I'm stuck on trying to figure out how to get the results back from an external command in Perl 6, but I'm sure I'll work it out sooner or later.