[PROGRAMMING] The joys of context

May I just say, Perl is a bloody weird language?

Every couple of years I come across a project that requires some significant Perl hacking, and I brush it off. This time, I'm fiddling around in UseModWiki, to make it do what I want as a LARP-development environment. For the most part, that's entirely straightforward. But figuring out the appropriate syntax for dealing with my key data structure (a hash of hashes of arrays) is really mind-bogglingly tricky. I spent a good two hours just figuring out how to get things to dereference into the proper contexts, so that I stopped getting things like "ARRAY (0xabfoobar)" in my data files.

(Is there actually any documentation on the @{ } and %{ } operators? They're referred to all over the Perl docs, but I couldn't find anything actually telling me outright how you're supposed to use them, so I had to do a lot of trial-and-error experimentation.)

Oh, I'm sure that by the time I'm done, I'll have gotten my fluency back. But man -- after spending the past two years working primarily in C# and The Horror That Men Call ActionScript, Perl does require bending my brain into a pretzel...

[PROGRAMMING] The joys of context

May I just say, Perl is a bloody weird language?

Every couple of years I come across a project that requires some significant Perl hacking, and I brush it off. This time, I'm fiddling around in UseModWiki, to make it do what I want as a LARP-development environment. For the most part, that's entirely straightforward. But figuring out the appropriate syntax for dealing with my key data structure (a hash of hashes of arrays) is really mind-bogglingly tricky. I spent a good two hours just figuring out how to get things to dereference into the proper contexts, so that I stopped getting things like "ARRAY (0xabfoobar)" in my data files.

(Is there actually any documentation on the @{ } and %{ } operators? They're referred to all over the Perl docs, but I couldn't find anything actually telling me outright how you're supposed to use them, so I had to do a lot of trial-and-error experimentation.)

Oh, I'm sure that by the time I'm done, I'll have gotten my fluency back. But man -- after spending the past two years working primarily in C# and The Horror That Men Call ActionScript, Perl does require bending my brain into a pretzel...

Noreascon First Night & the SCA

It occurs to me that I mentioned this on the Carolingian Mailing List, but should probably also put a tickler here --

I just found out (via ladysprite) that Worldcon is going to have a "First Night" celebration on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 2nd. I'm already seeing if I can do a couple of outreach-type activities there, but it would be lovely if others wanted to get involved. They have a slot on the large stage (suitable for combat demos or suchlike) and the small stage (suitable for magicians and jugglers and such, but too noisy for music), as well as an open booth which they're looking for carnival games for.

Their timeframe for adding stuff is apparently quite short, and Pennsic means that a lot of people are away this week. But if you see this, and would like to do something, please contact me ASAP, so we can talk details...

Noreascon First Night & the SCA

It occurs to me that I mentioned this on the Carolingian Mailing List, but should probably also put a tickler here --

I just found out (via ladysprite) that Worldcon is going to have a "First Night" celebration on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 2nd. I'm already seeing if I can do a couple of outreach-type activities there, but it would be lovely if others wanted to get involved. They have a slot on the large stage (suitable for combat demos or suchlike) and the small stage (suitable for magicians and jugglers and such, but too noisy for music), as well as an open booth which they're looking for carnival games for.

Their timeframe for adding stuff is apparently quite short, and Pennsic means that a lot of people are away this week. But if you see this, and would like to do something, please contact me ASAP, so we can talk details...