Perl’s object system is fuzzy. Methods are really just subroutines and classes are just packages, which means that any subroutine in a package is also a method in that class. Your class might have subroutines that you’ve never even noticed, so you end up with methods that you didn’t want in your interface. There are [...]

A recent question on Stackoverlow asked about the difference between the same floating numbers being stored in scientific notation and written out. Why does 0.76178 come out differently than 7.6178E-01 When Perl stores them, they can come out as slightly different numbers. This is related to the perlfaq answer to Why am I getting long [...]

At Frozen Perl I did a quick presentation about Unicode and Perl. I had to do some work on the slides before releasing them publicly, but here they are… Be sure to look at the author notes if you want more detailed information.

In the Effective Perl class I gave at Frozen Perl last week, I got a question I didn’t have the quick answer to. What happens to the strings when Encode’s decode function only partially decodes the string? The default behavior for decode always decodes the entire string, although it uses substitution character (0xFFFD, which may [...]

In Item 110: Compile and install your own perls, you saw how to install multiple versions of perl and to maintain each of the installations separately. Doing something with one version of Perl doesn’t affect any of the other versions. You can take that a step further. Within each installation, you can use a source [...]