/ 
perl5i-v0.1.0
River stage one • 2 direct dependents • 2 total dependents
/ perl5i

NAME

perl5i - Bend Perl 5 so it fits how it works in our imaginations

SYNOPSIS

use perl5i;

or

$ perl5i your_script.pl

DESCRIPTION

THIS MODULE'S INTERFACE IS UNSTABLE! It's still a playground. Features may be added, changed and removed without notice. use perl5i may not even work in the future. See http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/issues/issue/69 and http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/issues/issue/60 for details. You have been warned.

Perl 5 has a lot of warts. There's a lot of individual modules and techniques out there to fix those warts. perl5i aims to pull the best of them together into one module so you can turn them on all at once.

This includes adding features, changing existing core functions and changing defaults. It will likely not be 100% backwards compatible with Perl 5, so perl5i will try to have a lexical effect.

Please add to this imaginary world and help make it real, either by telling me what Perl looks like in your imagination (http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/issues or make a fork (forking on github is like a branch you control) and implement it yourself.

What it does

perl5i enables each of these modules and adds/changes these functions. We'll provide a brief description here, but you should look at each of their documentation for full details.

alias()

alias( $name           => $reference );
alias( $package, $name => $reference );
alias( @identifiers    => $reference );

Assigns a $refrence a $name. For example...

alias foo => sub { 42 };
print foo();        # prints 42

It will also work on hash, array and scalar refs.

our %stuff;
alias stuff => \%some_other_hash;

Multiple @identifiers will be joined with '::' and used as the fully qualified name for the alias.

my $class = "Some::Class";
my $name  = "foo";
alias $class, $name => sub { 99 };
print Some::Class->foo;  # prints 99

If the $name has no "::" in it, the current caller will be prepended.

This is basically a nicer way to say:

no strict 'refs';
*{$package . '::'. $name} = $reference;

center()

my $centered_string = $string->center($length);
my $centered_string = $string->center($length, $character);

Centers $string between $character. $centered_string will be of length $length.

<$character> defaults to " ".

say "Hello"->center(10);        # "   Hello  ";
say "Hello"->center(10, '-');   # "---Hello--";

<center()> will never truncate <$string>. If $length is less than <$string-length>> it will just return <$string>.

say "Hello"->center(4);        # "Hello";

wrap()

my $wrapped = $string->wrap( width => $cols, separator => $sep );

Wraps $string to width $cols, breaking lines at word boundries using separator $sep.

If no width is given, $cols defaults to 76. Default line separator is the newline character "\n".

See Text::Wrap for details.

ltrim()

my $string = '    testme'->ltrim; # 'testme'

Trim leading whitespace (left).

rtrim()

my $string = 'testme    '->rtrim; #'testme'

Trim trailing whitespace (right).

trim()

my $string = '    testme    '->trim;  #'testme'

Trim both leading and trailing whitespace.

title_case()

my $name = 'joe smith'->title_case; #Joe Smith

Will uppercase every word character that follows a wordbreak character.

die()

die now always returns an exit code of 255 instead of trying to use $! or $? which makes the exit code unpredictable. If you want to exit with a message and a special exit code, use warn then exit.

English

English gives English names to the punctuation variables like <$@> is also <$EVAL_ERROR>. See perlvar for details.

It does not load the regex variables which effect performance. <$PREMATCH>, <$MATCH>, and <POSTMATCH> will not exist. See </p> in perlre for a better alternative.

Modern::Perl

Turns on strict and warnings, enables all the 5.10 features like given/when, say and state, and enables C3 method resolution order.

CLASS

Provides CLASS and $CLASS alternatives to __PACKAGE__.

File::chdir

File::chdir gives you $CWD representing the current working directory and its assignable to <chdir>. You can also localize it to safely chdir inside a scope.

File::stat

File::stat causes stat to return objects rather than long arrays which you never remember which bit is which.

DateTime

time, localtime and gmtime are replaced with DateTime objects. They will all act like the core functions.

# Sat Jan 10 13:37:04 2004
say scalar gmtime(2**30);

# 2004
say gmtime(2**30)->year;

# 2009 (when this was written)
say time->year;

Time::y2038

gmtime() and localtime() will now safely work with dates beyond the year 2038 and before 1901 (the exact range is not defined, but its well into a couple million years in either direction).

Module::Load

Module::Load adds load which will load a module from a scalar without requiring you to do funny things like eval require $module.

IO::Handle

Turns filehandles into objects so you can call methods on them. The biggest one is autoflush rather than mucking around with $| and select.

$fh->autoflush(1);

autodie

autodie causes system and file calls which can fail (open, system and chdir, for example) to die when they fail. This means you don't have to put or die at the end of every system call, but you do have to wrap it in an eval block if you want to trap the failure.

autodie's default error messages are pretty smart.

All of autodie will be turned on.

autobox

autobox allows methods to be defined for and called on most unblessed variables.

autobox::Core

autobox::Core wraps a lot of Perl's built in functions so they can be called as methods on unblessed variables. @a->pop for example.

autobox::List::Util

autobox::List::Util wraps the functions from List::Util (first, max, maxstr, min, minstr, shuffle, reduce, and sum) so they can be called on arrays and arrayrefs.

autobox::dump

autobox::dump defines a perl method that returns Data::Dumper style serialization of the results of the expression.

autovivification

autovivification fixes the bug/feature where this:

$hash = {};
$hash->{key1}{key2};

Results in <$hash-{key1}>> coming into existance. That will no longer happen.

Want

Want generalizes the mechanism of the wantarray function, allowing a function to determine the context it's being called in. Want distinguishes not just scalar v. array context, but void, lvalue, rvalue, boolean, reference context and more. See perldoc Want.

BUGS

Some parts are not lexical.

See http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/issues/labels/bug for a complete list.

Please report bugs at http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/issues/.

VERSIONING

perl5i follows the Semantic Versioning policy, http://semver.org. In short...

Versions will be of the form X.Y.Z.

0.Y.Z may change anything at any time.

Incrementing X (ie. 1.2.3 -> 2.0.0) indicates a backwards incompatible change.

Incrementing Y (ie. 1.2.3 -> 1.3.0) indicates a new feature.

Incrementing Z (ie. 1.2.3 -> 1.2.4) indicates a bug fix or other internal change.

NOTES

Inspired by chromatic's Modern::Perl and in particular http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/04/ugly-perl-a-lesson-in-the-importance-of-language-design.html.

I totally didn't come up with the "Perl 5 + i" joke. I think it was Damian Conway.

THANKS

Thanks to our contributors: Chas Owens, Darian Patrick, rjbs, chromatic, Ben Hengst and anyone else I've forgotten.

Thanks to Flavian and Matt Trout for their signature and Devel::Declare work.

Thanks to all the CPAN authors upon whom this builds.

LICENSE

Copyright 2009-2010, Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html

SEE ALSO

Repository: http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/tree/master Issues/Bugs: http://github.com/schwern/perl5i/issues IRC: irc.perl.org on the #perl5i channel

Modern::Perl