Perl/perl5 on Hacker News

…mind quotes from The Lord of the Rings in comments at the top of perl’s source files. For example: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perl.c#L15

comment by gbacon · 2025-10-27 · in Ken Thompson recalls Unix's rowdy, lock-picking origins

…actually introduce bugs 1: I still think of it as a relatively new change, but it's from 2013: < https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/7cf040c1f649790a4040aec... >

comment by Amorymeltzer · 2025-08-02 · in The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity "

…pattern. If you change them, Perl won't even notice. Perl 4’s documentation is briefer. It says, ( https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/perl-4.0.00/perl.man#L272... ) PATTERN may contain references to scalar variables, which will be…

comment by fanf2 · 2025-08-02 · in The /o in Ruby regex stands for "oh the humanity "

…or not. But even if you ignore the undecidability, the rest is still ridiculously complicated. https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/toke.c#L4502

comment by fanf2 · 2024-11-02 · in Weird Lexical Syntax

…if your C compiler don't support # markers in -E output, you get missing includes everywhere. [0] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/ext/Errno/Errno_pm....

comment by fuhsnn · 2024-08-25 · in Consistently Making Wrong Decisions Whilst Writing Recreational C

…Wall's goals when creating Perl: > Perl is kind of designed to make awk and sed semi-obsolete. https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/8d063cd8

comment by mtmk · 2024-03-20 · in Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string"

…pretty impressive. If not by documented count of operating systems, at least by real diversity. https://github.com/Perl/perl5/tree/blead/hints https://www.cpan.org/ports/archive-2011-03-26.html

comment by tyingq · 2023-11-15 · in Curl on 100 Operating Systems

…idea when it was actually written, can’t be bothered searching harder for older than CGI.pm 2.32): https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/54310121b442974721115f936... For stuff that worked on the frontend, it’s still way older, though it…

comment by chrismorgan · 2023-05-26 · in That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something

…pages and other documentation, combined with forking of such projects? Even Perl has a roff file: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/cpan/podlators/t/da...

comment by wahern · 2023-05-17 · in The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2023

…/github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master gcc: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commits/master Perl: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commits/blead Wayland: https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/commits/main

comment by greaterthan3 · 2022-08-28 · in I like Odin

…bit string format specifiers to the pack function in perl so they could fix and recover the data: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/24f4b7dabc8

comment by leejo · 2022-05-19 · in Engineers investigating NASA’s Voyager 1 telemetry data

Factual sources: https://gist.github.com/Grinnz/be5db6b1d54b22d8e21c975d68d7a... https://github.com/Perl/perl5/wiki/Perl7-FAQ

comment by bmn__ · 2022-05-06 · in Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

…code to perl to help it run nicely on AIX workstations that were at use at Intel at the time: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/3e25f6d2dce9289bf3894d673... Then in 1999, Red Hat files an IPO and offers free shares to open source…

comment by wscott · 2021-12-18 · in Perl Turns 34 Today

…continuously maintained test suites. Using what's now called Test Anything Protocol[2] (TAP). [1]: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/8d063cd8450e59ea1c611a2... [2]: https://testanything.org/

comment by dgl · 2021-12-18 · in Perl Turns 34 Today

…be alive in the sense that the core language would get frequent updates. Even Perl is still alive https://github.com/Perl/perl5 , even in a healthier state than I would have thought.

comment by joelbluminator · 2021-09-17 · in How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

The message if you were running Eunice: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/perl-4.0.36/Configure#L10...

comment by tyingq · 2021-09-04 · in Large Unix programs were historically not all that portable between Unixes

…design as such is not what LW is saying was religiously motivated. You can find the actual text at https://github.com/Perl/perl5 if you care.] I listened to as much as I could bear to of that language design conversation. (The audio is…

comment by gjm11 · 2021-04-01 · in On the Decline of Perl – external factors

not a bad example nevertheless, but as we are talking about grammar https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perly.y

comment by sllabres · 2020-12-04 · in Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019)

C++ with lots of extern "C" , I imagine. Two examples: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/search?q=extern https://github.com/php/php-src/search?q=extern

comment by tyingq · 2020-11-17 · in Best aspects of C

…Perl 5 is my go-to language for counterexamples in programming language grammers and syntaxes. [1] https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/toke.c

comment by lifthrasiir · 2020-06-25 · in Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

Not the same, but a reminder that Perl works on ps2: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/caretx.c#L120-L125

comment by latenightcoding · 2020-05-25 · in Adventures of Porting MUSL to PS4

…this day, the Configure script for Perl still outputs "Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice." https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure#L4614

comment by bbanyc · 2019-11-20 · in The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting

…at the commit stats of the Perl 5 interpreter at github, looks pretty stable over the past years: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/graphs/contributors * Just general, unquantified impressions from Perl communities I vaguely follow (twitter,…

comment by perlgeek · 2019-10-07 · in Perl is dying

…C + Unix utils. In fact this is how Perl 1 looks: https://st.aticpan.org/source/RCLAMP/perl-1.0_16/ https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/8d063cd8450e59ea1c611a2...

comment by kamaal · 2019-09-19 · in Pure Bash Bible

Yep, still there in the latest perl5: Perl_start_glob https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/doio.c It's somewhat messier than I remember, because it uses csh as the first choice and falls back to sh.

comment by microtherion · 2019-08-28 · in Python rounds float values by converting them to string and then back

> Take a look at the config file for Perl and how many systems and architectures it accommodates: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure 25249 lines (23725 sloc) Good grief. This is incredible. Thanks for sharing that.

comment by scruple · 2019-04-04 · in 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

…Take a look at the config file for Perl and how many systems and architectures it accommodates: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure It's clearly such an incredible labor of love by Larry Wall et al. that I'm sad for them it…

comment by et2o · 2019-04-04 · in 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

…what about the uncommon ones? For your consideration, I'd like to share Perl's configure script: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure It's my favorite configure script of all time, but I would hate to be the guy who has to…

comment by Sir_Cmpwn · 2019-04-01 · in Show HN: Bsed – Simple, English syntax on top of Perl text processing

…still handled by RT. And if you look at the actual activity, you see that it not quite dead yet ( https://github.com/Perl/perl5/graphs/commit-activity ). And afaik, Perl 5 is in code freeze at the moment in preparation for the yearly…

comment by lizmat · 2018-04-08 · in Ask HN: Is Meteor.js dead?

https://github.com/Perl/perl5 Apparently it’s not the only thing that is as good as dead with activity on GitHub. Meteor might not literally be dead, but it may as well be. Don’t use it. Even MDG seems mostly focused on GraphQL these days…

comment by jrs95 · 2018-04-08 · in Ask HN: Is Meteor.js dead?

…it should be linear. The glob() routine in perl uses a fork of a BSD glob which ships with perl: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/ext/File-Glob/bsd_g... > pcre2 performs much better than perl btw: it > errors with match limit…

comment by avar · 2017-04-24 · in Glob Matching Can Be Simple and Fast Too

This is how you can implement isUpper() on EBCDIC: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/v5.24.0/handy.h#L1153

comment by avar · 2017-04-11 · in Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

Ditto for Perl - https://github.com/Perl/perl5

comment by draegtun · 2017-01-03 · in Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub

Perl is dual-licensed under the GPL & the Artistic license: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/README#L83

comment by avar · 2016-09-05 · in OpenBSD: Use the space freed up by sparc and zaurus to import LLVM

Yep... here's the commit on the Github mirror - https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/09edd81111f67b4331309c8...

comment by draegtun · 2014-06-17 · in Announcing Unicode 7.0