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Issue #798 - 2026-11-09 - LPW 2026
latest | archive | edited by Mohammad Sajid Anwar
This edition was made possible by the supporters of our cause.
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Hi there,
Less than two weeks left to the most awaited event, London Perl & Raku Workshop 2026. Most of us, remember it by the name, LPW. I have fond memories of it. I was encouraged to attend and give talk by my friend, Neil Bowers. I am glad that I listened to his advice. It has been part of my tech life ever since. Then I even started participating Perl Mongers Meet as it would happen in and around my work place. Thanks to the organisers, Andrew Mehta, JJ Atria and
If you are in and around London on the day, I would highly recommend to attend the event. It is not just the quality talks but you get to meet the who's who. I remember last year I got spend some quality time with Paul Evans. We even had lunch together as bonus. During the conversation, Paul coined the term Conference Driven Development. It is still stuck in my head. There is surprise element this year for all of us. Curtis Poe is giving a talk on AI. It has been a tradition for me that I give a talk every time I attend the event but this year I missed the boat. Never mind, I will still attend the event and meet my friends. The major dissappointment for me is that my book on DBIx::Class is not ready for launch. I was hoping to get it ready for the event. Life had some other plans unfortunately. I am trying to stay positive after all. I will use this opportunity to enjoy the moment and have fun with friends. Last year, Dave Cross couldn't make it but luckily this time he is attending and giving a talk as well. I am so excited and can't wait to attend it. Two other friends, Salve J. Nilsen and Andrew Shitov, I am looking forward to meet. I met Andrew when I attend the conference he organised in Riga just before the pandemic. I spent quality time with Salve when I attended the Perl Toolchain Summit in If you are attending the event then please do come say hi. I have got a surprise for all you. Enjoy rest of the newsletter. Mohammad Sajid Anwar |
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Announcements
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by Dana Jacobsen (DANAJ)  Dana has made Math::Prime::Util::GMP 0.55 publicly available. In this new version, an updated, and speedier implementation of Self-Initialising Quadratic Sieve (SIQS) for factorisation has been added. The enhancements were inspired by Hugo van der Sanden's research and have been aided by the work of coding AIs. This new feature has made factorisation faster and simpler to perform on large numbers, thereby improving memory consumption as well as the usability of the standard factor() calls by introducing msiqs, a separate multi-threaded factoring program that uses C and GMP and can successfully compete against established programs such as YAFU. |
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by Robert Acock (LNATION) Robert has introduced the new tool called Devel::XSCover that aims at overcoming the problem of observing the code coverage of Perl programs based on the C/XS programming languages. Unlike Devel::Cover (which only provides details about the Perl code and limited information about C through gcov), Devel::XSCover can deal with compilation options, ensure that the program works in a multithreaded environment, return the name of the Perl function linked to the C function, and provide detailed reports in HTML. |
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by Dean Hamstead (DJZORT) Dean has put out a trial version known as NetAddr::IP version number 4.080_08 to CPAN intending to find out the last bugs before making this version finally stable. The new version comes with better parsing, stricter input validation apart from introducing new constructors such as new4() and NetAddr::IP::Count. Moreover, this version is being published under the MIT license. | 
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Articles
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The Perl Steering Council released "This week in PSC (241)", which discusses their deliberations on issue GH24977 pertaining to changes to regexp interpolation while using strict in blead Perl. In the opinion of the Council, the changes proposed require more consideration and refinement before the next stable release of the software, in an otherwise uneventful week regarding issues discussed in the issue tracker and mailing list. |
The Weekly Challenge
The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Sajid Anwar will help you step out of your comfort-zone. You can even win prize money of $50 by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one champion at the end of the month from among all of the contributors during the month, thanks to the sponsor Marc Perry.
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Longest Repeating Character" and "Longest Absolute Path". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ. |
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by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Divisible Average" and "String Difference" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy. |
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by Ali Moradi The solution provided by Ali consists of clean test-driven Perl solutions implemented with common tools. The code works efficiently for the two parts, filtering out numbers for divisibility averages and managing character ordinals for unique differences of strings—taking advantage of Test::More built-in test. |
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by Arne Sommer Arne's post displays various idiomatic and innovative Raku solutions for the Weekly Challenge #398. The approaches employed in the scripts take advantage of strong built-in functionalities such as constraits on some MAIN parameters, the zip meta-operator Z with file subtraction, and the use of freqeuncy bags to perform filtering, converting characters into their code point values and calculating differences. | 
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by Bob Lied Bob's article presents a modern and elegant Perl solution. The article discusses several clean problem-solving strategies, including the utilisation of a contemporary feature of Perl, such as try/catch blocks, POSIX::lround to round precision, and the intelligent column-wise method to differentiate unique characters. | 
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by Jaldhar H. Vyas In this post, Jaldhar clearly demonstrates various implementations of Raku and Perl. The review emphasises Raku's features such as single-line mapping, usage of meta-operators, and automatic rounding, as compared to basic Perl implementations with Math::Round module and accumulation of records in a hash. |
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by Jorg Sommrey Jorg's write-up showcases compact and vectorized solutions in Perl and J language. The methodology adopts the PDL module (Perl Data Language) for numeric filtering and rounding of task 1 and applies functional tools (List::UtilsBy and List::MoreUtils) for grouping the string difference vectors in task 2. |
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by Matthias Muth Matthias provides an incredibly clear and fluent Perl tutorial, ingeniously optimising Task 1 by implementing modulo-6 checks and safe rounding. In the next step, he shows a wonderful process of developing signature-based bucket grouping for Task 2. |
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by Packy Anderson (PACKY) Packy's article regarding Challenge 398 includes perfectly organised answers described in Raku, Perl, Python, and Elixir. The article has an amusing musical introduction and an uncomplicated explanation of the algorithms where modulo filters and rounding methods were used in Task 1 and list splitting and differences in Task 2. | 
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by Peter Campbell Smith The post for the Weekly Challenge presents a brilliant but simple Perl script that does the filtering as well as the mean-rounding in a few lines. It also has a great mechanism for dealing with edge cases when criteria is missing while providing an excellent mobile development experience using terminal as well as text editor. | 
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by Reinier Maliepaard In this entry for the Weekly Challenge, there is an interesting algorithmic problem related to conditional filtering of an array of numbers and mathematical rounding. The description is short and clear, which gives opportunities for a good practice concerning the efficient processing of any data. |
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by Reinier Maliepaard The entry in this post for The Weekly Challenge features a stimulating string-manipulation task that has to do with calculating differences between characters and discovering the anomaly. What makes the exercise interesting is the available Perl tips and suggestions. |
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by Robbie Hatley The post showcases a solid Perl solution responding to The Weekly Challenge #398, including examples that explore various aspects of edge cases and provide a concrete path for building a more robust input than what the task itself demands. Robbie's impeccable explanations and clean scripting provide productive insight on solving an algorithmic problem. |
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by Roger Bell West (FIREDRAKE) The article offers clear and concise information about Weekly Challenge 398, demonstrating the use of clever mathematics optimised and neat iterator-based windowing of Rust programming language. Roger presents a great concept in the implementing the technology that is illustrated through the algorithms. |
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by Simon Green (SGREEN) In his post, Simon provides an incredible and easy-to-read description of Weekly Challenge 398, with idiomatic solutions in Perl and Python. His nice improvement for Task 1, which understands that even numbers divisible by 3 are multiples of 6, shows that he has an excellent knowledge of mathematical simplification. | 
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