autodie works under Perl 5.8
After applying a very different paradigm to the code, I have autodie working under Perl 5.8! For anyone who's missed my earlier posts on the subject, autodie allows Perl's built-ins (and your own code, if you like) to 'succeed-or-die' with lexical scope. This means you can write code like this:

autodie 1.10 beta released - It's Fatal 2.0!
After much hacking, I'm very glad to say that I've got a version of Fatal/autodie that I'm willing to foist upon the world for beta testing. It's not a release candidate, but all the important things that should work, do work (I hope).

For those who haven't seen my previous discussions, you can think of autodie as a Fatal 2.0. It provides lexical scope, exception objects, and much nicer error messages. It even lets you make system() fatal[1].

You can find the distribution at:

http://perltraining.com.au/~pjf/autodie/

It's currently not on the CPAN because I don't want innocent bystanders replacing their Fatal.pm by accident.

Currently it only works on Perl 5.10 and above. Support for 5.8 is on my TODO list.

I'm specifically after feedback on the following points:

• Do any tests fail on your system?
• If you use the new Fatal.pm module, does any of your existing code break? (It should be 100% backwards compatible.)
• If you s/Fatal/autodie/; in your code, does it do what you expect? Are the error messages nicer? Are there any gotchas I've missed?

If you really want to get your hands dirty, feel free to look at the TODO file, the DESIGN.pod file, or the source code in general. Suggestions and patches are very much appreciated. If you've got a github account, I'm happy to give you commit access, or you can just fork the repository.

If you want to see my five minute talk about what this is about, see the video in my blog.

If you want to track my repository of changes, you can find them at:

http://github.com/pfenwick/autodie/tree/master

I also want to say a special thank-you to Aristotle, who has provided invaluable feedback while I've been working on the project.

Any questions, feedback, criticisms, patches, or ideas are welcome.

Many thanks,

Paul

[1] To fatalise system() you'll also need to install IPC::System::Simple.

brian d foy asked in his use.perl blog:

Video: autodie - a lexical Fatal for Perl 5.10
Today's blog post is an adaption of a mail I just sent to perl5-porters. If you're curious about what this autodie business is that I've been talking about, here's your chance to find out. If you're reading this on my main blog you can just hit play on the widget below.

Some time ago, I started discussing the idea of autodie (previously codenamed 'lethal'), a lexical version of Fatal that could be implemented now that Perl 5.10's %^H hash does wonderful things.

Despite a small period where I was distracted by other things, I'm back to working on autodie, as I'm quite eager to get it released. To help facilitate that, I've done a couple of things:

I'm going to be a TV host
I was recently contacted by an associate who asked if I'd be interested in appearing as a guest on a new TV show pilot; needless to say, I agreed. Yesterday I arrived for the recording.

"How are you feeling?" I was asked.
"Nervous," I admitted.
"Well, you'll be more nervous in a moment."
"Really? Why is that?"
"Well, instead of having you as a guest, we were wondering if you'd like to be a TV host. For the whole season."

Apparently being a TV host is a lot less work than I would have expected, because in a 30 minute episode there's only 24 real minutes of show (the rest are taken up with credits, "words on our sponsors", etc), and after segments and specials and reviews and the like, I'll only be on air for maybe 12 minutes in total. In an eight hour day of recording it's reasonable that we'll get at least 36 minutes worth of decent footage, so we can potentially knock over half-a-season in a weekend. Of course, that's all assuming that as a host all I really need to do is look good in front of the camera.

The show looks like it will be called "The Geek Show", will run on channel 31, and start showing in September. All this is still a little provisional, since there's quite a few hurdles to jump before then, but it's still very exciting!

Flame, who some of my readers may know from his OSDC presentations, is the main driving force and creative talent behind the show. And this isn't the only FOSS-friendly, geeky TV show that I hear is in the works. However I don't know if I can talk about the others.

The ironic part of all this is that my channel 31 reception is awful, so I'll probably have to go visit friends to watch the show each week. ;)