hidden-features

What are some really useful but esoteric language features in Perl that you've actually been able to employ to do useful work? Guidelines: Try to limit answers to the Perl core and not CPAN Please give an example and a short description Hidden Features also found in other languages' Hidden Features: (These are all from Corion's answer ) C Duff's Device Portability and Standardness C# Quotes for whitespace delimited lists and strings Aliasable namespaces Java Static Initalizers JavaScript Functions are First Class citizens Block scope and closure Calling methods and accessors indirectly through

Visual Studio is such a massively big product that even after years of working with it I sometimes stumble upon a new/better way to do things or things I didn't even know were possible. For instance- Crtl + R , Ctrl + W to show white spaces. Essential for editing Python build scripts. Under "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor" Create a String called Guides with the value "RGB(255,0,0), 80" to have a red line at column 80 in the text editor. What other hidden features have you stumbled upon? Make a selection with ALT pressed - selects a square of text instead of

I know there is a standard behind all C compiler implementations, so there should be no hidden features. Despite that, I am sure all C developers have hidden/secret tricks they use all the time. Function pointers. You can use a table of function pointers to implement, e.g., fast indirect-threaded code interpreters (FORTH) or byte-code dispatchers, or to simulate OO-like virtual methods. Then there are hidden gems in the standard library, such as qsort(),bsearch(), strpbrk(), strcspn() [the latter two being useful for implementing a strtok() replacement]. A misfeature of C is that signed

I know this sounds like a point-whoring question but let me explain where I'm coming from. Out of college I got a job at a PHP shop. I worked there for a year and a half and thought that I had learned all there was to learn about programming. Then I got a job as a one-man internal development shop at a sizable corporation where all the work was in C#. In my commitment to the position I started reading a ton of blogs and books and quickly realized how wrong I was to think I knew everything. I learned about unit testing, dependency injection and decorator patterns, the design principle of loose

Continuing the "Hidden features of ..." meme, let's share the lesser-known but useful features of Ruby programming language. Try to limit this discussion with core Ruby, without any Ruby on Rails stuff. See also: Hidden features of C# Hidden features of Java Hidden features of JavaScript Hidden features of Ruby on Rails Hidden features of Python (Please, just one hidden feature per answer.) Thank you Farrel From Ruby 1.9 Proc#=== is an alias to Proc#call, which means Proc objects can be used in case statements like so: def multiple_of(factor) Proc.new{|product| product.modulo(factor).zero?}

Inspired by the question series 'Hidden features of ...', I am curious to hear about your favorite Django tips or lesser known but useful features you know of. Please, include only one tip per answer. Add Django version requirements if there are any. I'm just going to start with a tip from myself :) Use os.path.dirname() in settings.py to avoid hardcoded dirnames. Don't hardcode path's in your settings.py if you want to run your project in different locations. Use the following code in settings.py if your templates and static files are located within the Django project directory: # settings.py