For May, I was assigned Compiler::Lexer which is a Lexical analyzer for Perl 5. There were a number of issues available and after reading through them I found an issue with an example that looks like code I've written myself many times:

my @chars = split //, $what;

This problem seemed straight forward, so I decided to work on Issue #26.

This distribution is primarily written in C++ and has a few large Enums, arrays and hashes that define all the various Perl syntax features. Once I had identified the key pieces of code, I started with a failing test and began working. The fix involved identifying what a "RegExp" type should look like, updating a reserved keyword map and fixing the down stream logic. Once my test and the existing tests passed I submitted my May Pull request.


Shortly after submitting my pull request I checked the pull request status and saw that the automated tests had failed. I had stupidly forgot to do a full recursive run of the test suite. My "fix" was wrong and I realized my approach was going to need a lot of work to. Since I was already at the end of a busy month I asked Neil for a "Skip" and I will hope to contribute something successfully next month.