Term::ANSIColor 4.06

A small maintenance release to my Perl module for generating and manipulating ANSI color escape sequences.

In 4.00, I added 256-color support, using ansi0 through ansi15 for the colors that match the normal 16 colors and then rgbNNN and greyN names for the RGB and greyscale colors. One module user requested the ability to address all of the colors via ansi0 through ansi255 so that there's a consistent naming scheme for all the colors. This release adds that. (The more specific names are still returned by uncolor() when reversing escape sequences.)

This module tends to get included all over the place, so I did spend a bit of time when preparing this release trying to determine if adding a bunch more entries to various internal hash tables and arrays would noticably increase memory usage, since Perl is notoriously bad about memory consumption. It does cause a small increase, but it's on the order of about 100KB, and a minimum Perl program to load the module requires about 5.5MB of memory (aie), so it wasn't enough for me to do anything about.

It does look like if I lazily added entries to the built-in hash tables and instead added some more code to calculate escape sequences on the fly, I could save about 300KB of memory usage in the module. Not sure if it's worth it given how small the memory usage is compared to Perl itself, but maybe I'll look at that later when I'm feeling like fiddling with the module again.

(Oh, and all the documentation was regenerated by DocKnot, since I'm still having fun with that. It needed a few new features, which will be in an upcoming 1.01 release.)

You can get the latest version from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.