Just A Summary : Category perl-6, everything about perl-6

Ruby 'til 6

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 02:34:00 -0500

Oh, I say. It seems that Sam Ruby is another member of the “Ruby ‘til [Perl] 6” club.

I like Ruby a lot. For the kind dynamic OO/Functional coding style that I espouse, it’s a better Perl than Perl simply because it’s so much less verbose (I got so tired of always unpacking the argument list, it tended to put me off applying the Composed Method pattern anywhere near often enough).

But it’s not my One True Language. Perl 6 looks like it might be an awful lot closer to it. If nothing else, it has Lisp style macros.

A good macro system, especially when it’s combined with an accessible and well abstracted runtime is an awfully useful thing. For instance, consider the Rails controller. In a rails controller, public methods are ‘visible’ as actions that can be accessed via the web (usually with a url of the form /:controller/:action). Protected and private methods aren’t accessible in the same way.

But sometimes it’s quite handy to have a method on the controller that shouldn’t be deemed to be an action, but which you might want to call from a model. The canonical example here is when you’re doing Double Dispatch. Here’s an example of bad code:

results = @search_results.collect do |item|
  case item
  when Comment: extract_comment_metadata(item)
  when Trackback: extract_trackback_metadata(item)
  else
    fail "Oops!"
  end
end

Look, we’re using a case statement that dispatches on the class of another object! This is a job for Polymorphism. Let’s assume that the two extract_*_metadata methods need to do some of the things that only a controller can and can’t simply be replaced with extract_metadata on the Comment and Trackback objects. Here’s how I’d rejig the controller code:

results = @search_results.collect {|item| item.extract_metadata_for(self) }

And the support code in the model classes looks like¹

def Comment::extract_metadata_for(controller)
  controller.extract_comment_metadata(self)
end

def Trackback::extract_metadata_for(controller)
  controller.extract_trackback_metadata(self)
end

And look! I’ve saved a line of code! Except, it doesn’t quite work like that. The extract_*_metadata methods aren’t public, we’re not supposed to call them from the model, so we’ll have to work around it:

def Comment::extract_metadata_for(controller)
  controller.send :extract_comment_metadata, self
end

def Trackback::extract_metadata_for(controller)
  controller.send :extract_trackback_metadata, self
end

which isn’t the end of the world, but it does obfuscate an idiom that’s already unfamiliar to many readers. Not good.

If you were writing Rails in Smalltalk, you would just file your controllers web visible actions in an ‘actions’ protocol and have done with it. If you were writing it in Perl, you could use method properties, declaring actions with something like:

sub read :action { ... }

Sadly, ruby doesn’t have method properties. What I’d like to be able to write is something like:

action read
  ...
end

And have that define my action and do the housekeeping so that the rest of the framework knows that it can dispatch to this from a web request. About the nearest you could get to this with current Ruby is:

action :read do 
  ...
end

It’s not awful, but it’s not pretty either.

A good macro system would make it let you write things that feel even more like part of the language than the many excellent things that Ruby on Rails already does in this area.

Another example: I would dearly love to be able to ‘unwind protect’ my controller’s filter methods, it’d be great if I could write:

pre_filter whatever
  allocate_a_bunch_of_resources
  true
unwind_protect
  tidy_up_allocated_resources
end

The idea being that, if a filter block returns false, or throws an exception, we walk back up the stack of filters that have been called and execute their unwind_protect blocks. Admittedly, this sort of thing wouldn’t be terribly easy to write with a macro system, but I’m not sure it’s even possible to write without one because you need to preserve the value from just before the unwind_protect to return to the filter’s caller. You’d have to move your unwind_protect earlier in the code:

pre_filter :whatever

def whatever
  unwind_protect do
    tidy_up_allocated_resources
  end
  allocate_a_bunch_of_resources
  true
end

But that feels arse about face, and I don’t know how you’re going to catch any exception thrown by allocate_a_bunch_of_resources. I suppose you could do:

pre_filter :whatever

def whatever
  unwind_protect do
    tidy_up_allocated_resources
  end
  allocate_a_bunch_of_resources
  true
rescue Exception => e
  tidy_up_allocated_resources
  raise e
end

But by now we’re looking at code that only a mother could love, and even then she’d need a pretty high tolerance threshold.

Macro systems let you play these sorts of games, they’re just another tool for molding the language into something that makes it easy to solve the sorts of problems you face from day to day. One of the great things about using Ruby on Rails is that DHH and his cohorts have done a fabulous job of language design. Rails contains a host of handy domain specific languages (the most obvious being the stuff for declaring object relationships in ActiveRecord, but there’s some very handy stuff in the tag building and RJS support libraries as well) that work well together and allow the programmer to concentrate on solving his particular problem. It’s just that on occasion, it would be nice if they could go that one step further.

Perl 6 will let me take those sorts of steps.

I’d just like to say to any schemers/lispers who’ve made it this far: “Yes, I know.”

¹ It doesn’t quite, I’ve taken liberties with the def syntax to preserve some vertical space…

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2005-01-09

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:17:00 -0600

This week marks Matt Fowles’s first Summary posted on Just A Summary (here’s hoping it won’t be the last). We have been writing the Perl 6 Summary on alternate weeks since early last year when Piers returned from attempting to be a Maths teacher and had the time to write summaries again.

So, here’s Matt’s take on the week, complete with props to a troll. Now we know why the summary was late.

Welcome to another Perl 6 Summary. On a complete tangent, if you are playing World of Warcraft and see a troll hunter named Krynna, she rocks. She royally saved me. Be nice to her.

Perl 6 Compiler

PIL Containers and Roles

Audrey explained that she and Stevan have been putting in effort to allow Pugs and PIL to bootstrap Roles and eventually the entire object model.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.compiler/browse_thread/thread/b4dd4226a05aabd4/942641fb351db8bb#942641fb351db8bb

Reference and Assignment Semantics

Audrey posted a brain dump focusing on the issues and implications of how containers, assignment, and auto dereferencing interact.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.compiler/browse_thread/thread/9b13766895a21db0/146e208baf93c9da#146e208baf93c9da

Table of Perl 6 “Types”

Stevan Little posted a summary of his understanding of Perl 6’s core type hierarchy. Larry replied with a few comments and corrections.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.compiler/browse_thread/thread/343c6ca45eaf75b2/43efd79fd877512e#43efd79fd877512e

Parrot

Configure and Symlinks

Alberto Simoes wondered how the configuration system should handle symlinks. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/65d0580f06163e62/46dd98da13a4e2e4#46dd98da13a4e2e4

Removed NCI Types

Dan Sugalski wondered why the T and L parameters have been removed from NCI and how he should work around their absence. Leo suggested you ManagedStruct PMCs for it and pointed him to the SDL libraries.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/79282160cc3b7caf/232ca7c167792d94#232ca7c167792d94

`mkdir` test can fail

Bob rogers posted a patch fixing an unanchored regular expression in the mkdir test. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/80e0fcdcb79ac604/6e6f210b0feb68ab#6e6f210b0feb68ab

Build html should use Pod::Find

Joshua Isom suggested that Pod::Find would make building html less error prone and more robust to changes the Pod structure. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/e52de8403e23a161/eb1caef45f448f85#eb1caef45f448f85

CWD on HP-UX

Nick Glencross posted a fix to os.pmc for HP-UX. Alberto Simıes applied the patch.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/efa7305ff99b48a0/f167ae99bae4704a#f167ae99bae4704a

Alignment Issues on HP-UX

Nick Glencross posted a back trace from a test failing on HP_UX. His initial analysis indicates that it is an alignment issue. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/ce9628374307221e/e459d1f5ef3cc1bd#e459d1f5ef3cc1bd

Tcl Todo

Will Coleda posted more todos for Tcl. Like last week, I won’t summarize them all. But I am very happy to see Tcl coming along again. I must say that I always like watching the test percentages climb.

Parrot 0.4.1

Leo announced the release of Parrot 0.4.1.

Sun’s Compiler No Like CRLF

Andy Dougherty noticed that Sun’s compiler was choking on coroutine.pmc because it had bad line endings. He fixed it, and Jerry Gay applied the patch.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/edfd440125aa9b33/9f646f2379ad520a#9f646f2379ad520a

atan2 issues

Joshua Hoblitt committed a possible fix for some atan2 issues occuring on openbsd, solaris, and cygwin. The fix didn’t help cygwin or solaris. No word on openbsd.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/f0304137d88751b6/c0712e007deeede5#c0712e007deeede5

`OS.pmc` needs a few methods

Will Coleda created a few todo: OS.pmc needs an lstat method, and methods to set atime and mtime.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/82e08434f37eafaa/3609da9d2641ecd0#3609da9d2641ecd0

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/acf4595682eeba3c/a78191943a5cd21e#a78191943a5cd21e

Vanishing Warnings

Will Coleda noticed that a few warnings disappeared. Leo admitted that he accidentally applied a fix some time ago.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/e799005367e5738d/123ccc8d1143a23d#123ccc8d1143a23d

Configure.pl and Optimize

Andy Dougherty noticed that Configure.pl --optimize no longer worked correctly. Joshua Hoblitt took the opportunity to clean up that portion of Configure.pl.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/1c68358164e8b36a/b672f5f84be459cb#b672f5f84be459cb

Event System Question

Klaas-Jan Stol wondered why events (unlike exceptions) are handled after a little time instead of immediately. Leo explained that this was due to the asynchronous nature of an events arrival and the inability to resume execution after a long jump.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/622417a1fb7b15c6/0ab9e044ba779988#0ab9e044ba779988

CFLAGS missed two files

Andy Dougherty noticed that the core_ops source files missed come of the directory rearrangements. Jerry Gay applied the patch.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/554a5adc0b00f73c/e5067070cb6b621c#e5067070cb6b621c

File::Temp Issue

Leo noticed an issue in t/run/options. Jerry tracked it down to an old version of Perl and the File::Temp module and fixed the problem.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/thread/1712fb8a8b4c77b8/f5e8fbfa18d7279e#f5e8fbfa18d7279e

Simple Namespace Question

Joshua Isom wondered how to separate namespaces for find_global calls. Leo explain that he should use a list like ['Foo'; 'Bar'].

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/a884cc3c8cb83634/18813183c113508e#18813183c113508e

Credits

The ever modest Nick Glencross updated his name in the credits file to be a little more understated. Oddly, no one applied the patch.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/d57f1d7f86dd17d5/ba9a9277f45d4b94#ba9a9277f45d4b94

parrot config revisited

Nick Glencross posted a few questions, thoughts, and patches involving parrot_get_config. Leo agreed with most of it, but had a few comments.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/581d87d36d7752b1/3c124a185e2a02ff#3c124a185e2a02ff

pkgsrc build

Anders Nor Berle provided a few patches making thing work a little more smoothly with FreeBSD and pkgsrc. Jerry Gay reviewed the patches and Florian Ragwitz applied the relevant portions. In fact, 0.4.1 got added to pkgsrc for the curious.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/f2f0cfcfe8ae27c4/5bde981c101a524a#5bde981c101a524a

0.4.1 added

static and shared libparrot

Florian Ragwitz provided a patch that fixed the issue with building both a shared and static libparrot. Nick Glencross applied the patch. Nick Glencross made OS X and HP-UX build shared parrots. Anders Nor Berle helped FreeBSD along. Jonathan Worthington brought MSVC into line. Nick Glencross also finished up the painful task of making it all work on Cygwin.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/8958d41e014961da/804eb49e16fce1f3#804eb49e16fce1f3

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/a588ac33cc52216f/62ebd6819467e5ca#62ebd6819467e5ca

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/cfd3979b696361b7/30d773996ead034e#30d773996ead034e

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/0fc8e0b3b4173d1f/d7150979859a5686#d7150979859a5686

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/56dcf1f0a9026681/f498525fcdf16214#f498525fcdf16214

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/8b2081073b558507/f9440a32da3c78cf#f9440a32da3c78cf

GC Bug with String Ops

Roger Browne was tracking a GC Bug involving string operations. Unfortunately, no one else could reproduce it. Doubtless, we will see it again.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/76ba86f5792028f8/e2689bb5cc96ad53#e2689bb5cc96ad53

Winter Cleaning

Jerry Gay, not content with his fall clean up, has done a winter clean up too. This time he went through and cleaned all the svn metadata.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/80610e42f8532b28/4b3441e6d59214ad#4b3441e6d59214ad

Paper on Parrot

Klaas-Jan Stol posted a link to his paper on Parrot. It is not yet finished and, like most things documenting parrot, already out-of-date, but it can probably serve as a good introduction.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/f62ba03f728f4715/157620587fc8920b#157620587fc8920b

The Paper

http://members.home.nl/joeijoei/parrot/paper.pdf

`string_to_int` issues

Roger Browne found and tried to fix a problem with string_to_int. Unfortunately Leo beat him to the fix. Fortunately, Roger found and fixed another problem with it.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/179b11d7a05f56a1/768d8a8b3d3c6128#768d8a8b3d3c6128

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/838c12171baf29e7/932db171dd5163a9#932db171dd5163a9

Parrot for Windows Macros

Christian Lott wondered how hard it would be to write inter application macros in Parrot. Unfortunately, his wonderings didn’t seem to make it to the list. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/352a7091170ac2d2/c61bd0d26ff13edd?utoken=K8yzFTcAAADWXQ4sS—whFjzzhFxvEM0DybgO1VO7hObr9VCWjXlbtO6JXaRzBummFrFvR-_qGYgXZvolmEQX2aER5F1QK86

Installation of Include Files

Anders Nor Berle provided a patch which fixed parrot’s installation of include files. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/0e40335eabbd471e/25cec580b185f538#25cec580b185f538

Parrot on Cygwin

Alberto Simıes wondered if he was doing something wrong while trying to get parrot to build on cygwin. Nick Glencross answered that it didn’t work yet, but he was on the job.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/bc4f9357e6649a12/afb039ecfd6ad300#afb039ecfd6ad300

Clearing Exceptions Only in the Current Context

Bob Rogers provided a patch which makes clear_eh only clear exception handlers in the current context. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/fdc7033d01108917/44855db848f6cc0f#44855db848f6cc0f

Update Patch Instructions

Roger Browne posted a patch updating submissions.pod. Joshua Hoblitt applied and improved upon Roger’s patch.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/db9d0eff03781959/fc82328218aeb4fc#fc82328218aeb4fc

File Copy

Will Coleda opened a can of worms when he asked for a copy file method on os.pmc. Chip had some good insights.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/1c11f0a67bde34c2/07daca1c6e17fac1#07daca1c6e17fac1

doc/ops Permission Issue

Joshua Isom posted a patch fixing some permissions issues with installed parrot docs. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/62a61c089c0d0063/0bde8dd35b98204d#0bde8dd35b98204d

Smoke that Cross Site Scripting

Joshua Hoblitt noticed that the smoke system was not very health conscious about its input. Florian Ragwitz said that he was about to do a rewrite to fix the issue.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/9056405f08428637/f59aedd91a7f0d2a#f59aedd91a7f0d2a

Patches Go to parrotbug

Joshua Hoblitt noticed that not all patches were making it into RT. So he posted a friendly reminder that everyone should submit patches through parrotbug.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/1f5b8cf5d3b18535/29ea7fb95a2adb67#29ea7fb95a2adb67

TODO: make distcheck

Joshua Hoblitt created a TOD for distcheck.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/6df6c66d68ce39dd/6766691ced8f1c0d#6766691ced8f1c0d

`META.yml` Needed

Joshua Hoblitt also suggested that we generate a META.yml so CPAN can index it.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/d03881ef79c8e40a/760e9a0101f75253#760e9a0101f75253

Muddle Cleanup

Bernhard Schmalhofer resurrected an old ticket when he posted his thoughts on how far our documentation muddle had progressed. Original ticket from Sep 2004.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/0696c10897a4bba2/833729bcaabc3e5d#833729bcaabc3e5d

optimize `pmc2c.pl`

Joshua Hoblitt noticed that pmc2c.pl could be fairly easily optimized. Anyone up for some low hanging fruit?

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/ee8da32d7c701bda/2b256995c5a05672#2b256995c5a05672

Dynamic Binding

Bob Rogers posted an RFC about dynamic binding. Leo and Steve Gunnell both provided comments.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/03080716c382777b/e98296c5f83bf35e#e98296c5f83bf35e

svk-bootstrap-dump

Joshua Hoblitt noticed that svk’s bootstrap dump was a little old. We should probably automatically generate updated one for the SVK loving world.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/c5af8f390965b654/a7ed7ba32c67fabd#a7ed7ba32c67fabd

Dyn Op Build Process

Jonathan Worthington committed some changes rationalizing and improving the dynops build process. Nick Glencross affirmed that it worked on cygwin.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/feb1376b19577157/0c7ec926160f63ff#0c7ec926160f63ff

COWs Eat Memory

Leo found an interesting example. By reversing a string in place using substr he can make Parrot consume memory like never before. This was causing a panic, which he fixed. But the core issue remains.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/7b57df47d1cafba5/097808a56675ff13#097808a56675ff13

Bug Wranglers

Joshua Hoblitt posted a start to a bug wrangler document. Jerry Gay encouraged him to check it in.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4057591681481453187&q=cats+herding

Funny EDS Commercial – Cat Herding – Google Video http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/39c645e9a0c8d631/8864eae5becaac9a#8864eae5becaac9a

Lua2PIR Translator

Klaas-Jan Stol posted an update to his Lua2PIR translator.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_frm/thread/adbeecb12dc0bf7a/6746c6d18aaff181#6746c6d18aaff181

Perl 6 Language

Environmental Variables

Luke Palmer suggested that $/ and $! should be made into environmental variables. Thomas Sandlass like the idea.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.language/browse_frm/thread/c786b08adcb05de4/4be6c807430c91ad?utoken=_u3iJzYAAACm_q77TyrrVe_fwJ69_5uAbTPhSNyRrVYFoesl1T45OZNOpZR5DAKMQdongt7EtgAokkP7PIEG6lz8OJ6yP8p--

Implementing Several Signatures

Jonathan Lang wondered if there where a concise way to implement several function signatures at once. Fayland Lam pointed out the is commutative trait, but Miroslav Silovic warned that that actually generated another function which transposed the arguments.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.language/browse_frm/thread/2644235fdb0d4971/c37ea5f7f141e882#c37ea5f7f141e882

Zip vs Each

Jonathan Lang noticed that S4 and S3 did not agree on the usage of zip. Larry clarified that S4 was out of date.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.language/browse_frm/thread/69729272707d39c2/2097797fe3dda319#2097797fe3dda319

Junctions Again

Once more the perennial argument has returned. Junctions will either cure cancer, kill babies, or both. Odds are they won’t change this time.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.language/browse_frm/thread/45507ab64b0aa771/82d7bc5304e1a214#82d7bc5304e1a214

Friendly Facades

Gaal Yahas wondered how to make “friendly facades” like use_ok. Yuval Kogman suggested making it a macro, and Luke Palmer suggested a powerful scope object.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.language/browse_frm/thread/02c5a7051cb25247/afa19cc3dfdc6ccc#afa19cc3dfdc6ccc

Class vs Object Contradiction

Stevan Little posted a possible contradiction he saw from S12. Warnock applies.

Representation Types

Stevan Little wondered how to handle representation types other that P6opaque. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl6.language/browse_frm/thread/b27b8d2aac67b5bb/ce8b1d93c796cef8#ce8b1d93c796cef8

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The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2006-01-01

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:06:00 -0600

Another year, another summary. You might think I’m going to summarize the events of the whole year, but it turns out that chromatic’s already done it. So in the spirit of laziness, I’ll just point you at his year end summary.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8894

Sadly for us all, he doesn’t go into enough detail on the events of the last week for me to go straight into the coda. I shall have to talk to him about next year.

This week sees a big non-technical change in the Pugs camp, lots of roadmapping and implementation in the Parrot camp, and a more and more concrete feel of what the language is going to look like in the perl6-language camp.

Pretty much business as usual really.

This week in perl6-compiler

Runtime typecasting

Autrijus Tang is now Audrey Tang. Read her explanation on her blog. Speaking personally I’m delighted that she’s found the courage to make the change and wish her the best of luck and happiness in her new/true identity.

http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2005/12/runtime_typecas.html

Pugs on Cygwin

There was a fair amount of discussion on getting pugs and parrot running in the Cygwin environment this week. Last time I looked, things were working again.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1d9a3f400512261400l2cf167eauc2825a1ba73b0c1b@mail.gmail.com

This week’s Pugs developments

Audrey’s taken to summarizing pugs developments on her blog and to posting digests of these posts on the list. She wrote about PIL and Rules this week.

Pugs-PIL developments

Pugs-Rule developments

Pugs-Rule: Grammar support

Meanwhile, in perl6-internals

Threading PDD?

Patrick Michaud suggested, after a question from Klaas-Jan Stol, that it might be a good idea to create a placeholder Threading PDD (Parrot Design Document) noting that threading hasn’t been specced yet and that a draft would be welcomed. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051226180251.GB18241@host.pmichaud.com

Pugs is the official Perl 6?

Or am I putting words into Luke’s mouth? Read, then decide.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=7ca3f0160512272328w495ad815hecc409bd716fcbb7@mail.gmail.com

.imc or .pir? There can only be one

As part of the great Parrot reorganization, Chip declared that the IMC vs PIR ambiguity had to be resolved. As he put it:

IMC vs. PIR

Two names enter

One name leaves

The name that left was PIR; any files you find with .imc extensions should be cruelly laughed at while you kick sand in their faces.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1d9a3f400512281152u70a9726amb42b479c15be8bd0@mail.gmail.com

Dynamic binding patch

Bob Rogers offered up a patch to implement dynamic binding of globals for the list’s consideration. Leo thought the patch was mostly sound, but that the whole dynamic binding thing needed more thought and infrastructure. Which is probably a broad hint to Chip and possibly @Larry (said hint hasn’t been taken yet though, well, not in public).

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=17333.25927.15166.416455@rgrjr.dyndns.org

Smoke testing

Leo pointed everyone at the Perl Image Testing Architecture, which has possibly the coolest acronym of any Perl project in recent years. He thought it would be useful to use for additional Parrot platform testing as well.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=c52768167fd0624b66f97734cdf30d2b@toetsch.at

http://ali.as/pita/

Lots and lots of TODOs

I’m not going to enumerate them here, but Will Coleda, Matt Diephouse and others have been adding loads of TODO entries to the Parrot bugtracker. Which is nice.

IMCC optimizer instruction duplication and opcode write/reads

Amos Robinson wanted to know how to go about duplicating instructions and wondered about the correct semantics of in/out/inout arguments. Leo came through with the answers.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=cf7d0f370512310643s31ff2cf4n2d952aeb57c31f70@mail.gmail.com

Meanwhile in perl6-language

Iterating over complex structures

Rob Kinyon applied the ‘What does Ruby do?’ pattern to the problem of iterating over complex structures. Mostly it looks good, but I’m hoping that someone else considers applying the ‘What does Smalltalk do?’ pattern as well. Subject to tuit supply, I might even do that myself.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=70384420512251808q3c3bc01cue2cd8af86062d9bb@mail.gmail.com

Match objects

“Who is Match, and to what does he object?”

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Patrick and Luke discussed the behaviour of match objects.

(Array) introspection

Ilmari Vacklin wondered about how to introspect on the structure of arrays and other data structures. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1135632846.7282.4.camel@localhost.localdomain

Array/list transformations

Rob Kinyon pointed out the difficulties of dealing with binding array slices and other such goodies. Larry thought it wasn’t really that difficult (from the point of view of the perl programmer, things might be different for the implementers)

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=70384420512262110u4ce4861o628e3a0b585e8bae@mail.gmail.com

Relationship between slurpy parameters

Austin Frank wondered about the different uses of prefix:<*> in parameter lists and elsewhere. Stuart Cook had answers. Piers Cawley worried about the current behaviour of prefix:<*> in parameter lists and about how eager its flattening should be.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=43B332B9.2050400@gmail.com

Building the documentation that will ship with Perl 6 and Pugs

Andrew Savige outlined some off the issues that need addressing as we move towards releasing a properly documented Pugs, and the Perl 6. After outlining issues, he called for volunteers. Nobody commented on the list (yet), but I hope people will be taking up the challenge.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051231014706.94262.qmail@web36103.mail.mud.yahoo.com

`$/` and `$!` should be `env`

Luke proposed that we change $! and $/ into env variables. Because almost nobody understands what an env variable is (your summarizer had never even heard of ‘em—I think I may have to do some serious synopsis rereading and soon) Luke explained what they were and why they should be used in this case. The usual Sunday Warnocking applies—expect more detail next week.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=7ca3f0160601011034m21da9f24h86f5888d77c0b4ad@mail.gmail.com

Rules should be independent of evaluation strategy

Luke talked about an idea for implementing different parsing engines that use Perl rules but without necessarily doing recursive descent style parsing. Nicholas Clark pointed out a typo, but the basic thrust of the article remains in Sunday Warnock land.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=7ca3f0160601011115l25d08592o930f4cb0d065b58d@mail.gmail.com

Acknowledgements, apologies and everything else

Happy new year everyone. I’ve just opened up a 4th annual subdirectory in my summaries directory. I had hoped we’d have the real Perl 6 by now, but these things take the time they need I guess. Things are looking good for the future though. Here’s hoping that Audrey and the other pugs people keep up their phenomenal rate of development.

I hope that, from next week you’ll be able to find Matt’s summaries in the same place as mine, http://www.bofh.org.uk/articles/category/perl-6-summaries.

Help Chip

Chip still needs help.

The usual coda

If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.

The Perl Foundation

The Perl Foundation Blog is an excellent source of news about the Perl Foundation’s activities.

http://blog.perlfoundation.org/

Planet Perl Six is a handy news aggregator of several Perl 6 related sources.

http://planet6.perl.org/

Perl 6 Development site

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2005-12-18

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 11:21:00 -0600

Welcome to another Perl 6 summary. This has been a week of shootouts, cleanups, relationships and cunning translations. Read on for the details (or, this being a summary, pointers to the details).

This week in perl6-compiler

2 messages? Sometimes I wonder why I even bother summarizing this list; I could just paste its contents in their entirety. However:

Call for a Pumpking: Do you want a Ponie?

Jesse announced that Nicholas Clark was retiring as Ponie’s Pumpking following his departure from Fotango. So we’re looking for another volunteer to take Ponie from its current state to a working Perl 5 runtime fully integrated with Parrot. If you’re a C programmer with a good grasp of the Perl 5 internals and you’re interested in taking on the job, ponie-pumpking@perl.org is eager to hear from you.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051214225235.GR25436@bestpractical.com

Pugs, Javascript and Perl 5

Continuing Pugs’ tradition of linguistic mashup, Chia-liang Kao announced that Pugs Javascript backend can now support Perl5.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051214022446.GC9267@home.clkao.org

Meanwhile, in perl6-internals

Parrot Shootout

Work continued on implementing and optimizing Parrot’s entry for the Language Shootout.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=05D985D7-A48E-44A2-9CFF-B219A18DF864@pacbell.net

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=31247ad5226f5927031cabb213a483b2@ritalin.shout.net

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=8109939b614a9dd99df5b9b7387c16bb@ritalin.shout.net

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=942c27460512151539h691425e4×1cfd06e3a3278e9@mail.gmail.com

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=942c27460512151659h42872a66xa740809c47dd857a@mail.gmail.com

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3bbbb64e9c99a66ec0d6f1b8bc693277@ritalin.shout.net

Variables, Aliasing and Undefined-ness

Matt Diephouse wondered how he should translate the following in to PIR code:

$var   = "Foo";
*alias = *var;
$alias = undef;
$alias = "Baz";
print $var, "\n";

Audrey “Autrijus” Tang suggested that allowing multiple LexInfo names to point to the same underlying register would make this sort of thing (and several Perl6isms) a good deal easier to implement. Leo pointed out that it actually had been implemented, though I’m not sure if Luthor includes this. (Pugs always targets the latest Parrot release).

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=198c87380512150046o3efb9626×7c30588105b5b8e5@mail.gmail.com

Cleaning up the build process

Joshua Hoblitt went to town on RT posting a breakdown of proposed refactorings of the Parrot build process

ParTCL shootout

Will Coleda suggested that it would be useful to set things up to run the TCL shootout benchmarks on ParTCL. He’s not exactly sure that they’d work just yet (or be fast, come to that), but they’d certainly be a handy test/benchmark suite. After a couple of patches, it seems that ParTCL can at least run the “hello” benchmark. Still, a journey of a 1000 miles starts with but a single step and all that.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3FB91E50-040E-4CD7-83DF-FC8D4AEFBCE2@coleda.com

Parrot directory reorganization (phase 2 mark 3)

Jerry Gay’s reorganization of the Parrot distribution’s directory structure continued apace. Reorganizing the JIT subdirectory and its associated config system proved to be something of a sticking place, but Joshua Hoblitt sorted things out.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1d9a3f400512121814m6e6a64d4gfccddfc95a9a5cfd@mail.gmail.com

Bug or feature?

Chip had some thoughts about PIR’s macro support and concluded that we need a robust multi-line quoting convention in order to pass multiple lines of code to macros. He outlined some suggested syntax. Discussion ensued, mostly favourable.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051212185501.GK6257@tytlal.topaz.cx

Building Parrot includes

Leo noted that the files in runtime/parrot/include/*.pasm are created by configure. He argued that they should really be generated by a Makefile rule, which would have the advantage of taking note of dependencies. There followed a certain amount of quibbling with Joshua Hoblitt, but I don’t think anyone disagrees with the gist of the proposal.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.11-37898-125569.9.16891768502722@perl.org

Library loading – no more duplicates

Leo announce that, as a of r10458, Parrot doesn’t load_bytecode from the same file twice any more. Chip and Nicholas Clark applauded the change and plotted ways to make it even more effective.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=439D6A23.80305@toetsch.at

Fixing japhs

Not content with implementing shootout benchmarks, Joshua Isom has also fixed a few of Parrot’s example japhs.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=dcf0c8153462a13760cc9f0c6ccd0070@ritalin.shout.net

Q: String.get_integer

Leo had some questions about magical conversion between strings and integers. Patrick and others reckoned that his proposed behaviour was about right. Personally, I’m not convinced that the basic String PMC should do any magic conversion, but PerlString definitely should.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=43A2D3BD.6010203@toetsch.at

Parrot Borking

Steve Gunnell had a problems with Parrot throwing segfaults. Leo gave him some pointers to tracking the issue down and recommended using the SVN repository and not the CVS mirror.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1134899914.8669.11.camel@eldred.local

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

Relational data models and Perl 6

Darren Duncan’s been doing some thinking about Relational data models and how to support working with them in Perl 6 and posted the results of his thought on this to the list. Lots of discussion ensued. There was a fair amount of quibbling over details, but the general tenor of the discussion was in favour of supporting relational data models (possibly as a separate module).

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=p06230900bfc66428a67e@[192.168.1.100]]

Handling `undef` better

Darren also had some ideas about making undef behave more like a relational NULL. These were received a little less favourably—they aren’t exactly compatible with autovivification, which is one of those things that many people like about Perl.

So, a little later, Darren retracted his original proposal and posted a new one which takes into account the various different ways in which undef gets used in Perl programs.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=p06230900bfc90d05004d@[192.168.1.100]]

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=p06230900bfca4b9752ed@[192.168.1.100]]

Transliteration preferring longest match

Brad Bowman wondered why the trans function described in Synopsis 05 specifies that the longest matching input sequence should be the one that wins. He thought that a simple ‘first in order’ rule would be more useful and flexible. The answer was that, because transliteration matches literal strings, if you didn’t have ‘longest’ wins rules then, depending on the order, you might as well simply remove the longer literal because it’d never be used.

http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/syn/S05.html#Transliteration

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=43A1ACDB.2060603@bereft.net

Import/export and module configuration

Gaal Yahas had some questions about Perl 6’s import/export model and the various hooks that get called in the process. Larry had many answers and speculations. He also noted that he can now ‘translate about 95% of random Perl 5 back to identical Perl 5’. Which probably doesn’t sound like much at first glance, but it means he’s getting a great deal closer to being able to translate random Perl 5 code into equivalent Perl 6 code.

As Larry puts it, he is “now confident that we can hit the original p5-to-p6 spec of translating 95% of scripts at least 95% accurately”.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051213104247.GA4095@sike.forum2.org

Acknowledgements, apologies and everything else

Wow! It’s still Monday! The move went pretty smoothly and our lives are slowly emerging from the boxes they had been packed in. We’re still boggling at how many boxes of china there were though. At one point I began to think we’d packed the country in there. I’m typing this from my new office on the second (third if you’re American) floor of our new (well, 178 years old, but new to us) house and wondering how much of the stuff that’s spread out over two table tops is really necessary.

Help Chip

http://geeksunite.org/—Chip still needs help.

The usual coda

If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.

http://donate.perlfoundation.org/—The Perl Foundation

The Perl Foundation Blog is an excellent source of news about the Perl Foundation’s activities.

http://blog.perlfoundation.org/

Planet Perl Six is a handy news aggregator of several Perl 6 related sources.

http://planet6.perl.org/

http://dev.perl.org/perl6/—Perl 6 Development site

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2005-12-04

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:40:00 -0600

I heard a rumour on the London.pm mailing list week. Apparently the Perl 6 Summaries are no longer being ublished. As I’m sure you can imagine, it came as something of a surprise to me.

This week has been all about Parrot, Leo’s got the new lexical scheme, calling conventions and exception handlers working and made Parrot stricter about arguments. The end of the week saw the release of ‘Luthor’, version 0.4.0 of Parrot.

Read on for more details…

This week in perl6-compiler

Um… one post in perl6-compiler this week. And that was crossposted to perl6-language. And because it got posted at the end of the week, none of the actual discussion occurred this week.

Moving swiftly on…

This week in perl6-internals

Much more going on here as everyone rushed towards the release of Parrot 0.4.0 “Luthor” at the end of the week.

Exception handlers and calling conventions

As I predicted last week, Leo’s brain dump about exception handling got discussed this week. It was well liked, and after a small bit of sugar was sprinkled on to make ParTCL’s life a little easier (and possibly unsprinkled later) all manner of things were well.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=5b4f21642641211939b10fe8548ea876@toetsch.at

Subs may not contain dynamic call info, ever

Chip posted a clarification of his comments on what data could and couldn’t be hung off a Sub object at runtime. Let’s be reentrant people.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051128035833.GD6446@tytlal.topaz.cx

PDD20 Tcl

Will Coleda announced that ParTCL is now working with the new lexically lovely Parrot calling conventions. There was much rejoicing.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=A235A03B-6CF1-4C5A-83FB-AB49805ED491@coleda.com

Test::More and Tests in PIR

Leo showed the love for chromatic’s shiny pure parrot implementation of Test::More. So the patch was applied.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=cbd309ab4fac265f6ceab71ccb2cd91d@toetsch.at

Upcoming changes

Leo announced the scratchpad’s impending doom and outlined the planned change for comment. Nobody commented, and the changes went in.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=5c3a3e2a9838b2e7ed45b7a0d03d52f7@toetsch.at

Parrot directory reorganization

Quick quiz: where would you expect to find tests in the parrot distribution? How about generated source files?

Jerry Gay proposed a reorganization to make things a little more lovely.

The consensus seemed to be that a reorg along Jerry’s lines wouldn’t be a bad idea, but Chip pointed out that, whatever gets done it should be done ‘cautiously so as to minimize unpleasantness’. So Jerry is proceeding cautiously, starting with a host of new TODO tickets in RT.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1d9a3f400511281645s5e75a64fl529dfad83f8457af@mail.gmail.com

Solving `=` confusion: `:=` for aliasing

There are those of us who are wondering why this one took so long…

Chip proposed that people start to spell aliasing as := and assignment as =. I think it’s a really good idea, but then I don’t have a large amount of PIR code to maintain so what do I know. Some other folks weren’t so sure, but Chip is not to be denied. Discussion then span off into what language to write the automagical translator in.

I believe this may involve writing it in PIR then converting it to PIL, which would be converted to Perl 5 using pugs and then Larry’s Perl 5 to Perl 5 project could be used to convert it to XML, which could then be modified using XSLT and converted back into PIR using some scary voodoo magic.

Or they could just write it in Perl 5. Prosaic, but possible right now.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051129200801.GT6446@tytlal.topaz.cx

PDD03 Revisions

Chip announced that he’d put up another revision of PDD03 on Parrot calling conventions. Most of the changes are simple clarifications and flag renaming, but he’s also proposing a new READONLY flag for C to make it easy to support the default Perl 6 argument mode. Response was muted, but favourable.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051130030122.GL6446@tytlal.topaz.cx

PDD03 and Overflow/Underflow

It’s been mandated for ages that Parrot should throw an exception when functions get called with the wrong number of arguments. It’s always been one of those things that will be implemented ‘some day’. Well this week had a someday in it as Leo made parrot do what it’s supposed to do. And broke PGE for a while…

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=438D8A90.8070105@toetsch.at

PDD20 questions

Jonathan Sillito is a class act. He didn’t just ask a bunch of questions about the new PDD20 on lexical variables, he promised to take the answers he received and use them to patch PDD20 to make things clearer. Spurred on by this promise, Chip was unstinting in his answers and clarifications of them. Which is nice.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=8be166ff0511301202s4382b6efwc579d7d711419bc9@mail.gmail.com

PIR methods and local variables occupy the same ‘namespace’

Allison Randal used Snarks, Boojums and Thingies to demonstrate a possible problem with the way Parrots local variable and method namespaces overlap. Leo pointed out that this can sometimes be useful. So, for the time being, Parrot continues as is in this area. If you go getting the bowsprit and the rudder mixed up, it’s your own silly fault.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=AB54429A-690E-47FA-805C-33FEEBAF9EB9@perl.org

Suddenly… Namespaces!

After “many months and lots of work,” Matt Diephouse returned from the mountain top bearing a couple of stone tablets. One was labelled ‘Namespace Spec’ and the other ‘[Draft]’. Muttering dark incantations about giving a discussion eyes, he laid out their contents and asked for comments. And low, there were comments in abundance. I would attempt to summarize both the spec and the ensuing discussion but, alas, the margin here is narrow and my time is short. Suffice it to say that if namespaces are your bag, you should read this thread.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=198c87380512012231w42dee5a9y96c9c06508b55fbe@mail.gmail.com

HLL and autoboxing

Okay, who else has an image of two of those transformer robot things from the Renault Megane advert punching each others’ lights out?

Ahem.

I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand François Perrad’s question about maps and autoboxing. Luckily Roger Browne and Leo did.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=5.1.0.14.2.20051202100324.02cfe6d8@pop.besancon.parkeon.com

Punie’s demo likes its memory

Jerry Gay worried that Punie is using way too much memory, running out of the stuff on his 512Mb machine. He wondered if it was a bug or to be expected. Luke thought it might be an issue with the algorithm used in the attribute grammar implementation which is somewhat less than abstemious with memory. Nick Glencross noted that, after he’d done a nuke of the distribution and rechecked it out, the problem seemed to go away. So, it’s either fixed, or there was something odd going on somewhere.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1d9a3f400512021414t6b789daev5c4bc5df089938da@mail.gmail.com

Parrot 0.4.0 “Luthor”

Leo announced the usual freezes and parrot proceeded smoothly down the road to release. After the release he discussed goals for the next release and asked for comments.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=ed864ea1d4db3a436c7de6d6bf4046f8@toetsch.at

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=df23aee8ec07c676e2748102f6668d72@toetsch.at

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

A quiet week here too.

Capabilities in Perl 6

Rob Kinyon has read slides on CAPerl and had some thoughts about how to build the idea into Perl 6. Larry and Yuval Kogman commented on it.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=70384420512010754w1dbdc62cq5404a295da5b6e7e@mail.gmail.com

http://caperl.links.org

Acknowledgements, apologies and everything else

It’s not exactly Monday today is it? Well, I could lie and claim that I was waiting for the Perl Foundation blog to be announced before I posted the summary, but that would be Wrong. Instead I shall claim (with some justification) that there’s an awful lot of things that need sorting out when you’re moving house, and they take far longer than you expect.

My ankle and shin are progressing nicely, thanks for asking, and there has been a good deal less random swearing in the Cawley household this week.

http://blog.perlfoundation.org/—The Perl Foundation blog

Help Chip

http://geeksunite.org/—Chip still needs help.

The usual coda

If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.

http://donate.perlfoundation.org/—The Perl Foundation

http://dev.perl.org/perl6/—Perl 6 Development site

Vaguely pretty photos by me can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdcawley

Perl 6 Summary: Week ending 2005-11-27

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 19:19:00 -0600

Another week passes. Another summary is written. Another sentence is written in the passive voice.

This week in perl6-compiler

Perl 5 tests for PGE::P5Regexp

Jerry Gay announced that he’d checked in a subset of perl 5.9.2’s regexp tests to give PGE something to work on. Right now only 130 of 960 tests are running, in part because the test harness he’s using can’t quite cope with the test file syntax used for the original tests. I’m sure it won’t stay that way or long.

A couple of days later he announced that more tests were being converted and that there were now 360 passing tests and a further 155 or so TODO tests.

Well done Jerry.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1d9a3f400511211939i134aa0fnefc86179431b96fd@mail.gmail.com

PDD 20 and :outer

Leo had some questions about the workings of lexical pads and :outer. He showed a couple of examples in high level language and wondered if his parrot conversions were right. Chip thought that Leo shouldn’t worry about implementing the Perl 5 semantics of a named inner subroutine because the way Perl 5 does it is a bug not a feature. Dave Mitchell wasn’t so sure.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=43832AF2.2040402@toetsch.at

DynLexPad

Leo’s working on implementing a DynLexPad PMC to provide ‘a more dynamic lexpad’ akin to the new deprecated ScratchPad PMC. He outlined his current plans and asked for comments from HLL authors about what they needed.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=43834203.2020209@toetsch.at

Punie to AST

Allison has checked in the code to transform PunieGrammar match objects into Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs). Apparently the set of AST node types she’s using isn’t quite the same as the Pugs PIL. Hopefully one day we’ll have a common AST format, and all manner of things shall be well.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=FE692303-15F8-42D8-AF73-270BCEDA6EAD@perl.org

Meanwhile, in perl6-internals

RESPONSIBLE_PARTIES or ENTITIES_AT_FAULT?

Joshua Hoblitt suggested that Jerry Gay should be added to the F file as the person in charge of the test suite. After a small amount of byplay suggesting the file be renamed, the nomination was strongly seconded and Jerry’s name added to the list.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051120210940.GB22898@ifa.hawaii.edu

Curses and parrot problems?

Josh Isam has been having problems with using the curses library under both Darwin and freebsd. He wondered if anyone had any pointers for fixing things. Leo thought it might be that the parrot ncurses support was getting a function signature wrong somewhere and suggested Josh check that.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.53.0511222245480.1385@ritalin.shout.net

Subs may not contain dynamic call info, ever

Repeat after Chip: “Subs don’t have callers. Call frames have callers.”

After a short discussion with Leo, Chip wrote a short treatise on the relationships between Subs and Closures, noting that they should only hold static information.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051123180834.GF6095@tytlal.topaz.cx

Undefined labels

While working on TODO #37590 (catch illegal bsr at compile time), Leo’s made parrot rather more picky about labels and how they are used. Essentially, if you weren’t doing daft things with labels you’re probably all right. If you were, you should probably check this post.

After Leo checked the fixes in (r10168), several PGE tests started breaking. Less than 6 hours later, Patrick check version r10176 in and the tests started passing again. Leo (and I) was impressed.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=87bc76ce931e9c7e29ed9be192d32de4@toetsch.at

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3a149d0a332aa57205267f928fe1544a@toetsch.at

Exception handlers and calling conventions

Leo posted a brain dump about how to get exception handling to work in Parrot. In particular he wanted help with syntax (exception handling semantics aren’t exactly rocket science when you’ve got a continuation based virtual machine after all). Warnock applied (However, I am reliably informed that next week’s summary will have some responses; anyone who suggests that that’s because this summary is late will be annoyingly Right).

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=5b4f21642641211939b10fe8548ea876@toetsch.at

Test::More and tests in PIR

Not content with having a pure PIR implementation of Test::Builder, chromatic posted his implementation of Test::More in pure parrot. Admittedly the current version should likely be called Test::Less::Is::More, but the journey of 1000 cliches starts with a single step and all that. And that’s not all, the fearlessly lowercased one intends to start work on the big daddy, Parrot::Test with an eye to doing even more in Parrot. (Which makes a good deal of sense. After all, the plan is to get Parrot to a point where it can be built without needing a working perl installation)

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=1133039776.6474.48.camel@localhost

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

`\x{123a 123b 123c}`

Juerd had praised Ruud H.G. van Tol’s proposal of \x{123a 123b 123c} as a replacement for \x{123a} \x{123b} \x{123c} in rules. Larry wasn’t so sure. He suggested \x[123a,123b,123c] but still wasn’t exactly happy with it. He also had some thoughts about character class syntax, and the meaning of spaces within a character class spec. This being the language list, the discussion spun off in various directions (all related to rules, just not necessarily that much to do with the nominal subject). It was good stuff though; threads with Larry, Damian, Patrick and Luke in them usually are.

One little tidbit that came out of this was a reminder that the best place to read synopses and apocalypses is at svn.perl.org or dev.perl.org because they are kept up to date, unlike the ones at perl.com.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051120023217.GA507@wall.org

Multidimensional argument list binding

Ingo Blechschmidt’s question from the end of last week about multidimensional argument list binding got addressed this week. He, Luke and Larry discussed different aspects of slurpiness. Personally, I expect I’ll be using the *;foo@ for almost all my slurpy needs.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=dlql9i$bnf$1@sea.gmane.org

`statement_control<foo>()`

Ingo Blechschmidt had asserted that for is not strictly a Perl 6 keyword, but is (conceptually at least) at statement control subroutine. Rob Kinyon wondered what other ‘keywords’ were actually statement control subs. According to Ingo, pretty much everything that’s used for control flow modification is a statement control subroutine, but that they’ll almost certainly be optimised away to ‘primitives’ of some sort (after all, it’s rather hard to come up with a definition of if, say that isn’t at least slightly circular).

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=70384420511202024y223ac219h3ecea2cbd0feef8@mail.gmail.com

`till`

Perl 6’s stock of agricultural operators continues to grow apace. Not content with gather, we now have C, which replaces the old flipflop operator .. (sorry beachware fans).

Larry had some thoughts on the detailed semantics in response to a question from Ingo. Most of Ingo’s problems disappeared when he realised that till would be a macro.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051121062128.GA9451@wall.org

Ponie!

Joshua Gatcomb wondered what was happening to Ponie and if Fotango would continue to fund it. Warnock applies.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=941eab840511211220t1ee6952dpb578ed10259f29@mail.gmail.com

Dis-junctive patterns

Gaal Yahas found what looked like a bug in pugs. Larry agreed that it looks pretty entomological. It’s probably already fixed in bleadpugs.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051122073126.GE14252@sike.forum2.org

Type sigils and a new unary `^` operator

Larry announced that, after all the discussion of coming up with a type sigil and searching for various possibilities, he’s ended up back at ::, which was what it was before the discussion started. Apparently the tipping point came when he realised that he wanted ^$x back as a unary operator that’s short for 0..($x-1) which would make it easy to write things like:

for ^5 {...}

without falling foul of fencepost errors etc. Some people didn’t like it. Vocally. Larry stood firm. Yay Larry. (Impartial summarizer? What’s that then?)

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20051122223412.GA28366@wall.org

Lazy lists in Str context

Flavio S. Glock reckoned it would be nice if:

say substr( ~(1..Inf), 0, 10 )

printed “1 2 3 4 5”. There was discussion, but I think we stayed firmly in “Not going to happen.” Unless I completely misread the thread of course.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=aa47605d0511230413p20173745k@mail.gmail.com

Binding of list slice elements

Ingo Blechschmidt is great at posting a few lines of not particularly mind bending code and then following consequences through until either your mind is broken, or you assume that Ingo’s must be (more usually the former than the latter, to Ingo’s everlasting credit).

This time he followed through on the implications of binding array slices. Nothing from @larry yet, but he posted at the end of the week.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=dm4has$u3s$1@sea.gmane.org

Acknowledgements, apologies and everything else

This summary was made from the finest mailing list posts, each individually plucked and filleted for your delight and elucidation. The alert among you will have noted that today is Wednesday and not Monday, which means we’re a little late. What can I say? It’s ready when it’s ready.

This summary was also brought to you through the labours of Piers Cawley and not Matt Fowles as we had planned when, dewy eyed and innocent, I set off on the long journey down to the wilds of London with the express intention of attending the London Perl Workshop, the International Magic Convention, Sharp’s folk club and divers fine gentlemen’s outfitters, jewellers, bookshops and quality eating establishments.

All was proceeding flawlessly, until, on Saturday morning as the tube train doors began to close in front of me, I attempted to stop running and discovered that the soles of my shoes had other ideas and fell on my arse, twisted my ankle and scraped an unfeasibly large amount of skin from my shin off on the bottom of the aforementioned tube train. Luckily the driver noticed my plight and did not drive off, taking my left foot with him. Instead he opened the doors and waited for me to dust myself off and board his vehicle, which carried me to Paddington where, after much hobbling and swearing I was bandaged and deposited once more on London’s cold and unfeeling streets.

So, I hopped into a taxi (and I use the word hopped advisedly) and repaired straightway to King’s Cross and thence home to Gateshead, where my discomfort was somewhat ameliorated by the distraction of preparing this week’s summary. I hope to be writing next week’s summary as well because the week after I’ll be moving house and don’t quite know when I’ll have my bandwidth back.

Help Chip

http://geeksunite.org/—Chip still needs help.

The usual coda

If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.

http://donate.perl-foundation.org/—The Perl Foundation

http://dev.perl.org/perl6/—Perl 6 Development site

Check out my website, it’s lovely.

http://www.bofh.org.uk/

Vaguely pretty photos by me can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdcawley

Just A Summary : Category perl-6, everything about perl-6

Ruby 'til 6

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2005-01-09

Perl 6 Compiler

PIL Containers and Roles

Reference and Assignment Semantics

Table of Perl 6 “Types”

Parrot

Configure and Symlinks

Removed NCI Types

mkdir test can fail

Build html should use Pod::Find

CWD on HP-UX

Alignment Issues on HP-UX

Tcl Todo

Parrot 0.4.1

Sun’s Compiler No Like CRLF

atan2 issues

OS.pmc needs a few methods

Vanishing Warnings

Configure.pl and Optimize

Event System Question

CFLAGS missed two files

File::Temp Issue

Simple Namespace Question

Credits

parrot config revisited

pkgsrc build

static and shared libparrot

GC Bug with String Ops

Winter Cleaning

Paper on Parrot

string_to_int issues

Parrot for Windows Macros

Installation of Include Files

Parrot on Cygwin

Clearing Exceptions Only in the Current Context

Update Patch Instructions

File Copy

doc/ops Permission Issue

Smoke that Cross Site Scripting

Patches Go to parrotbug

TODO: make distcheck

META.yml Needed

Muddle Cleanup

optimize pmc2c.pl

Dynamic Binding

svk-bootstrap-dump

Dyn Op Build Process

COWs Eat Memory

Bug Wranglers

Lua2PIR Translator

Perl 6 Language

Environmental Variables

Implementing Several Signatures

Zip vs Each

Junctions Again

Friendly Facades

Class vs Object Contradiction

Representation Types

The usual footer

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2006-01-01

This week in perl6-compiler

Runtime typecasting

Pugs on Cygwin

This week’s Pugs developments

Meanwhile, in perl6-internals

Threading PDD?

Pugs is the official Perl 6?

.imc or .pir? There can only be one

Dynamic binding patch

Smoke testing

Lots and lots of TODOs

IMCC optimizer instruction duplication and opcode write/reads

Meanwhile in perl6-language

Iterating over complex structures

Match objects

(Array) introspection

Array/list transformations

Relationship between slurpy parameters

`mkdir` test can fail

`OS.pmc` needs a few methods

`string_to_int` issues

`META.yml` Needed

optimize `pmc2c.pl`

`$/` and `$!` should be `env`

Handling `undef` better

Solving `=` confusion: `:=` for aliasing

`\x{123a 123b 123c}`

`statement_control<foo>()`