Perl 6 Summary for 2004-11-22 through 2004-11-29 All~ Rather than try to do something witty about the strange music I am listening to, or the stuffed animals who are assisting me. I will start this summary off with an entirely self-serving request. <abuse>A while ago I saw the quote "Computer Science is merely the post-Turing Decline of Formal Systems Theory." without an attribution. I have tried to find an attribution for it, but have been unable to find one. If any of you know it, that information would be appreciated.</abuse> With that out of the way, I bring you
Perl 6 Language Deep Operators Last week, Matthew Walton wondered about Deep Operators and if they would work as he expected. As I tentatively predicted, the answer came back and was "yes". Then the thread got side tracked with context and Perl vs perl vs PERL concerns. <http://xrl.us/d6wj> gather to separate bins Dave Whipp wanted to know if he could use gather/take with multiple bins. Michele Dondi suggested using adverbs for it. Rod Adams pointed out that as gather is inherently lazy the two binned approach could cause strange results (like churning for a while filling one bin trying to get an element for the other). Of course, not being able to do it would mean possibly having to compute an expensive generate function more than necessary, unless it is memoized... <http://xrl.us/d6wk> « in here-docs Thomas Seiler has decided to test my copy-paste-fu by starting a discuss on characters that don't appear on my keyboard. His question was if «END could start a here-doc. The answer appears to be no. <http://xrl.us/d6wm> -- here-doc « != << The above thread led to a discussion of the various quoting operators, and the differences between «» and <<>>. This led to much discussion on the finer points of qw, qx, and qq (among others). Juerd suggested scrapping qx and qw in favor of qq:x and qq:w, which Larry liked. Rod Adams suggested scrapping <<END in favor of qq:h/END/, which I like. <http://xrl.us/d6wn> unifying namespaces Alexey Trofimenko wondered about unifying the $, @, and % namespaces. Larry told him that this ship sailed long ago and that it was not changing. <http://xrl.us/d6wo> Lexing/Parsing Perl6 without executing code Adam Kennedy wants to be able to syntax color (and possible perform basic programatic manipulations of perl6 code). Anyone who has used a good IDE like Visual Studio, Eclipse, or IntelliJ probably understands where he is coming from. He does not, however, want to execute arbitrary code in the process of doing this. Much discussion ensued, but it does not look like he will be able to do this. Quite the tragedy, but perl is simply too dynamic to be docilly lexed like static languages. <http://xrl.us/d6wp> Perl6 Compiler Nice Work Nick Glencross has the honor of the only message on p6c this week. But his sentiment is shared by all. Nice work, Patrick. <http://xrl.us/d6wq> Parrot Internals Parrot_compreg.sig Bernhard Schmalhofer noticed that Parrot_compreg had a different signature then documented, so he submitted a patch to fix it. Leo applied it. <http://xrl.us/d6wr> opcode numbering Leo added a TODO ticker for opcode numbering. <http://xrl.us/d6ws> tests pass, but create core files I reported that on my machine all of the tests claim to pass, but core files appear in the parrot directory. Dan confirmed my suspicion that this was a real problem. I tried to supply helpful information like backtrace, but Warnock applies. <http://xrl.us/d6wt> -- initial message <http://xrl.us/d6wu> -- squeeky wheel gets the kick? pcc cleanup Leo removed the recently deprecated P0, P1, P2 usage. Relatively few tests break as a result. <http://xrl.us/d6wv> Namespace-sub invocation Luke Palmer wanted to know if there was syntax for calling subs from a particular namespace. Leo provided the answer, call it as a method on the namespace PMC. <http://xrl.us/d6ww> Reserved Words Annoy Luke Palmer wondered if he could define a .sub "new" to get around reserved word problems. Leo added the support, but warned him not to use "spaces or such". <http://xrl.us/d6wx> Lexicals, Continuations, Register Allocation, and ascii art This thread (and the ones that preceded it) have made me wish that gmail and google groups had a fixed width font option. Sadly, this summary will probably not get me it, as it did not get me p6c either :-( Ah well. The problems associated with lexicals and continuations churned. There was a plea for guidance from Dan. Hopefully he will guide us shortly. <http://xrl.us/d6wy> -- one thread about it <http://xrl.us/d6wz> - and another (with plea) old Parrot question Bloves had a question about assemble.pl in the parrot 0.0.1 source. Warnock applies. <http://xrl.us/d6w2> Parrot on Linux PPC build chromatic managed to track down some of the PPC build issues for linux. Leo wondered where all of the config hackers went, I think he wants someone to fix it. <http://xrl.us/d6w3> preprocessor problems Flavio S. Glock noted that the preprocessor did undesirable things. Leo suddenly realized that it was woefully out of date and need major fixing/disabling. Flavio submitted a small patch for it, but Leo pointed out that this was not enough to actually fix the preprocessor. <http://xrl.us/d6w4> -- initial message new push_eh opcode Leo added a new push_eh opcode and derprecated the old set_eh. <http://xrl.us/d6w5> TODO and RT wrangling Will Coleda continued his stellar work managing the RT queues. Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon patched the first one. <http://xrl.us/d6w6> -- remove Perl* PMCs (done) <http://xrl.us/d6w7> -- the patch <http://xrl.us/d6w8> -- make Perl* PMCs dynamic <http://xrl.us/d6w9> -- IMCC Documentation needed PMC does "hash|array|monkey" Will Coleda added a ticket for the does functionality. He promptly closed it when Leo pointed out that it already existed in the form of the "does" op. So Will up and started using it. <http://xrl.us/d6xa> -- initial request <http://xrl.us/d6xb> -- Tcl takes advantage Strings are in Dan announced that the last of his string stuff was checked in and he would like brave souls to help him merge it back into the tree. <http://xrl.us/d6xc> Language TODO tests Will Coleda thanked Josh Wilmes for fixing the Language TODO tests. And apparently one of Tcl's has mysteriously started working. <http://xrl.us/d6xd> minesweeper broke Jens Rieks noticed that somewhere in the shuffle minesweeper got broken. As a professional minesweeper-er, this shocks and offends me. Leo offered a pointer as to where to start looking to fix it. <http://xrl.us/d6xe> @ANON subs Leo added some support for anonymous subroutines. People liked them and began. Luke Palmer prompty tried combining it with @IMMEDIATE and began to wonder if it was immediate enough. <http://xrl.us/d6xf> Parrot Grammar Engine issues I think that I shall continue to spell out PGE for a little while, but I may decide to use only the acronym in some later summary without warning, be prepared. Oh right, the whole reason I mentioned it in the first place... Will Coleda pointed out a few issues including (1) doesn't compile by default and (2) doesn't compile at all. Nicholas Clark fixed (2), and Patrick figured that (1) could wait until it was a little more mature. Personally, I feel that maturity is over rated, poo-poo head. <http://xrl.us/d6xg> (Java|ECMA)Script on Parrot David "liorean" Andersson wondered if there were any projects to run JavaScript on Parrot. While there does not appear to be, many people thing it would be a good idea and offered useful pointers. <http://xrl.us/d6xh> Rules Engines Cindi Jenkins posted a link to an interesting blog entry on Rules engines. Unfortunately, I think she posted it to google groups as it did not find its way onto the list. Also, unfortunately, it is a post about logic rules engines a la prolog and not grammar rules. although who knows, there might be some overlap... <http://xrl.us/d6xi> PIR examples on the website Herbert Snorrason noted that there were no PIR examples on the website and opened a ticket for it. Will took a first pass at it. <http://xrl.us/d6xj> -- original message <http://www.parrotcode.org/examples/> testj string_102 issues Luke Palmer found a subte looking problem in string_102.pasm. Leo couldn't reproduce it and suggested that it might be a redhat thing. Peter Sinnott chimed in with a possibly unrelated failure also on redhat. <http://xrl.us/d6xk> Tuning and Monitoring Matt S posted a question about how much internal tuning and monitoring Parrot would allow. Unfortunately, I think he posted it to google groups, as it didn't show up in my inbox. I am honestly not sure how much is available/in the works. <http://xrl.us/d6xm> missing directory in MANIFEST Andy Dougherty submitted a patch fixing a missing directory in the manifest by allowing ops2pm.pl add it. <http://xrl.us/d6xn> Objects, Classes, Metaclasses, and tall people's heads Dan posted a refresher on the current state of the object system. He then went on to explain where it was headed and conjectured that this would be enough. Just reading his description of it hurts my head enough that I do not wish to guess if he is right or not. <http://xrl.us/d6xo> eof opcodes Brian Wheeler wondered why there was no "eof" opcode. Leo told him that it was a method on a PIO object. Apparently most of the IO opcodes should actually be PIO methods, go figure. <http://xrl.us/d6xp> ops to deprecate or not Leo attempted to trim down the core by removing some opcode variants. Dan did not appreciate the change and told Leo to roll it back. Fortunately, Dan went on to explain the longer term goal (which should satisfy Leo). <http://xrl.us/d6xq> -- initial posting <http://xrl.us/d6xr> -- CVS commit message <http://xrl.us/d6xs> -- the goals The usual footer If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl. You might also like to send feedback to [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://donate.perl-foundation.org/> -- The Perl Foundation <http://dev.perl.org/perl6/> -- Perl 6 Development site <http://planet.parrotcode.org/> -- Parrot Blog aggregator