Perl 6 Summary for 2005-07-19 through 2005-07-26 All~ Welcome to another Perl 6 Summary brought to you by microwaved chinese food and air conditioning. I love the modern era. Without further ado, I bring you
Perl 6 Compilers Grégoire Péan announed the release of PxPerl 5.8.7-3, allowing people who want to play with Pugs and Parrot on windows easy access. <http://xrl.us/gv6k> Test Report for Windows Ronald Hill reported some failing tests for Pugs on windows. Fortunately, given Pugs's developement, there is a reasonable chance of these problems being fixed. Unfortunately, given Pugs developement, no such information made it to the list. <http://xrl.us/gv6m> Parsing Perl6 Rules Nathan Gray wondered how Jeff Pinyan's parsing perl6 rules project was going. Jeff said that it did not get very far, but he posted what he did have to <http://feather.perl6.nl/~japhy/>. <http://xrl.us/gv6n> Pugs Problems Vadim Konovalov was playing with slurp and found two problems. Adriano Ferreira showed him how to work around slurp not accepting a ":raw" option. Nobody commented on the peculariar $*ARGS[0] value when the argument is "-foobarfluffy". <http://xrl.us/gv6o> Official Perl6 Rules Grammar Patrick announced an "official Perl 6 grammar" whichi he would be mainting closely with PGE in Parrot. It is incomplete at this point, but patches are most welcome. <http://xrl.us/gv6p> PIL Nodes's Descriptions Allison Randal posted a request for a clue batting, listing various types of nodes in PIL and explaining her guess at their descriptions. Stuart Cook and Patrick both provided a little help, although not everything on her list was addressed. <http://xrl.us/gv6q> Perl 6 FAQ Patch Autrijus provided a patch for the Perl 6 FAQ removing an outdated question. Robert Spier applied the patch (modulo some confusion about staged vs live copies). <http://xrl.us/gv6r> Parrot Opcode Optimizability Curtis Rawls noted that it is often simpler from an optimizer writers standpoint to do constant folding and optimization on a smaller set of opcodes (just one variant add instead of five (seven if you count inc and dec)). Leo explained that removing these opcodes isn't an option, but that a suggestion for compiler writers to only emit the more verbose codes could be added to the faq. <http://xrl.us/gv6s> Refcounting Hash Nicholas Clark wants to use a hash to hold reference counts for Ponie (something like dod_register_pmc in pmc.c), but he doesn't want to duplicate code. Leo suggested that he move some of the code into a pmc and then switch the real registry to use that PMC. <http://xrl.us/gv6t> New PGE Test Mitchell N Charity submited a test for a "large" pugs grammar, which currently fails. Patrick noted that the test like came from rx_grammar.pl in the Pugs distribution. This probably led to his above addition of an "Official Perl6 Rules Grammar". <http://xrl.us/gv6u> Jit Emit Help Adam Preble decided that he would play with an x86_64 code generator. Unfortunately, he was hitting some stumbling blocks. Leo offered to help him and provided pointers from #parrot. <http://xrl.us/gv6v> Call Opcode Cleanup Leo wants to cleanup some of the various invoke opcodes. He posted a request for comment, but Warnock applies. It seems that Leo's request for comments like this get Warnocked a lot... <http://xrl.us/gv6w> <http://xrl.us/gv6x> "spawnw" Return Value Jerry Gay opened a TODO ticket for switching spawnw to return something object like to wrap platform-specific oddities. Prompted by Jonathan Worthington submitting a patch to make the spawnw tests pass on windows (which was applied). <http://xrl.us/gv6y> -- Ticket <http://xrl.us/gv6z> -- TODO Bugs in ops2vim.pl Amir Karger noticed a bug in ops2vim.pl and suggested a fix. Jerry Gay fixed it. <http://xrl.us/gv62> Leo's Ctx Branch Tests Jerry Gay and Leo worked together to get his branch passing a few more tests on windows. Nick Glencross wondered if the python dynclasses tests were being run too. Jonathan Worthington explained that they were being skipped for the moment. <http://xrl.us/gv63> Raised by the Aliens Matt Diephouse was surprised to discover that you cannot use addparent with a PMC for either argument. He suggested that this be made to work or officially documented. <http://xrl.us/gv64> Patches Accumulating Leo requested that people with commit bits pick up some of the patches that were building up as he was running a little low on tuits. <http://xrl.us/gv65> Dump CFG Curtis Rawls moved the dump_cfg call from reg_alloc.c to cfg.c. Leo applied the patch. <http://xrl.us/gv66> string_to_cstring leaks Jonathan Worthington plugged a few leaks caused by string_to_cstring. Leo applied the patch. <http://xrl.us/gv67> Deleting Globals/Lexicals Matt Diephouse noted that there was no way to delete globals or lexicals. Leo posted one (untested) way to do it. <http://xrl.us/gv68> Generating Win32 Executables Jonathan Worthington laid some ground work for generating executables on windows. Leo applied the patch. <http://xrl.us/gv69> Library Loading on Win32 Jonathan Worthington beefed up the library searching logic in Parrot to be a little more Windowsy. Leo applied the patch. <http://xrl.us/gv7a> PBC Merge Utility Leo posted a request for a utility that could merge several pbc files into one. <http://xrl.us/gv7b> Calling Super Methods Matt Diephouse noticed that there was no way to call the method from a super class. Leo pointed out a way to do it by accessing the slots of the parent directly. <http://xrl.us/gv7c> Cmd Buffer Reallocation Greg Bacon fixed a bug in the reallocation of the cmd buffer on Win32. Jonathan Worthington applied the patch. <http://xrl.us/gv7d> Data::Dump(PGE) Will Coleda added a TODO for making PGE's match objects compatible with Data::Dumper. <http://xrl.us/gv7e> does Hash Will Coleda wants Data::Dumper to check if an object does Hash or Array and dump it thusly if no default dump is implemented. <http://xrl.us/gv7f> rx.ops's future Will Coleda wondered what the future of the rx ops. Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon, who wrote them, recons they are not long for this work. He reckonned that the intstacks and the bitmap handling code might be worth saving. <http://xrl.us/gv7g> Debugger - List breakpoints Will Coleda noticed that the debugger was not quite compatible with perl's. Leo replied that the debuggers whole command loop was a mess that required a turn of the crank. <http://xrl.us/gv7h> \u escape issues Will Coleda opened a ticket for some unicode escape issues. Leo asked for a test case. <http://xrl.us/gv7i> string -> int conversions Matt Diephouse noticed that there was no opcode Octal and Hex conversions. Leo suggested adding one of the form " set Ix, Sy, Ibase # Ibase = 2..36 ". <http://xrl.us/gv7j> Make " make languages " Failures Nonfatal Bernhard Schmalhofer suggested that " make languages " should not give up after the first failure, but should instead build the remaining languages. <http://xrl.us/gv7k> Dynclasses on Windows Nick Glencross and Jonathan Worthington discussed how to make dynclasses build on windows. <http://xrl.us/gv7m> Resizable*Array Allocation Matt Fowles submitted a patch making all the various Resizeable*Array pmcs share their allocation strategy. Bernhard Schmalhofer applied the patch. <http://xrl.us/gv7n> MMD Roundup - Take 2 Nicholas Clark attempted to dewarnock a suggested change by Leo. Unfortunately, his thoughts on the matter were "this is really a call for the designer to make, isn't it?". Leo suggested starting a WARNOCKED file for these things. Will countered that adding it to the DESIGN section in docs/ROADMAP, so Chip needs only look in one place. <http://xrl.us/gv7o> Parrot Failures on OS X Nicholas Clark forwards some failures on OS X to the Parrot list (from the Ponie one). <http://xrl.us/gv7p> Parrot Needs stderr Nicholas Clark noticed that running parrot with a closed stderr, makes parrot unhappy. <http://xrl.us/gv7q> GMC Alexandre Buisse and many others have been talking about his Generation Mark and Compact Garbage Collector. Plans are rapidly taking shape. <http://xrl.us/gv7r> Perl 6 Language User Defined Context Behavior Ingo Blechschmidt wanted to know how to make is own custom class that would act specially in list context. Thomas Sandlaß suggested overloading &infix:<=>. Sadly, his answer doesn't seem to have made it to google groups. <http://xrl.us/gv7s> Hash Creation with Duplicate Keys Ingo Blechschmidt noticed that in Perl 5 hash definitions the right most duplicate one, whereas the left most wins in Perl 6. He was wondering if this was a bug or not. Luke explained that it was that way for named variable bindings. Larry figured it should be that way ONLY for named variable binding. If Pugs has not done it yet, some brave soul could probably add tests and find it implemented before they had finished committing. <http://xrl.us/gv7t> Tail Calls, Methods, and Currying Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wondered about Tail calls, noting that the current method " $obj.can('meth').goto($obj, [EMAIL PROTECTED]); " was kinda ugly. Larry mused that " return g() " should go ahead and tail call. If the code does not want a tailcall there then it should avoid it manually. <http://xrl.us/gv7u> Pairs and Binding Play Poorly Together Autrijus noted that pairs and bindings (such as in a for loop) play badly together. Larry supposed that the Bare code object could have parameters of type Pair|Item (note no Juntion) by default to solve this problem. Damian supported the exclusion of Junction. <http://xrl.us/gv7v> Method Introspection and meta....meta.classes chromatic wondered about subroutine and method introspection. Sam Vilain thought he might want to look at Stevan Cook's Perl6-MetaModel. He also talked about closing the loop on meta-meta-meta headaches. Apparently small talk has done this somewhere... <http://xrl.us/gv7w> Big Object Rethink Larry posted a fairly major rethink of member variables and methods. Honestly I did not quite follow what he described and there is a lot to summarize... Hey! Look over there! ::PUNT:: Nothing to see here move along. <http://xrl.us/gv7x> Garbage Collection API David Formosa (after being lightly chastized by an unknown summarizer) started a new thread expanding on his desire for a GC API. I thought there were replies to this, but they don't seem to have made it to google. <http://xrl.us/gv7y> Exposing the GC Piers Cawley thought that it might be useful to expose the GC to get an array of all objects of a particular class. Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon thought that the ability to get such an array would be useful, but that it should merely be an implementation detail of whether an array of weak refs or the GC or Harry Potter was invoked. <http://xrl.us/gv7z> The usual footer To post to any of these mailing lists please subscribe by sending email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. 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