The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030119
Summary time again, damn but those tuits are hard to round up. Guess,
what? perl6-internals comes first. 141 messages this week versus the
language list's 143.
Objects (again)
Objects were still very much on everyone's mind as the discussions of
Dan's initial thoughts about objects in Parrot continued. Jonathan
Sillito put up a list of questions about Dan's original message which
Dan answered promptly. Down the thread a little Dan mentioned that he
hoped Parrot's objects would serve, reasonably unmodified for a bunch of
languages (ie, he hoped that there wouldn't be a requirement for
PythonRef/Attr/Class/Object etc), Chris Armstrong thought that, given
what Dan had outlined so far, that wouldn't be straightforward. Dan
thanked him for throwing a spanner in the works, asking for more details
which Chris provided.
Meanwhile Jonathan had some supplementary questions... Hmm... doing this
blow by blow will take forever. Suffice to say that details are being
thrashed out. At one point Dan's head started to spin as terminology
mismatches started to bite, leading Nicholas Clark to suggest an
entirely new set of terms involving houses and hotels (but with some
serious underpinnings).
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y21952033 -- thread root, from last week.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M52912033 -- Jonathan's questions
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A23912033 -- Chris throws a spanner
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z44922033 -- Nicholas tries for a
monopoly on silliness
Optimizing and per file flags
Nicholas Clark wrote about requiring the ability to adjust compiler
optimization flags on a per file basis (brought up by Dan on IRC
apparently) and proposed a scheme. Quote of the thread (and quite
possibly the year so far): "When unpack is going into an infinite loop
on a Cray 6000 miles away that you don't have any access to, there isn't
much more you can do." Thanks for that one Nick.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I15965033
The draft todo/worklist
Dan posted his current todo/worklist, which he described as "reasonably
high level, and a bit terse". I particularly liked the last entry
"Working Perl 5 parser". Surprisingly, there was very little discussion,
maybe everyone liked it.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?L56921033
Parrot Examples
Joe Yates asked if we could add a helloworld.pasm to
parrot/examples/assembly. Joseph Guhlin wondered what was so special
about
print "Hello, world\n"
end
that it would need a file of its own (though he did forget the "end" in
his post, and segfaults are not really what you want in sample code).
http://makeashorterlink.com/?E27912033
Thoughts on infant mortality (continued)
Jason Gloudon posted a wonderfully clear exposition of the problems
facing anyone trying to implement a portable, incremental garbage
collector for Parrot which sparked a small amount of discussion and
muttering from Dan about the temptation to program down to the metal.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?X38931033
Operators neg and abs in core.ops
Bernhard Schmalhofer posted an enormous patch adding "neg" and "abs"
operators to core.ops. There were a few issues with the patch so it
hasn't gone in yet and an issue with what underlying C functions are
available reared its head too.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?L29951033
The "eval" patch
Leo Tötsch seems to have spent most of the week working on getting
"eval" working and he opened a ticket on rt.perl.org to track what's
happening with it. The response to this can be summarized as 'Wow!
Fabulous!'.
Once more, for Googlism, Leopold Toetsch is my hero.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I5A922033
Pretty Pictures
Mitchell N Charity posted some pretty pictures that he'd generated with
doxygen and graphviz. Most of the responses to this suggested he use
different tools. Ah well.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?B2B921033
Solaris tinderbox failures
Andy Dougherty created an RT ticket for the Solaris tinderbox, which
have been failing with the delightfully useful 'PANIC: Unknown signature
type" and wondered if things could be fixed up to be a little more
informative. Apparently it was as issue with Leo's recently checked in
eval patch. So Leo fixed it.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?D1C925033
Parrot compilers
Cory Spencer wondered about how the current compilers that target parrot
work, noting that they seem to be duplicating a good deal of labour, and
wondered if anyone had worked on a gcc like framework with a
standardized Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). Everyone pointed him at IMCC.
Gopal V also pointed out that, given the variety of implementation
languages (C, Perl, Parrot...) sharing effort between the sample
languages would be a little tricky, and mentioned his work on TreeCC (an
AST manager).
http://makeashorterlink.com/?D4D912033
ook.pasm eval
Leon Brocard had problems getting the eval based Ook implementation
working. It turned out to be a problem with Ook's "make test" using
parrot instead of IMCC.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?T1E955033
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
The language list was a little fractious this week; I get the feeling
that we're spinning our wheels slightly at the moment
Array questions
Piers Cawley thought that "my $b is $a" would be a compile error, but
Michael Lazzaro pointed out that that would mean that "my %data is
FileBasedHash($path)" would also be a error. Damian pointed out that
they shouldn't be compile time errors, but there would be no compile
time type checking.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?D3F952033
L2R/R2L syntax. Again.
Okay, cards on the table here, I'm getting really, really fed up with
this thread. This week it was the monster that ate perl6-language. And
how.
We revisited the Unicode argument (Larry has said that Perl 6 *will*
have Unicode operators, some people don't like it, others (including me)
aren't keen. Nobody came up with any original arguments this week).
Sarcasm was employed (and missed).
Michael Lazzaro brought up Perl 5's special case syntax for functions
prototyped with block arguments which sparked some slightly heated
discussion. Damian had some words of wisdom on this subject.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y20A23033 -- Michael Lazzaro on block
syntax
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q21A22033 -- Damian talks sense
Later in the thread, Damian clarified his explanation of how the
proposed "~>" and "<~" operators would work in response to Buddha Buck's
excellent summary of his understanding of them. If you're taking part in
this monster thread I strongly suggest rereading both of these messages,
they're excellent. The subthread from Damian's clarifications led on to
a discussion of multimethods that's worth looking at too.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?D62A22033 -- Buddha Buck's summary
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z23A12033 -- Damian's clarifications
Larry's state of health and employment
Damian mentioned that "We should bear in mind that Larry has had some
health issues. And that he's currently unemployed with four children to
support. Other matters are taking precedence at the moment." Get well
soon Larry.
This led to a discussion of whether the Perl Foundation would be
continuing its grant to Larry in 2003 (apparently not). (The
[EMAIL PROTECTED] list is supposedly the right place to discuss this
further but I'm not yet a member.)
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I24A13033
Who's Who in Perl 6?
Who are you?
Melvin Smith. I work for IBM. Former Linux hacker. My education is
Computer Science. I am happily married.
What do you do for/with Perl 6
Wrote various pieces of Parrot, including continuations (woo woo!),
IMCC, and Cola as well as heckle Dan on IRC any chance I get. Sadly,
my contributions are fragmented and sparse, until I no longer have
to work for a living.
Where are you coming from?
Country boy from Georgia. I have a 4x4 truck and a dog. Perl is my
favorite language because it has made possible many days of
finishing work early to play golf, and I love WOW-ing Java
programmers.
When do you think Perl 6 will be released?
In digestable form, December, 2003. However, if the Raelians can
clone Leopold Tötsch by July, then August might be possible.
Why are you doing this?
Solely to learn new things. There is no better way to learn how to
write a compiler than to write one badly. If Perl6 never arrives,
I'll be satisfied by what I accomplished.
You have 5 words. Describe yourself
Intense, stubborn, dedicated, happy and kind.
Do you have anything to declare?
Yes. Treat people on the Net just like your friends and coworkers.
They just might be, one day.
Acknowledgements
Well, this set of acknowledgements may look slightly different than
usual. This morning we had one of *those* meetings... If you've ever
worked for a dot com you know the type; the whole company got called
into a conference room that was two small at about two minutes notice
and the boss spent 10 minutes umming and ahhing through a speech about
retrenchment and cost cutting and... um... downsizing.
So, it looks like I'm about to become a member of the Copious Free Time
club. I would take this opportunity to beg for a job, but if you do have
jobs to offer Perl programmers Larry and Dan may be more useful to you.
Returning to your normally scheduled acknowledgements, many thanks to
Melvin Smith for his answers to the Who's Who questionnaire. The answer
queue is empty again so unless someone else sends some answers Who's Who
will be on hiatus for a while. Send your answers to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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