The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030831 Welcome to this week's Perl 6 summary. This week, for one week only I'm going to break with a long established summary tradition. No, that doesn't mean I won't be mentioning Leon Brocard this week. Nope, this week we're going to start by discussing what's been said on the perl6-language list this week.
Now that's out of the way, we'll continue with a summary of the internals list. Continuation Passing is becoming the One True Calling Style Jos Visser had some code that broke in an interesting fashion when "find_lex" through an exception, so he asked the list about it. Leo Tötsch explained that exceptions and old style subs don't play at all well together. It seems to me that the total and utter deprecation of subs using the old style calling conventions is not far distant. http://xrl.us/rtk Embedding Parrot in Perl Luke Palmer has started to learn XS in the service of his project to embed Parrot in Perl. Unsurprisingly, he had a few questions. He got a few answers. http://xrl.us/rtl Implementing ISA Leo Tötsch has implemented "isa". The unfashionably lowercased chromatic argued that what Leo had implemented should actually be called "does". Chris Dutton thought "does" should be an alias for "has". Piers Cawley thinks he might be missing something. http://xrl.us/rtm More on constant PMCs and classes Leo Tötsch's RFC on constant PMCs and classes from last week continued to attract comments about possible interfaces and implementations. http://xrl.us/qxk A miscellany of newbie questions James Michael DuPont a bunch of questions and suggestions about bytecode emission, the JIT and about possibly extracting the Parrot object system into a separate library. Leo supplied answers. http://xrl.us/rtn What the heck is active data? Dan clarified what he'd meant when he talked about Active Data. His one sentence definition being '"Active Data" is data that takes some active role in its use -- reading, writing, modifying, deleting or using in some activity'. The consequences of such data are far reaching; even if your code has no active data in it, Dan points out that you still have to take the possibility into account, or solve the halting problem. Benjamin Goldberg seemed to think that you didn't need to solve the halting problem, you could just add scads of metadata to everything and do dataflow analysis at compile time. I look forward with interest to his implementation. Matt Fowles wondered why active data necessitated keyed variants of all the ops, asking instead why we couldn't have a "prepkeyed" op to return an appropriate specialized PMC to use in the next op. Dan agreed that such an approach was possible, but not necessarily very efficient. Leo Tötsch disagreed with him though. TOGoS wondered if this meant that we wouldn't know whether "set Px, Py" did binding or morphing until runtime. (It doesn't. "set" always simply copies a pointer). In an IRC conversation with Dan we realised that some of this confusion arises from the fact that "set_string" and friends behave as if they were called "assign_string"; to get the expected "set_string" semantics you'd have to do: new Px, .PerlUndef set_string Px, "some string" Hopefully this is going to get fixed. http://xrl.us/rto Mission haiku Nicholas Clark To make some kind of mark Committed haiku. Don't you. Yes, I know that's not a haiku. It's a Clerihew. I suggest that anyone else who feels tempted to perpetrate verse on list restrict themselves to a sestina or a villanelle, or maybe a sonnet. I also note that POD is a lousy format for setting poetry in. http://xrl.us/rtp Jürgen gets De-Warnocked Jürgen Bömmels had been caught on the horns of Warnock's Dilemma over a patch he submitted a while back. It turns out that he'd been Warnocked in part because both Leo and Dan thought he already had commit rights. So that got fixed. Welcome to the ranks of Parrot committers Jürgen, you've deserved it for a while. http://xrl.us/rtq Parrot Z-machine New face Amir Karger wants to write the Parrot Z-machine implementation and had a few questions about stuff. So far he's been Warnocked. http://xrl.us/rtr Notifications Dan described how Parrot's notification system would work, and what that means for weak references. Michael Schwern thought the outlined notification system would also be awfully useful for debugger watch expressions. Tim Bunce worried about some edge cases. http://xrl.us/rts MSVC++ complaints Vladimir Lipskiy (who's been doing some stellar work recently on various build issues amongst other things) found some problems trying to build Parrot with MSVC++ and asked for help in working out how to fix them. Jürgen Bömmels suggested a fix, which Vladimir liked in principle, but noted that there were still some issues it didn't quite fix. http://xrl.us/rtt "vtable->dump" Leo Tötsch thought that, if only for debugging, it would be really handy for PMCs to offer a "dump" method which would return a string representation of the PMC. Dan thought that a better approach would be to get freeze/thaw working for PMCs and have the debugger know how to dump a frozen PMC. This seemed to open up a whole big can of worms as Leo, Dan and others discussed what was needed from the serialization toolset and what its interface should look like. Nicholas Clark threw a googly down the pitch with his description of a possible attack on serialization schemes (possibly originating with Jonathan Stowe) that seems deeply tricky to work around. http://xrl.us/rtu http://xrl.us/rtv "exit" opcode Leo checked in a small change to Parrot, making "exit" throw an exception rather than simply quitting the program. Of course, unless the exception is caught, parrot will exit anyway. He also proposed changing the startup parameters by moving the ARGV array from P0 to P5 for consistency with the Parrot Calling conventions. For some reason this sparked off an enormous thread discussing how to return from the main function. Dan liked the the idea, so Leo checked a patch in and fixed up as many of the examples and languages as he could find, but he expects that he hasn't caught 'em all. http://xrl.us/rtw Acknowledgements, Announcements, Apologies I'm really, really sorry about the Clerihew. But not sorry enough to remove it. Thanks to everyone involved in making sure I only got one and a half of last week's predictions right. (The half prediction was to do with my writing real Perl code, I didn't. But I *did* release the Paris code, you can find it on CPAN at http://xrl.us/rtx if you're interested.) Thanks to Gill for seven and 2 days (as I write this) of wedded bliss. Check out http://xrl.us/mt4 for more of my writing (and thanks to those who have already popped by). As ever, if you've appreciated this summary, please consider one or more of the following options: * Send money to the Perl Foundation at http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ and help support the ongoing development of Perl. * Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open to all. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ and http://www.parrotcode.org/ are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing lists. * Send feedback, flames, money, requests for consultancy, photographic and writing commissions, or the soul of your first born to [EMAIL PROTECTED]