The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20040229
Welcome to the leapday summary. We'll crack straight on with
perl6-internals
Running up to release time
As Leapday had been chosen as the release date for Parrot 0.1.0, the
week was mostly spent getting things ready for release. A case in point
was the PLATFORMS file which lists those platforms on which Parrot is
known to compile and run, which (at the beginning of the week) was short
several platforms and generally out of date. So everyone manned the
pumps and sent in reports of success and failure. BTW, if you manage to
get Parrot up and running (or even partially up and limping) on a
platform that's not listed in PLATFORMS then [EMAIL PROTECTED]
would be very pleased to hear from you.
http://tinyurl.com/287f2
Objects and time
Dan announced that he'd trodden on one of the nasty bits of objects; the
proper ordering of classes for initialization and destruction in the
face of multiple inheritance. He announced that he was in the process of
actively ignoring it for the time being and canvassed opinions about
whether to delay the Leapday release in favour of fully
specced/implemented objects or whether to make the 29th without objects,
or some other choice. In the end we decided to still aim for the 29th,
with objects in a 90% there state, but with big 'HERE BE DRAGONS'
warnings plastered on the tricky edge cases. A little later Dan
announced what would be there for the release (Multiple inheritance,
attributes, object instantiation and method calls) and what wouldn't
(monkeying with some things after subclassing/instantiation, method
redispatch and fancy namespace lookups).
As the week progressed, objects inched closer and closer to readiness,
though at least one summarizer's heart was in his mouth as the week
ebbed away. Would Dan get everything he'd promised working before the
deadline? Tune in later on to find out.
http://tinyurl.com/34db3
http://tinyurl.com/2xuoa
Feature Freeze
On Wednesday, Leo Tötsch announced a feature slush (patches to add OO
features were still being accepted) in anticipation of a release. The
patch rate increased as people got on with fixing up failing tests on
various platforms, improving documentation, and improving OO
functionality. Not all the object patches were from Dan; chromatic got
in on the act with a couple of tweaks to parrotobject.pmc...
http://tinyurl.com/2u3kb
Native PBC issues
It turns out that, just at the moment, Parrot bytecode isn't actually
platform independent. This will, of course, get fixed, but it's not
Leo's top priority at present. He asked people who are running Parrot on
64 bit and Big endian architectures to submit native_pbc test files (if
you're on such an architecture, take a look at t/native_pbc/*.t for
instructions, and the Parrot community will thank you for it).
http://tinyurl.com/2fh5r
Object Questions
Simon Glover did some sterling work exercising the Object documentation
and implementation, posting several bug reports and questions.
http://tinyurl.com/3bnys
http://tinyurl.com/yu9ce
Ladies and Gentleman: Objects!
On Wednesday, several full days before the release date, Dan announced
that objects were done (well, everything that he promised would work
did) and asked for people to start 'abusing it heavily'. Which they
promptly did. There was applause too.
http://tinyurl.com/2bsqv
Next on the hit list
Having got objects up, Dan immediately posted a list of desiderata for
the next release but one. Is there no stopping him?
http://tinyurl.com/38ymw
Today we have naming of parts
Will the madness never stop?
Mitchell Charity spoke for everyone when he posted an extract from
PDD15:
What .NET calls an attribute parrot calls a property
What .NET calls a property parrot calls an attribute
Everyone shared the pain, though Paolo Molaro pointed out that it's not
exactly accurate and the .NET name for a parrot attribute is 'field'
(which is yet another term with wide variety of meanings when you think
about it). Not being the biggest OO fan in the world, Dan swears he's
just going to rename them Fred and Barney but not tell anyone which is
which.
http://tinyurl.com/24j36
LANGUAGES.STATUS updates
Mitchell also pointed out that LANGUAGES.STATUS was out of date and
several languages which were supposed to be okay failed to work on his
system. He asked for feedback to get it updated correctly.
http://tinyurl.com/3xow7
Inconsistent Parrot/IMCC behaviour
Gregor Purdy found that Parrot was doing different things with the .pasm
file generated from an .imc file by IMCC than it was when it ran the
.imc file directly. Melvin Smith and Leo both agreed that it was a bug,
but it's very hard to fix with the current incarnation of IMCC. IMCC2
should (will) fix the issue. Leo provided a workaround to fix the
generated .pasm though.
http://tinyurl.com/2j5hn
The Kakapo leaps
Yay! Parrot 0.1.0 "Leaping Kakapo" got released at 2004022913:45:49 GMT.
This is a big release, with Objects and multi-threading as well as a
major documentation overhaul and a bunch of other good stuff. Anyone who
suggests that I'm only really excited by this particular release because
I came up with the code name.
Pointing out that the Kakapo is a flightless, nearly extinct species of
parrot is considered unsporting.
http://tinyurl.com/3fbdo
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
Perl 6? When?
Aaron Sherman noted that Apocalypse 1 was published in 2001, and it made
mention of Apocalypse 26. And we've seen all of six apocalypses. He
wondered if there was anything that could be done to increase the
apocalypse rate. As chromatic pointed out, no plan survives first
contact with the enemy; it turns out that a lot of the theoretical
apocalypses (one apocalypse per chapter of Programming Perl), aren't
actually necessary for specifying the language to the point where we can
start implementing.
Larry also answered Aaron's concerns and noted that last year he had to
take half a year off 'to participate in various non-optional gastric
revisions'. He quickly discussed the outstanding chapters and RFCs and
pointed out that a large amount of the work had already been done. Which
is nice.
Larry also showed us his outline of Apocalypse 12 which is apparently
about a week away from the first alpha for the sixcabal. It looks rather
promising (and it's rather easy to see why it's taken so long).
http://tinyurl.com/ysf6g
http://tinyurl.com/2ol2h -- Larry's big plan
http://tinyurl.com/2aylx -- Apocalypse 12 outline
Thinking about accessors
John Williams wondered about how accessors will work with Perl 6
objects. In particular he wondered about cases like:
$foo.bar_attr += $z;
$foo.bar_attr++;
Things got a little complicated, indeed Larry muttered that there would
be a delay to A12 because John had asked him to explain something that
he hadn't figured out yet.
http://tinyurl.com/367hy
An interesting matching problem
Austin Hastings came up with a neat little problem for matching.
Consider an instrumented string class which carries information like
'bold' and 'italic' or even the language of a substring. How would you
write a search to match all the letters 'l' in french text. (Not a very
realistic problem I know, but you'll have to bear with me).
Larry responded with a neat idea involving "&", so you would write:
/[l & <french>]/
where french is presumably a block rule that makes a method call on the
appropriate character.
http://tinyurl.com/22ou8
Exegesis 7
Damian's Exegesis 7, dealing with the replacement for Perl 5's format,
was published on Thursday. It's jolly good. Really. And you can use it
now if you grab Perl6::Form from CPAN. This threw up a pile of questions
about ambiguities, edge cases and all the other stuff that p6l does so
well. The version of the exegesis at perl.com has already been updated
to take some of these issues into account.
http://tinyurl.com/2vuq9
Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements
Whee! The Summary goes to the mailing lists before midnight on Monday.
"Will I be able to keep up this dizzy pace?" I ask myself.
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 me feedback at
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], or drop by my website.
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site
http://www.bofh.org.uk/ -- My website, "Just a Summary"
