Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030727
Welcome to another in the ongoing series of Perl 6 summaries in which
your faintly frazzled summarizer attempts to find a native speaker of
Esperanto to translate this opening paragraph in honour of the huge
amount of money (1371 Euros) raised for TPF during the YAPC::Europe
auction, when the official language of both London.pm and Paris.pm's
websites were auctioned off as one lot. Somewhat to the surprise of
everyone, the winning bid was for Esperanto. As Jouke Visser just
commented on IRC, the price was well worth paying just to see the looks
of panic on the faces of Mark Fowler, Leon Brocard and other London.pm
worthies as the price of keeping the website English (and changing
Paris.pm's website to English in the process) shot up beyond the reach
of their collective pocket.
Meanwhile, we'll return to English and start with the internals list as
usual.
Events
Junior reporter: "Mr Macmillan, what caused your greatest difficulties
in your time as UK Prime Minister?"
Macmillan: "Events dear boy, events."
Whilst I'm not sure Dan would fully agree with Macmillan, there was a
certain amount of concern about Events (well, event handling). Damien
Neil is still convinced that asynchronous IO is the Wrong Thing, but he
hasn't convinced Dan, and (in this at least) it's Dan's opinion that
counts.
http://xrl.us/nj3
http://xrl.us/nj4 -- Dan ditches the cranky reply
Memory system issues
Jürgen Bömmels' work on the aforementioned Asynchronous IO system means
that he's been getting rather more involved with the internals of
Parrot's memory allocation and Garbage Collection system than he
intended. He had a few questions, which Dan answered.
http://xrl.us/nj5
Splitting core.ops
Brent Dax announced that the patch splitting core.ops into a slightly
more logical set of smaller files has been committed. This occasioned a
small flurry of discussion and a smaller flurry of patches to ensure
that all the new .ops files had their associated documentation files
built.
http://xrl.us/nj6
Parrot docs translated to Japanese
Koichi Sasada, a Japanese university student has translated the Parrot
Primer into Japanese and put it on his website. He wanted to know if he
could publicise the translation. This summary is (at least in part) his
answer.
http://xrl.us/nj7
http://xrl.us/nj8 -- In English
http://xrl.us/nj9 -- In Japanese
PMC methods
Luke Palmer can't stop thinking of other ideas as he works on
implementing lazy PMCs. His latest idea relates to accessing methods on
PMCs without having to generate scads of new opcodes (Personally, I
don't see what's wrong with using the object stuff for getting both PMC
vtable (C) methods and methods that are implemented in Parrot itself.)
Luke proposed a few ops which he reckons will solve the problem.
http://xrl.us/nka
objects.t Failures
Simon Glover tracked down a problem with the objects.t test file that
had been failing on some, but not all platforms. It turns out that the
class_hash wasn't included as part of the root set, which meant that the
garbage collector could try to reclaim it before it got used. Which is
bad. He supplied a two line patch to fix the problem. Which is good.
Dan made with the "D'oh!", commenting that he'd known he'd forgotten
something.
http://xrl.us/nkb
RFC: Cleaning up the ParrotIOLayer API
Jürgen Böemmels has reached a point in his redoing of the Parrot IO
subsystem that he wanted to remove and/or rename several of the old
methods so he posted an RFC explaining what he intended to do and asked
for comments. Gregor N. Purdy had some comments, mostly to do with the
data structures involved (with particular reference to strings) but
other than that there has been no further comment.
http://xrl.us/nkc
Parrot Emits an Executable
Daniel Grunblatt checked in a patch to make parrot generate native
executables. There are caveats about what must be done in order to get a
working executable and the original patch needed to have a few wrinkles
ironed out, but this looks like a fantastic start to me.
http://xrl.us/nkd
Approaching Python
Michael Wallace wondered about the issue of compiling python to parrot.
He wondered if it would be possible to make use of the existing Python
compiler module which generates python bytecode from a parse tree. He
wondered if it'd be worthwhile modifying it to generate parrot bytecode.
The discussion which followed covered various options for handling
Python code, ranging from bytecode transformation to translating the
source code into Perl 6 (which is probably the least likely to save Dan
from pie).
I'm not sure if a particular approach was chosen, but Michael seems keen
to try a spike based on his initial suggestion.
http://xrl.us/nke
Doc Patches
Jonathan Worthington sent in a patch to intro.pod and wondered if that
would count as a 'real' patch. The answer being "Yes, of course they do.
Patch applied."
http://xrl.us/nkf
Meanwhile in Perl 6 Language
Things were again relatively quiet on the language list...
Preprocessors and Patterns
David Whipp explained what he meant when he talked about overriding the
"<ws>" pattern as a way of doing preprocessing. His insight being that a
C Preprocessor style directive is generally legal anywhere that
whitespace is legal, so by implementing a grammar along the lines of:
grammar Perl6::WithCPPStyleDirectives {
rule ws { <CPPDirective> | <SUPER::ws> }
rule CPPDirective { ... }
...
}
one could avoid having to add a whole bunch of "<CPPDirective>"
subclauses to the various rules in the grammar.
Austin Hastings popped up to say that he thought that this was just
another aspect of the issue of being able to run grammars/patterns
against arbitrary objects, and proposed the idea of chaining grammars (a
la SAX pipelines I think). Dave came up with a possible syntax:
$fh ~~ / < <Grammar.Lang.C.Preprocessor ==> <Grammar.Lang.C> > /;
For the life of me I couldn't tell you whether I think that looks like a
brilliant or a disgusting idea.
http://xrl.us/nkg
Protocols
Discussion of the idea of borrowing Objective-C's Protocols for Perl 6
continued with a discussion of what that means precisely, and why Java's
interfaces are a sub optimal way of doing the Right Thing. In general,
people seemed to be in violent agreement.
http://xrl.us/nkh
Acknowledgements, Announcements and Apologies
Okay, okay, PONIE really stands for 'Perl On New Internal Engine'. I
think. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe PONIE can stand for itself.
Many, many thanks to my kind hosts in Paris, Sebastien Huart and
Paul-Christophe Varoutas (and to Paul-Christophe's sister whose
apartment I borrowed for a couple of nights). Thanks also to Earle
Martin and Sam Vilain for Eurostar tickets, even if a communication
breakdown caused chaos on Sunday. No thanks at all to whoever pocketed
my iPod rather than handing it in to lost property.
Paris is a fabulous city and YAPC::Europe was both great fun and
enlightening. Quote of the week came at the Parrot BOF:
Dan: I'm really bad at reading my mails Leo: You should at least read
*my* mails Everyone: Hear! Hear! (or words to that effect)
After which we went on to draw a bunch of boxes and arrows along the way
to fixing up the GC system.
Thanks are also due to my stepdaughter who's been looking after the
kittens for the past six weeks. Well, I say kittens, but now they're
back they are *huge*, gorgeous, and easily driven to distraction by my
shiny new laser pointer.
Thanks too to all of you who popped by at http://xrl.us/mt4, I promise
more new content this week.
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 anything really cool that isn't Nigerian
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