The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030914
Welcome to this week's Perl 6 Summary. And what better way could there
be of spending the morning of your 36th birthday than by reading
through a bunch of old messages in a couple of mailing lists and
boiling them down into a summary?
Hmm... you have a point. Still, I'd just spend the day feeling slightly
guilty if I did that. And I'd spend more than just the day feeling
guilty if I did that, but thanks for the offer.
Ahem.
Continuing the thread of "So little was said we might as well get it
over with and move onto the meat of the week", we'll start this week
with the language list.
Dispatch on context
Piers Cawley wondered about doing multiple dispatch based on context and
came up with a scheme which involved wrapping multimethods in a simple
method that would 'reify' context so that it could be used as a
multimethod argument. Luke Palmer came up with a better notation for
handling class arguments to multimethods than Piers's suggestion...
http://xrl.us/tgd
Next Apocalypse
In a transparent (and successful) attempt to generate some traffic on
the language list, Jonathan Scott Duff wondered when the next Apocalypse
was due. (If anyone's reading this who isn't up to speed on the Perl 6
design process, Apocalypses are Larry's design documents which describe
the syntax and semantics of Perl 6. In theory they reflect the structure
of *Programming Perl*, but the order may vary slightly).
Dan Sugalski popped up with an answer "Not for a while". The thing is,
the next Apocalypse is objects, and judging by the amount of time it
took Dan to get object internals finalized (hah!) over on
perl6-internals, getting objects right in Perl 6 is going to take a
time. Dan thought that Damian may well get Exegesis 7, formats, out
sooner. (Apocalypse 7 boiled down to the following: "See Damian").
However, Damian is currently on holiday for the first time in too long,
Dan hoped (and I agree) that Damian wouldn't answer for a few weeks.
There was general agreement that getting objects right deserved as much
time as it needed. Luke Palmer dropped a few hints though (and made your
summarizer happy by noting that 'the standard library will definitely be
mutable at runtime'.
http://xrl.us/tge
Macro arguments themselves
Alex Burr responded to a question about Macro arguments that Luke Palmer
posed on the second of August (you have to love the dizzying pace of
life on perl6-language). Alex suggested the partial evaluation might be
handy but predicted that nobody will write a useful partial evaluator
for Perl 6 as the language is 'simply too big'. The thread went on to
discuss ways of getting at syntax trees from precompiled code and
whether or not Alex had been serious in his prediction.
http://xrl.us/tgf
Meanwhile, in perl6-internals
Of AST And YAL
At the back end of last week, Leo Tötsch announced that he was looking
into the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) interface to Parrot by implementing
parts of Yet Another Language (YAL). What's been done so far looks
remarkably impressive, and Leo wondered whether to commit the changes.
He noted that the work was currently totally standalone and could be
distributed as a tar file instead.
Michal Wallace liked it, noting that he'd like to merge in all the
pirate code generation stuff. James Michal DuPont suggested using the
redland RDF API, and representing the syntax trees with RDF. Not being a
fan of XML (Who is?) Leo was unconvinced, worrying that he wasn't keen
on having an external library in such a central place in Parrot. James
pointed out that RDF isn't necessarily XML, and that the redland API
wasn't quite the same as the redland library.
Meanwhile, Leo put a YAL distribution up on his web page.
http://xrl.us/tgg
http://toetsch.at/yal/
vtable->dump
The "How to do serialization right" thread rumbled on. Threads continue
to make things hard.
http://xrl.us/tgh
Parrot Z-Machine
Amir Karger continued his investigation of what would be needed to get
Parrot emulating the Z-machine. Later in the week he announced that he
was about to start coding. Go Amir!
http://xrl.us/tgi
Moving IMCC
Everyone admits that languages/imcc is the wrong place for something as
central to Parrot as IMCC. Leo wants to make a top-level imcc directory.
Dan wants to move the current top-level C code to a core directory and
move the IMCC stuff into that directory as well (without an imcc
subdirectory). Quite what the Right Thing is hasn't yet been decided so
IMCC remains in the wrong place. Robert Spier thought that we should
wait 'til after the next Parrot release anyway.
http://xrl.us/tgj
Leon Brocard Speaks!
Leo Tötsch noted that there appeared to be a few ops missing, for
instance there are "neg_p_p", "neg_i_i", and "neg_i" ops but no "neg_p",
he wondered if the 'missing' ops should be implemented or simply worked
around. Leon Brocard thought that implementing the missing ops was the
best course as it made it much easier to target Parrot. He noted that we
could always move the logic into the assembler later if we decide to
prune ops. Dan agreed. Leo set about implementing, throwing up the
occasional question about semantics.
http://xrl.us/tgk
FEATURE FREEZE
As of Sunday 14th, Parrot is feature frozen in preparation for the next
Parrot release. We're not sure whether this will be 0.1.0 or 0.0.11, but
there's definitely a release coming soon. Steve Fink, who reserves the
right to call it the "hairy tulip" release, nevertheless invited
suggestions for release codenames.
http://xrl.us/tgl
Luke's Timely Destruction Scheme
Luke Palmer released the second revision of a patch implementing his
proposed timely destruction scheme. He claimed that in his benchmarks he
was seeing a 1000% speedup for lazy DOD runs, which can't be bad. Dan,
Leo and Daniel Grunblatt all asked Luke for his benchmark programming,
suggesting that it go in the examples/benchmarks directory. Dan also
asked for Luke to have a go at writing a good torture test for the
system. Assuming it survived the torture test, Dan thought we could
commit the changes.
http://xrl.us/tgm
File Spec
Vladimir Lipskiy posted a patch implementing a new variant of File Spec
for the Parrot internals. (File Spec is a method of decoupling file
paths from the gory details of particular operating system
interpretations of what a file path looks like). It seems from the
subsequent discussion that Vladimir and Michael Schwern have a
fundamental disagreement about how a File Spec module should work.
http://xrl.us/tgn
Embedding interface to PMCs
Arthur Bergman, the Ponie Jockey asked if there was any documentation or
code extant to help him figure out how to use PMCs in embedded mode.
Apparently there isn't.
http://xrl.us/tgo
Win32 Tinder suggestions
Dan is in the process of setting up the TPF Win32 tinderbox machine.
However, he's not a windows person at all, so he solicited suggestions
as to which particular build options would make useful tinderboxes.
Melvin Smith offered up several suggestions of compilers etc.
http://xrl.us/tgp
The P6E challenge!
In the Win32 Tinder thread, Dan told Melvin Smith (and by extension
everyone else) that "it's your job, if you choose to accept it, to help
make [Perl 6 Essentials] horribly out-of-date." Nicholas Clark wondered
if there would be prizes for people who make the most paragraphs
obsolete, and if anyone was counting. (It looks like Nicholas just
volunteered). Dan reckoned that yes there would be a prize, the winner
would get a mention in the forward of the next version, but he wasn't
sure whether that would include a signed copy of the new version or a
hand corrected copy of the old one... Nicholas voted for the hand
corrected copy, and I second that suggestion.
http://xrl.us/tgq
http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/P/p6ee++.jpeg -- Hand correction #1
Acknowledgements, Announcements, Apologies
I'm afraid I still don't have the info about the Perl Foundation's
Parrot related grants. I'll nudge Gav and hopefully have something for
you all next week.
I promise there will be new content at http://www.bofh.org.uk:8080/
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 the secret of eternal youth to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Right, I'm off to enjoy the rest of my birthday. See you all next week.
