The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20030921
Deadlines, I love the sound they make as they fly past.
Those of you who receive this summary via mail may have noticed that
this summary is a little late, with any luck it will make up for its
tardiness by being inaccurate and badly written as well.
I'm going to reinstitute the tradition of starting with the internals
list this week, so without further ado:
Pondering argument passing
Steve Fink pondered passing parameters properly, with a prototyped Perl
6 example. Perl 5 certainly, and Perl 6 possibly, allow you to ignore
any function prototype by calling the function like "&f(1,2)". Steve had
concerns about what to do in the presence of 'splatted' argument lists.
(Consider
sub foo(@a, $b) {...}
@generated_arglist = ([1,2,3], 2);
Calling "foo(@generated_arglist)" will throw an error, because the
function is expecting an array followed by a scalar. However, you can
get around that by using the "*" (splat) operator, which tells Perl to
wait until runtime and then treat @generated_arglist as if it were a
list of arguments to the function, and check its contents against foo's
parameter list. In Perl 5, if you had a prototyped function "sub foo(@$)
{...}" you would work around the problem by calling it as
"&foo(@generated_arglist)", but I have digressed a long way already.)
I'm not entirely sure I got what this thread was about. I've just had a
chat with Dan about it on IRC, and I think I'm a little wiser, but the
thread that arose from Steve's post gave me the impression of people
talking past each other a little.
<http://xrl.us/t4x>
Feature Freeze for 0.0.11
Steve Fink announced that Parrot was feature frozen in the wee small
hours of Monday morning (at least it was Monday morning if you live in
GMT; it was still Sunday if you're in Steve's timezone). Everyone set
about tidying things up, nailing bugs and generally getting Parrot's
house in order for a public release.
<http://xrl.us/t4y>
Some Parrot people are disgustingly young
In a move calculated to annoy your summarizer, Dan Sugalski pointed out
that Piers is now twice the age of Brent Dax. I thought it was bad
enough back when I was working with Leon Brocard, who is also
disgustingly young, but at least he was old enough to drink beer and
vote. (It's very important that you do the former before the latter
apparently).
Parrot musical chairs
Some time after the next Parrot release everything's going to get moved
around in the parrot directory tree so things make a little more sense.
Dan laid out his vision. Leo liked it. Looks like it'll be happening.
<http://xrl.us/t4z>
Sorting out dependencies
Andy Dougherty has been shaking the parrot tree with different versions
of Perl and found some incompatibilities between the jako and perl6
languages and Perl 5.005. A few patches and skipped tests solved that.
<http://xrl.us/t42>
Attaching Debuggers
Nicholas Clark passed on the concerns of a nameless interlocutor who had
expressed a desire for a Perl debugger which could attach itself to a
troubled running process. This is, after all, something that gdb can
already do for C programs. Dan punted on details, but thinks it should
be possible to implement. It's definitely post 0.0.11 though. Michal
Wallace pointed out that Python is very 'hooky' and supports this.
<http://xrl.us/t43>
Various fixes
Because most of the week was spent under a feature freeze, the vast
majority of this week's threads have been the kind of short lived
"Patch! Applied!" bugfix threads. Suffice to say, lots of bugs and
niggles got stamped on by the usual heroes plus a few more heroes for
good measure.
Parrot 0.0.11 "Doubloon" Released
Parrot 0.0.11 got released on Saturday, narrowly missing "International
Talk Like a Pirate Day". It was almost immediately superceded by version
0.0.11.1 which fixed a slight oversight and introduced a new bug.
Breaking my 'midnight GMT cutoff' rule, the latest version, released is
actually 0.0.11.2, which deals with the fact that Parrot isn't set up to
handle 4 part version numbers.
<http://xrl.us/t44>
<http://xrl.us/t45> -- The "We really can't handle these version
numbers" release
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
Disposable optimization
The increasingly poorly named "Next Apocalypse" thread went off into
discussing the possibilities of disposable optimizations that could get
thrown out when invariants that they depend on no longer hold. This
rapidly developed into serious blue sky stuff that I can't help but
think is a little premature. Fascinating certainly, but I would like a
working language before we got off making it do all sorts of clever
optimization stuff.
<http://xrl.us/t46>
Acknowledgements, Announcements, Apologies
Sorry it's late.
I promised there will be new content at <http://www.bofh.org.uk:8080/>
last week and, well, I put some photos up. Maybe this week I'll actually
write something.
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