The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-07-10
Another week down, another summer summary. On a Monday no less. Last
week I even managed to get the summary to the mailing lists before the
Perl 5 Porters summary. I may have been even more surprised that Rafael
by that. Let's see if I can do it again.
We'll kick off with perl6-internals as usual (though it was actually the
quieter list this week).
The Pie-thon charge
A good deal of this week's work was Pie-thon related, what with the
looming deadline and all. The effort hasn't been exactly helped by Dan's
problems with unreliable laptops. However, it's apparent that the effort
is helping to flush all sorts of issues out.
http://xrl.us/cdrm -- Dan thinks about generic new PMCs
http://xrl.us/cdrn -- Dan on parrot/python opcodes
http://xrl.us/cdro -- Getting Python::Bytecode to work
http://xrl.us/cdrp -- Leo's summary of Pie-thon activities
http://xrl.us/cdrq -- a new Python::Bytecode
Changing the Perl 6 Guard
The Perl Foundation is looking for a good person to take on the
responsibility of getting the Perl 6 compiler working. Parrot's reached
the point where it can probably support all of Perl 6 (or can be made to
support it), and the Perl 6 design is (while not complete) good enough
to start implementing. The catch is Dan's not got the time to work on
Parrot and implementing Perl 6 as well. So, we need a volunteer.
Read Dan's job spec and if you think you've got the skills (especially
the people skills) then Allison Randal and the rest of the Perl 6 Cabal
will be very happy to hear from you. Austin Hastings attempted to
volunteer Luke Palmer, but Luke's keeping schtum. Personally I think
he'd be a cracking candidate for the post, but he's the only person who
can decide to volunteer.
http://xrl.us/cdrr -- The job ad
Parrot m4
Bernhard Schmalhofer posted a patch to get the parrot implementation of
m4 working again.
http://xrl.us/cdrs
native_pbc fixes
Jarkko Hietaniemi posted a bunch of changes to get the native_pbc tests
working on 64 bit platforms. Thanks Jarkko, it's good to see another
Perl 5 Porter working on Parrot.
http://xrl.us/cdrt
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
Just like the old days
Matija Papec wondered if it would be possible to continue to use simple
unquoted hash keys (a la $hash{MYKEY}) instead of the new "%hash«MYKEY»"
syntax. "Of course!" replied Luke Palmer, posting a macro to fix things
up. The thread moved on to discussing the sorts of macros/operators that
it'd be possible to implement. It got scary when Luke and Larry talked
about writing a macro to declare new grammatical categories that could
be used to declare subsequent macros/operators.
http://xrl.us/cdru
Predeclaration of subs
Noting that it was now possible to write
$obj.meth "foo"
where, in Perl 5, one would have to write "$obj->meth("foo")", Luke
Palmer wondered whether there would still be a requirement to predeclare
"foo" in order to be able to say
foo "bar", "baz";
He went on to wonder how the new rules affected
method evil($x is rw)
Larry gave one of his thinking aloud answers. Essentially, there's
context trickiness to be worked out, but he thinks that requiring method
calls to evaluate their arguments in a list context and requiring
predeclaration of functions that force scalar contexts on their
arguments should be good enough to avoid ambiguity.
http://xrl.us/cdrv
Graphemes and codepoints and bytes, oh my!
The discussion of Perl 6's Unicode handling continued for another week.
http://xrl.us/cdrw
Scalar subscripting
Guatam Gopalakrishnan wondered about the meaning of $a[0] now that array
subscripting was done using @a[0]. He proposed that it could be used for
'peeking into scalars', particularly strings.
Luke Palmer pointed out that $a[0] actually expands to "$a.[0]" which,
when $a is an array, is an array subscript as per usual. He pointed out
that this had also come up in the ongoing "Graphemes and codepoints and
bytes" thread, where such things as "$str.bytes[0]" had been discussed.
http://xrl.us/cdrx
C style commas
Michele Dondi is another person who doesn't like the thought of losing
the ability to say
print, next if /stgh/;
or something very like it, so he induced deja vu in your Summarizer by
suggesting something involving "then". Larry pointed out that Perl 6's
comma would still work perfectly well in this case.
The thread expanded into a discussion of various issues to do with
statement modifiers, in particular "do {...} while ...", which continues
to be illegal in core Perl 6.
http://xrl.us/cdry
Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements
Quote of the week comes from Larry Wall: "I'm also trying to learn perl6
after using perl5 for some time." I think it probably applies to all of
us.
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]
You could also wish me luck on Tuesday 12th of July when I'll be
interviewing for a place to train as a maths teacher. (You only have to
read these summaries to realise why I'm not after training as an English
teacher).
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site
