The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-09-17
Another week, another summary, and I'm running late. So:
This week in perl6-compiler
The current state of the compiler
Discussion of the current state of the nascent perl 6 compiler and how
best to contribute to its development even before code has been released
continued. The best way to contribute right now is "Write tests". Don't
worry about what the test harness should look like, simple tables of
rules, test strings and expected matches will be very welcome.
The status discussion also touched on how to handle different languages
in the closures embedded in rules.
Bootstrapping the grammar
Uri Guttman had some thoughts on bootstrapping Perl 6's grammar. He
hoped that his suggested approach would enable lots of people to work on
the thing at once without necessarily getting in each other's way. Adam
Turoff pointed everyone at a detailed description of how Squeak (a free
Smalltalk) got bootstrapped.
http://xrl.us/c6kp
Synopsis 5 updated
Larry announced that he has updated Synopsis 5, which covers Grammars,
rules and all that good stuff. It's now only a week out of date instead
of two years and counting.
http://xrl.us/c6kq
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/synopsis/S05.html -- Synopsis 5
This week on perl6-internals
Namespaces
Discussion of Dan's namespace proposal really got going this week.
http://xrl.us/c6kr
Buffered IO and Parrot Forth
Matt Diephouse fell foul of a problem with IO buffering when he was
taking a look at Parrot Forth, so he asked the list for help. Leo
supplied the help, so Matt supplied a patch to Parrot Forth which made
it print its prompts correctly when run under modern (CVS) Parrot.
http://xrl.us/c6ks
Pragma @LOAD is not always honoured
Stéphane Payrard was bemused to discovered that parrot routines declared
with the @LOAD pragma don't get automatically executed if they're in the
main segment. He suggested that the issue be either fixed or documented.
Leo documented it.
http://xrl.us/c6kt
NCI basics
Charles Somebody tried to crash the monomonikered big leagues by failing
to vouchsafe his surname when he posted a question about getting NCI to
work with wxWindows. For reasons that escape me, the answers (and,
indeed, Charles's surname -- Lowell) appeared in a different thread.
Sadly the answers were more along the lines of "Oops, that's a bug that
is, we'll add it to the RT queue". Still better to have it identified
than festering away undiscovered.
http://xrl.us/c6ku
http://xrl.us/c6kv
Language::Zcode
Who says Perl 6 is the only language that's taking a long time to appear
on Parrot? Amir Karger posted his first annual update on his attempt to
get Parrot to emulate the Z-machine. Hopefully subsequent updates will
be more frequent.
http://xrl.us/c6kw
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
Ordinals, Hashes and Arrays, oh my!
David Green had some thoughts on Perl 6's compound data structures.
Larry didn't sound convinced.
http://xrl.us/c6kx
Writing "pack", or something like it
Michele Dondi wondered how to write "pack"-like functions in Perl 6,
where the first argument is a string which specifies the signature of
the rest of the function call. The proposal stumped me, but maybe you
all can make something of it.
http://xrl.us/c6ky
But is it intuitive?
No it isn't.
http://xrl.us/c6kz
S5 Grammar compositions
While peacefully reading Synopsis 5 (Rules & Grammars), Dave Whipp
noticed that grammatical inheritance wasn't as flexible as the Role
based compositions that can be used when working with classes. Larry
wondered allowed about having grammar roles, but I don't think they've
been officially mandated yet...
http://xrl.us/c6k2
Still about subroutines...
Michele Dondi continues to make my head hurt with zir proposals. In part
it's because I've still not worked out whether zie is male or female,
and in part because, well, zir proposals are challenging. In this
particular proposal zie wondered if there would be a way to magically
write recursive anonymous functions without having to introduce a new
symbol of some sort.
Luke and Larry think there will be such a way, but the precise syntax
hasn't been settled just yet.
http://xrl.us/c6k3
Range quantifier woes
Jonathan Scott Duff wasn't happy with the new range quantifier syntax in
Synopsis 5. He posted a bunch of questions that were nagging at him.
Larry had some good answers (if you're interested in contributing to the
design of Perl 6 you should *really* read Larry's replies).
http://xrl.us/c6k4
Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements
And so ends another summary. I hope you liked it. Sorry for the delay if
you're reading this on the mailing list; this teacher training malarkey
is remarkably tiring.
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 feedback or contributions to a
'getting Piers to OSCON 2005' fund to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site
Or, you can check out my website.
http://www.bofh.org.uk/
