Perl 6 Summary for 2004-11-29 through 2004-12-06
All~
Last week I asked for help identifying the source of a quotation. One
friendly soul suggested Alan J. Perlis, but could not find an actual
attribution. It did lead me to find a very applicable (and in my mind
funny) quote from Perlis, which I will now inflict upon you all, before
your regularly scheduled summary:
When someone says I want a programming language in which I need only
say what I wish done, give him a lollipop. -Alan J. Perlis
Perl 6 Language
qq:i
Jim Cromie wondered if there could be a qq:i which sometimes
interpolates and sometimes doesn't depending on whether the variable had
been previously defined. There was some discussion which led to the
conclusion that this was just asking for strange bugs.
http://xrl.us/d95h
getters and setters
John Siracusa wanted to know if Perl 6 would allow one to expose a
member variable to the outside world, but then later intercept
assignments to it without actually having to switch to using getters and
setters in all of the code that uses the variable. The answer: yes, yes
you can.
http://xrl.us/d95i
« foo
Richard Proctor asked if he could do list of words». Juerd pointed out
that this had already been asked. Which brings us to the fine point, ask
not Larry for he will tell you both yes and no. Although in this case I
think he said, probably...
http://xrl.us/d95j
flipflop operator
Juerd wondered about the fate of the flipflop. Larry explained that
while it had lost the election it was still going to work hard for you
in the Senate. Err, that's not quite right, he said that It's leaving
syntactically but not semantically., but the new syntax has not been
specified...
http://xrl.us/d95k
temp $var
Alexey Trofimenko wanted to know whether temp would preserve or
destroy its old value. Larry is leaning towards the Perl 5 semantics of
destroying, I think.
http://xrl.us/d95m
state vs my
Alexey Trofimenko wondered how much advice about optimizing Ruby also
applied to perl. Unfortunately, he also misunderstood the state
specifier. The topic then quickly veered into what exactly state
does.
http://xrl.us/d95n
specifying a hash's key type
Abhijit Mahabal wanted to know if he could specify a hash's key type.
The answer is yes, but the exact syntax seems to be worth a discussion.
Luke Palmer, in his Mathematician's rage, attempted to shoot down any
usage of Domain and Range, as they really should be Domain and Codomain.
http://xrl.us/d95o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_%28mathematics%29 -- wikipedia:
range Range (mathematics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
container methods
Ashley Winters wants to have syntax for calling a method on the
container object rather than the containee. Luke Palmer agreed that this
was problematic. Larry appears to be in no hurry to add more operators
for this one, yet.
http://xrl.us/d95p
slight discrepancy between synopses
Stéphane Payrard pointed out a small issue in some synopses. Larry
replied oops.
http://xrl.us/d95q
arrays, lists, iterators, functions, coroutines, syntax
Many people suggested many things about the best thing to replace the
now missingop. I think Larry is leaning towards adding a undare
= op, which would do cool things. I don't thing anything is final
yet.
http://xrl.us/d95r -- iterators as functions
http://xrl.us/d95s -- unary = talk
Push/Pop/Pull/Monkey
Many folk voiced their dislike of shift and unshift. I must agree with
them, but they also suggested a great many alternatives, including
pull/put, get/unget, and even getting rid of Push/Pop. I must say that I
really dislike that last idea, fortunately I am no alone. Currently we
are waiting for inspiration to strike.
http://xrl.us/d95t
Topicalization
It was noticed that for might override one's topic at undesired
times. Larry rumminated about ways to solve this.
http://xrl.us/d95u
Required Whitespace
Rod Adams does not like inconsistent whitespace rules. Larry explained
why the existing rules really were consistent.
http://xrl.us/d95v
Perl 6 Compilers
The lack of traffic on p6c has given me another space to abuse. You
should listen to Soul Coughing. If you would like to join in the fun
of abusing p6c, you should submit tests. Nothing is more abusive then
stress testing ;-)
Parrot
Tuning and Monitoring
Matt S asked how much support for tuning and monitoring. This week I
exercise the awesome powers of the summarizer and invoke the mighty
Warnock's Dilemnia.
http://xrl.us/d95w
imcc.globals--
Leo removed some imcc globals. Nice work.
http://xrl.us/d95x
ensure directories exist first
