The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021020
I'm sorry to have to inform you that I've returned from my holiday (no,
base jumping and paragliding were *not* involved) and that this week's
summary will not be written by the estimable Leon Brocard. Sorry about
that. Leon is currently taking a rest cure.
So, with the customary mention of Mister Brocard out of the way good and
early this week, it's time to take a look at what's been discussed on
the internals list:
Regarding JVM - Parrot Compatibility
Newcomer Karthik Kumar is interested in writing a tool to convert java
.class files to parrot .pbc files and asked for information on what
had been done in this area. Leon Brocard says it's very easy to get the
basics working because of the low number of JVM bytecodes. But getting
the fundamentals (classes, objects) right is hard. Ramesh
Ananthakrishnan commented that it might be a little early for anything
more than proofs of concept at the moment as Parrot is a rapidly moving
target. Ramesh also came up with the idea of compiling `real machine'
assembly language to `virtual machine' parrot assembler.
Karthik commented that the real issue seems to be one of what level of
support Parrot will offer for objects, and until that is known the
class-parrot problem is almost pointless to solve.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?S18F26432
http://makeashorterlink.com/?C19F22432 -- Ramesh clarifies his `Linux
in Parrot' idea.
The Getting Started Guide
Erik Lechak is still not loving POD but, despite his distaste he posted
version 0.4 of his getting started guide in POD format. Thanks a lot
Erik. Marty Pauley suggested that Erik take a look at the Simple
Document Format which may meet his needs better than POD
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F2AF11432
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z5BF34432
C# and Parrot
Rhys Weatherly, author of Portable.NET, part of the DotGNU project made
a welcome appearance on the list. Apparently the DotGNU people are
looking into compiling C# down to parrot bytecode and hoped that there
might be parrot people who were interested in trying to complete their
compiler and system library.
Rhys wanted to know how to make a user-defined class in Parrot; what the
convention is for which registers must be saved across a call; the size
of int and whether there was a way to store and access auxiliary data
in a Parrot bytecode file.
Answers were provided. Sadly, the answer to Rhys's question about
user-defined classes was You don't, yet. Other answers were more
immediately useful.
The DotGNU weekly IRC meeting discussed Parrot this week, Leon and Dan
managed to cover both sessions between them, and there's a log
available.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M2CF21432
http://makeashorterlink.com/?J1DF11432 -- Condensed summary of the
meeting
http://ajmitch.dhis.org/dotgnu/ -- unedited logs available here
Variable/Value Split Prelims
Leopold Toetsch rather confused me when he replied to a two week old
message (I thought I'd completely screwed up setting the `limit by date'
values in my summary buffer) about the conceptual split between
variables and values. Leo wanted some clarification which Dan provided.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M4EF21432 -- Dan's old message
http://makeashorterlink.com/?C3FF22432 -- Leo's questions
PMC Initializers
Leon Brocard attempted to kick start discussion of Jonathan Sillito's
patch to pass more information when creating new PMCs. Leopold Toetsch
and Josef Höök both said they thought that something along those lines
was a good idea, but the discussion seemed to die there. Later in the
week, Dan introduced the new init_pmc function to PDD02, which works
along the lines suggested.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?V20023532
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I11021532
PerlHash questions
Clinton A. Pierce wondered about how to do the equivalent of exists
$hash{$key} in Parrot when one doesn't necessarily know the types of
the things in the hash. Leo Toetsch pointed to exists_keyed and
type_keyed. Jason Gloudon pointed out that the docs for type_keyed
referred only to PMCs, with no mention of 'primitive' types. He wondered
if PerlHash shouldn't just dictate that its contents were all PMCs.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M62042532
Meanwhile in Perl6-language
The language group is trying to catch up with internals in number of
posts. They managed 89 posts this week compared to internals' 96. If you
discount attachments, language probably won on volume (and it certainly
wins hands down on the `difficulty of summarization' metric).
Draft Proposal: Declaring Classwide Attributes
The discussion of how to declare classwide attributes rumbled on from
last week; I'll just pick out a few
