Perl 6 Summary for last week
The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021027 You may have noticed that this summary is late. Um... [looks sheepish, shuffles feet], the dog ate my homework. I did a tiny bit of procrastination at the beginning of the week and then got totally overtaken by events involving failed AC adaptors and general confusion. Sorry folks, it will probably happen again, but hopefully not in the near future. So, kicking off, as is customary, with perl6-internals before getting down to attempting to summarize the monster that was perl6-language: C# and Parrot The dialogue with Rhys Weatherley and Gopal V from the DotGNU project continues apace, mostly to do with clarifying what C# needs in the way of datatypes and the like. It appears that Leon Brocard is the go to guy if you need to know the exact details of almost anything in a language spec. Maybe he's just really good with Google. Gopal V wondered if there was someone involved in p5i who would mind acting as a liaison with the DotGNU people, who could give them a heads up when, say, the packfile format changed. Leopold Toetsch wondered what sort of changes were potential C# breakers, as there were probably things that we thought of as `internal' that the C# team could be depending on. Leo also thought that the liaison person should probably be Dan. http://makeashorterlink.com/?K57E12E42 Scratchpad confusion At the end of last week, Allen Short pointed out some discrepancies between the implementation of scratchpads and the description of them in PDD6. John Sillito reckoned that PDD6 was waiting on a rewrite from Dan, especially where Scratchpad PMCs were concerned as there were a couple of different patches waiting on Dan's say so. Dan also offered some clarification, but hasn't ruled on the Scratchpad PMCs yet. http://makeashorterlink.com/?B58E25E42 Help! Bugs! Crawling all over me! OR The road to 0.0.9 Steve Fink wants the GC bugs ironed out before he goes adding much in the way of new features, and he wants to start putting together a 0.0.9 with working GC too. To that end he deliberately broke all the tests by turning GC_DEBUG on for tests. There's a certain amount of cleverness involved in how he did this; read his post if you're interested. Peter Gibbs found what he thought was a fix for a couple of the failures and pointed to the possibility of a fundamental problem in MultiArray as the culprit for the remaining failure. Steve applied this patch with much rejoicing, and then came up with a trial patch that seemed to fix the multiarray triggered failure. This patch had not been finalized by the end of the week. Steve also kicked off discussion of the forthcoming 0.0.9 release, when he posted his list of prerequisites and sparked off a decent amount of discussion of various points. Steve's overarching goal for this release appears to be 'bug reduction and general consolidation'. http://makeashorterlink.com/?N19E21E42 http://makeashorterlink.com/?S2AE12E42 Keyed ops, the return. I think it's safe to say that some people aren't entirely happy with keyed ops as they stand now in Parrot. The week before, Leopold Toetsch had written a proposal for keyed ops. This week he supplied a proof of concept patch. Jürgen Bömmels liked it but Dan took a little more convincing. I'm not sure he is entirely convinced yet, but he's willing to live with it. http://makeashorterlink.com/?U5BE62E42 64-bit ints and non-capable hardware Dan announced that he was about to bite the bullet and declare that INTVALS have to be 64 bit integers and wanted to know of any (plausible) platforms that have neither native nor emulated 64 bit integers. Martin D Kealey pointed at what sounds like a scary proposal from C99 involving declarations and clever compilers and wondered if it might be a way forward for parrot. Rhys wondered how well the idea would play with something as dynamic as Parrot and the languages expected to run on it, but Martin didn't seem to think it would be much of a problem. http://makeashorterlink.com/?W1CE23E42 http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y1DE23E42 Configuring and DOD Erik Lechak couldn't get the latest parrot to build on WinXP. Josh Wilmes diagnosed a problem with the way the configuration tools probed for stack direction, and patched things so that stack direction detection was done at runtime once more. Jason Gloudon, who had moved the detection phase out into configuration time wasn't sure that this was a good idea 'cos it would lead to a performance hit in the stack walking code. Nicholas Clark, with his clever head on, came up with three different ways of doing things at runtime without a performance hit, and Dan blessed the third choice. http://makeashorte
Perl 6 Summary for last week
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 jus
