The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20040215
In his talk on Parrot at OSCON last year, Dan said that Parrot would
have objects 'by the end of the week'. It's been a very long week, and
it's not finished yet.
Right, venting over, time for the summary. I'll start with
perl6-internals, as always. Actually, we're starting slightly before the
usual start of the week because about half an hour after I sent last
week's summary off I realised I'd completely missed a couple of threads.
Some minor decisions and timetables
Dan made a few design decisions and outlined a release timetable for the
next release of Parrot (which was initially set to be Valentine's Day,
but the appeal of February 29th for a Leap Parrot release proved to be
greater).
http://tinyurl.com/2y8fz
Why didn't I mention this last week?
Jens Rieks earns a "Wow, cool!" from me with his parrot version of
Data::Dumper. Way to go Jens. People were impressed.
http://tinyurl.com/2uebj
Supporting simple PMCs as keys
Stéphane Payrard posted a patch to support using simple PMCs instead of
full on key PMCs for simple lookups. He and Leo discussed it, but the
patch hasn't been accepted yet.
http://tinyurl.com/2fru2
Keyed access to UnManagedStruct
Everyone's favourite differently capitalized O'Reilly employee,
chromatic (Maybe the new running joke should be my struggles to avoid
using his name at the start of a sentence so we don't have a falling out
cases), continued his discussion with Leo about keyed access to
Unmanaged (and presumably managed) C structs.
http://tinyurl.com/yuk3m
http://tinyurl.com/2c6z6 -- An example of chromatic's problem
Backward branch, fixed
Remember the problem with a backward branch that I said was Warnocked
last week. It turned out that it was fixed before I posted the summary.
They don't call Leo Tötsch the Patchmonster for nothing.
http://tinyurl.com/24tre
Parrot "system"
Dan apologized for his recent silence on list, but thought he'd be more
active from now on. He also announced that he was in the process of
adding in perl 5 style "system" support
http://tinyurl.com/2jg8v
Parrot sort
Jens Rieks garnered more kudos with his implementation of a simple _sort
function in IMC. Leo checked it in, and you'll find it in
library/sort.imc in an up to date CVS distribution. Then, seemingly in
his spare time, he fixed up some SDL related stuff for chromatic.
http://tinyurl.com/3fm4w
RFD: Symbol naming and IMCC2
Melvin Smith posted a Request For Discussion about how IMCC2 will handle
symbols and sigils. The issue seems to be that, for humans writing code,
quoting symbols is a pain. Various options were suggested, but nothing
appears to have been decided yet. (I quite like Leo's suggestion
involving declaring lexicals with a mangled name for use in parrot, but
marking it as being associated with an $unmangled_original_name.)
http://tinyurl.com/2ovqp
JIT and branches under the Sun
Stephane Peiry found with the JIT on Suns; it seems that a loop that
should terminate carries on forever instead. He and Leo worked on
tracking it down, but the bug was still there by the end of the week.
http://tinyurl.com/2acc8
Rules for method resolution?
Okay, so I may have kvetched about the continuing lack of Parrot objects
earlier, but Dan's definitely working on it. This time he's thinking
about method resolution. In particular he wondered when
findmethod P4, Pobject, "methodname"
should do the name resolution. In other words, should P4 contain the
method that was current at the time of the "findmethod" call, or a proxy
PMC that waits until the method is invoked to find the appropriate
method. The discussion seemed to come down in favour of doing both.
http://tinyurl.com/232lg
Object spec
Dan noted that he'd checked in some major revisions to PDD15 (objects!)
and suggested that people take a look. Simon Glover, Leo Tötsch and LF
had questions.
http://tinyurl.com/2hm3x
Meanwhile in perl6-language
The thread that ate the mailing list
Luke Palmer doesn't like the repetition inherent in
@sorted = sort { $^a.foo('bar').compute <=> $^b.foo('bar').compute }
@unsorted;
He wondered if there might be some way of rejigging "sort" to eliminate
the duplication and proposed a couple of spectacularly ugly
possibilities. And then the world exploded. It seems that nobody (on
perl6-language) actually likes the current signature of "sort", but
nobody can quite agree on what it *should* look like. You know things
are getting hand when Dan proposes just using SQL's "ORDER BY" syntax
(even though he was joking). Simon "Rubyometer" Cozens proposed:
@sorted = @unsorted.sort(op => &infix:<=>,
key => { $^a.foo('bar').compute });
Which, I have to confess, I rather like. Rod Adams demonstrated a truly
painful looking sort function which this summary is too succinct to
contain, see the link for details.
Personally, I'm amazed that a single library function could generate so
much discussion. And there's more to come next week.
http://tinyurl.com/3drwy
http://tinyurl.com/2sk5l
http://tinyurl.com/2exo4 -- Feel Rod's pain.
Haven't I had this feeling of déja vů before?
Dmitry Dorofeev pointed everyone at Scharli et al's paper on Smalltalk
Traits and proposed that Perl 6 use something similar. Which is what
Larry proposed a few weeks back, except he called Traits Roles and
propose that they also have (or mandate) state (the original Smalltalk
Traits are stateless). Aaron Sherman wondered if the Emperor was
actually wearing clothes by saying that Roles didn't seem to be
substantially different from Java interfaces. I particularly liked
chromatic's answer that "interfaces completely suck while [Roles]
don't." My other favourite quote of the thread was from (who else)
Larry: "The Traits paper didn't go into traits with state, though it did
mention it as a future research topic. We're just doing that future
research for them."
http://tinyurl.com/32ttd
Announcements, Acknowledgements, Apologies
Well, I've thought about it some more, and I'd like you all to welcome
chromatic as the Perl 6 Summary's official running joke. I don't
guarantee to mention him every week, but I do guarantee that I'll always
jump through hoops to avoid starting a sentence with his name when I do
mention him.
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], or drop by my website.
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site
http://www.bofh.org.uk/ -- My website, "Just a Summary"
