The documentation thing I've noticed too. A big reason I use perl is
there's a lot of documentation and I was able to teach myself. That's
not very easy with a lot of other languages. I don't deal at all with
PAST because the best reference documentation would be
examples/past/hello.past and it's not helpful.
I think it'd help to have a wiki available for learning each of pasm,
pir, and past. One of the first things I did to work with pir is port
a couple of the small pasm examples to pir. Because of constant
changes with things within parrot it's hard to keep track of what
you're supposed to do to get what result, and what some new addition
does in an easily understandable way.
Joshua
On Dec 10, 2005, at 4:11 PM, Joshua Hoblitt wrote:
I believe that you are correct that it does not end there.
[below is a general comment, it is in no way directed towards Jerry]
I feel that we are in desperate need of clear and easy to understand
PIR
documentation that is targeted at end users. And that is definitely
not
the situation at the moment. I read p6i every single day and I have
trouble keeping up with the current state of PIR syntax. That just
isn't a viable solution for the size of the community this project is
hoping to attract. The basic premise we should be following is
something like, "If you document it, they will come". Most PIR
programmers/Parrot targeters will not care about the name of Parrot's
internal subprograms, IMCC is no different.
There are a number of competent technical writers on this mailing list
that could make a big difference for a fairly modest investment of
time.
There's no reason that such an effort couldn't become the basis for a
'Learning PIR' book. Any volunteers?
Cheers,
-J
--
