Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030720
Welcome back to an interim Perl 6 Summary, falling as it does between
two conference weeks; OSCON and YAPC::Europe. For reasons involving
insanity, a EuroStar ticket going begging, and undeserved generosity I
shall be bringing my conference haul up to 3 for the year. Yay me! Now
if I can just finagle a talk into the schedule I will have spoken at all
three too. I'll certainly have heckled at all three...
The State of the Onion
Tim Howell wondered if Larry's State of the Onion address to OSCON would
be available anywhere. Robert "White Camel" Spier didn't rest on his
laurels, but posted a link to Larry's slides and transcript. Chromatic
popped up with a different link, which neatly combines slides and
transcript. However, they both lack the funny balloon pony which I gave
Larry just before the talk. Maybe there will be video later.
http://xrl.us/mtl
http://xrl.us/mtm
A Small Perl Task for the Interested
A few weeks back, Dan asked for volunteers to improve Parrot's build
system. Lars Balker Rasmussen stepped up to the plate and offered a
simple wrapper. Josh Wilmes seems to be somewhat sceptical about the
whole endeavour, pointing at libtool as an illustration of the size of
the problem.
http://xrl.us/mtn
env.pmc
Parrot is in the process of getting an "env" PMC, for accessing
environment variables. Dan and Leo's discussion of the patch took in
iterators and the wisdom of caching values. In the end, Dan prevailed
and the environment PMC doesn't cache values.
http://xrl.us/mto
Dan on threading
"Yes, [there is some plan of how threading will work in Parrot]. (Though
there's some disagreement [as] to the solidity and sanity of the plan)"
Dan went on to outline the plan.
http://xrl.us/mtp
Event handling
Event handling appears to be the topic of the week. The consensus seems
to be that getting it right is hard. Lots of people offered constructive
suggestions and/or problem cases. I sat on the sidelines and trusted
them to get it Right (a strategy which seems to pay off remarkably
often, thankfully).
Damien Neil was rather less sure of the wisdom of Parrot's events and
asynchronous IO model, arguing for a system based on threading. Dan was
unconvinced. I don't think Damien was convinced either.
http://xrl.us/mtq
http://xrl.us/mtr
http://xrl.us/mts
IMCC sub names are not labels
Luke Palmer had some problems with using continuation passing style
subroutines in IMCC. Leo initially pointed out that IMCC didn't support
CPS, then he fixed it so that it did (sort of, the user still has to do
a chunk of the work, but sometimes that's a good thing).
In an example of synchronicity, Will Coleda had a similar problem. Leo's
fix helped him too, and he went off to continue hacking on TCL. (It
helps me too, I have this cunning plot you see...)
http://xrl.us/mtt
More on targeting GCC
In last week's summary I wondered what Tupshin Harper was talking about
when he suggested emulating a 'more traditional, stack-oriented
processor'. This week, Tupshin wished that 'people had the decency to
tell me how insane [the idea] is'. Dan obliged, telling Tupshin that he
was insane (but he did it with a smile).
The problem boils down to GCC's assumptions about the 'shape' of the
stack. GCC assumes a conventional, contiguous area of stack memory
filled with stack frames. Parrot assumes a garbage collected chain of
continuations, which is about as far as you can get from GCC's beliefs.
http://xrl.us/mtu
Parrot_sprintf not recognizing 7 in precision
mrnobo1024 posted a patch to fix a minor niggle with Parrot_sprintf.
Leon Brocard applied it.
http://xrl.us/mtv
Problems with new object ops
Dan has started adding real classes and objects to Parrot. (Yay!)
Simon Glover found some bugs. (Not entirely unexpected)
Simon also sent in a patch fixing the bugs. (Yay! Yay! and thrice Yay!)
http://xrl.us/mtw
The big core.ops split
Brent Dax has started work on splitting core.ops up from being the
second largest file in the Parrot distribution (108k) into a total of
10, rather more narrowly defined .ops files. Benjamin Goldberg wondered
if this would be a good time for tidying up the parrot directory
structure (at the very least, he called for moving the source files into
a src subdirectory).
Dan asked for a volunteer to rough out a move plan coving which files
move where and what the new directory structure would look like, which
would allow the CPAN jockeys to rearrange things in such a way that the
various files remember their histories.
http://xrl.us/mtx
Copyrights
Josh Wilmes posted a monster patch to unify the various copyright
notices attached to the files in the parrot distribution. Everything is
now (correctly) copyrighted by the Perl Foundation.
http://xrl.us/mty
Meanwhile in perl6-language
Somebody needs to set an Exegesis among the pigeons. There's all of 14
messages in there, and almost all of them are discussing the semantics
of aliasing an array slice.
http://xrl.us/mtz -- Alias those slices
Parsers with Pre-processors
I didn't quite understand what Dave Whipp was driving at when he talked
about overloading the "<ws>" pattern as a way of doing preprocessing of
Perl 6 patterns. I didn't understand Luke Palmer's answer either. Help.
http://xrl.us/mt2
Protocols
Luke Palmer's been toying with Objective-C (And why not, it's a nice
language) and would like Perl 6 to steal Objective-C's protocols.
(Objective C Protocols are a little like Java's interfaces, but nicer.)
I'm waiting for him to latch onto the idea of Categories which are
Objective C's way of adding methods to a class. At runtime.
Discussion of Luke's proposal centred on a couple of his peripheral
points, nobody's yet addressed his main point (but it looks like a
decent idea to me).
http://xrl.us/mt3
Acknowledgements, Announcements and Apologies
First of all, I plead insanity for my mistake of last week's summary.
PONIE does not stand for 'Perl On New Internal Architecture', it
obviously stands for 'Perl On New Implementation Engine'. I'm very, very
sorry and I'll try not to do it again.
Secondly, an announcement, I've started one of those punditry/bloggy
things. It's at http://xrl.us/mt4 (Snappy URL eh?) and it's called
'Just A Summary'. I'm expecting it to concentrate on Perl and Perl 6
related issues, but at the time of this writing I've only got two 'real'
articles up there so anything could happen.
As ever, if you've appreciated this summary, please consider one or more
of the following options:
* Send money to the Perl Foundation at
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ and help support the ongoing
development of Perl.
* Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open to
all. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ and http://www.parrotcode.org/
are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing
lists.
* Send feedback, flames, money, requests for consultancy, photographic
and writing commissions, or an apple 23" Cinema Display to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (One of these days that begging request
will work, and I'll be flabberghasted).
