The Perl 6 summary for the week ending 2006-02-12
Did I say Thursday night? What was I thinking? Blame Nikon for finally
delivering my D200; or just blame me for being a lazy git who spent
Thursday night recovering from the drive home from Liverpool and Friday
playing with a new toy and chatting to interesting people in the atrium
at SageGateshead.
So, here's part two of the summary, in which I summarize ancient history
in perl6-language.
This week in perl6-language
Overloading the variable declaration process
Darren Duncan asked that Perl 6 provide a way for a class/role/metaclass
to declare that all variables declared to be of that type are
automatically/implicitly set to a particular value at declaration time.
Larry's response was fascinating as he talked about what I find myself
thinking of a continuum of definedness, where, instead of worrying if a
variable is defined, the language/programmer/whatever only cares whether
it is defined enough. The syntax for asking such questions isn't really
defined enough yet.
Then it all got slightly philosophical with talk of the ideal of a dog
(when I think the questioner really wanted to talk about the ideal dog),
Platonism and Aristotelianism. And the metamodel.
And there was hypnotism.
<http://xrl.us/j36z>
Macros?
Last week, Brad Bowman asked a bunch of questions about the workings of
Perl 6 macros. This week, Larry offered answers.
<http://xrl.us/j362>
A proposition for streamlining Perl 6 development
Yuval Kogman had some ideas about how to make Perl 6 development go
faster. "Igor! More tuits!"
Some people disagreed with him. Some agreed. I am staying well out of
this one (at least in the summaries; I have opinions and I don't trust
them, or myself, enough to be able to write a properly impartial summary
of the discussions).
<http://xrl.us/j363>
Tokenizer hints, supporting delimited identifiers or symbols
Darren Duncan had another wish for Perl 6: a simple and terse way for
Perl 6 identifiers or symbols to be able to be composed of any
characters whatsoever... whoa! Deja vu!
Ah yes, I already did this one in part one. Move right along the
summary, nothing to see here.
<http://xrl.us/j364>
The definition of "say"
Simple question: how do you implement "say"?
The answer isn't quite as simple as you might think. Actually, that's
not true, the answer is simple, but the question has hidden depths.
Go read Robin Houston's question and its responses if you don't believe
me.
<http://xrl.us/j365>
Smart match table
Robin Houston had some questions/observations about the smart match
table in synopsis 4. This is the table that describes how the smart
match ("~~") operator does its comparisons. It turns out that the table
in the synopsis implies non-commutative behaviour, which came as
something of a surprise. I'm surprised this thread petered out so
quickly without any real resolution; it seems rather important to me.
<http://xrl.us/j366>
Acknowledgements, apologies and everything else
So, does the serial format work? Apart from the problem of not actually
getting on with part two when I should have done, it works remarkably
well for me. Writing the summary in one big chunk can be somewhat
daunting, especially if my brain gets fried by the first two lists.
Feedback is good.
Help Chip
<http://geeksunite.org/> -- Chip still needs help.
The usual coda
If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider
contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of
Perl.
<http://donate.perlfoundation.org/> -- The Perl Foundation
The Perl Foundation Blog is an excellent source of news about the Perl
Foundation's activities.
<http://blog.perlfoundation.org/>
Planet Perl Six is a handy news aggregator of several Perl 6 related
sources.
<http://planet6.perl.org/>
<http://dev.perl.org/perl6/> -- Perl 6 Development site
Check out my website, it's lovely.
<http://www.bofh.org.uk/>
--
Piers Cawley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.bofh.org.uk/
