Re: "Disappearing" code

2003-01-12 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: sub debug is immediate is exported (@message) { return $debugging ?? { print $*STDERR: @message; } :: {;} } Won't @message need lazy evaluation? How will Perl know to delay interpolation until the result of the "macro" is called at run time? - Ken

Re: right-to-left pipelines

2002-12-10 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: For that reason, even if we can solve this puzzle, it might be far kinder just to enforce parens. I might be weird, but when I use parens to clarify code in Perl, I like to use the Lisp convention: (method $object args) Hopefully that will still work even if Perl 6 requi

Use CPAN to help define built-ins and globals?

2002-12-09 Thread Ken Fox
Smylers wrote: Ken Fox wrote: How about formalizing global namespace pollution with something like the Usenet news group formation process? Ship Perl 6 with a very small number of global symbols and let it grow naturally. If the initial release of Perl 6 doesn't have commonly-req

Re: purge: opposite of grep

2002-12-08 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: Ken Fox asked: Is it correct to think of flattening context as a lexical flattening? i.e. only terms written with @ are flattened and the types of the terms can be ignored? I'm not sure I understand this question. Sometimes array references behave as arrays, e.g.

Re: purge: opposite of grep

2002-12-08 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: sub part ($classifier, *@list) { return @parts; } Given the original example (@foo,@bar,@zap) := part [ /foo/, /bar/, /zap/ ] @source; this binds the contents of @parts to (@foo,@bar,@zap)? The array refs in @parts are not flattened though. Is it c

Re: purge: opposite of grep

2002-12-07 Thread Ken Fox
Michael Lazzaro wrote: (@foo,@bar,@zap) := classify { /foo/ ;; /bar/ ;; /zap/ } @source; A shorthand for: for @source { given { when /foo/ { push @foo, $_ } when /bar/ { push @bar, $_ } when /zap/ { push @zap, $_ } } } How about just (@foo,@bar,@

Re: Continuations

2002-11-18 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: It's [<<...>>>] the ASCII synonym for the «...» operator, which is a synonym for the qw/.../ operator. Nope. Heredocs still start with <<. Hey! Where'd *that* card come from? ;) Seriously, that's a good trick. How does it work? What do these examples do? print <<"a" "

Re: Continuations

2002-11-18 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: Ken Fox wrote: The < must begin the circumfix <> operator. Or the circumfix <<...>> operator. Which is the problem here. This is like playing poker with God. Assuming you can get over the little hurdles of Free Will and Omniscience, there'

Re: Continuations

2002-11-18 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: my $iter = fibses(); for < <$iter> > {...} (Careful with those single angles, Eugene!) Operator << isn't legal when the grammar is expecting an expression, right? The < must begin the circumfix <> operator. Is the grammar being weakened so that yacc can handle it?

Re: String concatentation operator

2002-11-14 Thread Ken Fox
Michael G Schwern wrote: Before this starts up again, I hereby sentence all potential repliers to first read: "string concatenation operator - please stop" http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@;perl.org/msg06710.html The bike shed thing is like Godwin's Law. Only I don't know which side

Re: String concatentation operator

2002-11-14 Thread Ken Fox
Andy Wardley wrote: Can we overload + in Perl 6 to work as both numeric addition and string concatenation ... Isn't there some nifty Unicode operator perl6 could enlist? ;) How about concatenating adjacent operands? ANSI C does this with string constants and it works very well. It would become

Re: Supercomma! (was Re: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, demos)

2002-11-05 Thread Ken Fox
Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: Um ... could we have a zip functor as well? I think the common case will be to pull N elements from each list rather than N from one, M from another, etc. So, in the spirit of timtowtdi: for zip(@a,@b,@c) -> $x,$y,$z { ... } sub zip (\@:ref repeat{1,}) { my $ma

Keywords global or only in context?

2002-11-05 Thread Ken Fox
Me wrote: YAK for marking something. I've been assuming that a keyword will only have meaning in contexts where the keyword is valid. Given the shiny new top-down grammar system, there's no requirement for keywords to be global. (Context sensitive keywords fall out of Perl 6 grammars naturally

Re: How to set your Windows keyboard to ¶erl-mode

2002-11-04 Thread Ken Fox
Austin Hastings wrote: The << and >> ... are just as pictographic (or not) as [ and ]. I'm not particularly fond of << or >> either. ;) Damian just wrote that he prefers non-alphabetic operators to help differentiate nouns and verbs. I find it helpful when people explain their biases like that.

Re: How to set your Windows keyboard to ¶erl-mode

2002-11-04 Thread Ken Fox
Austin Hastings wrote: At this point, Meestaire ISO-phobic Amairecain Programmaire, you have achieved keyboard parity with the average Swiss six-year-old child. The question is not about being ISO-phobic or pro-English. ** The question is whether we want a pictographic language. I like the siz

Re: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, demos

2002-11-04 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: Larry Wall wrote: That suggests to me that the circumlocution could be >>*<<. A five character multiple symbol??? I guess that's the penalty for not upgrading to something that can handle unicode. Unless this is subtle humor, the Huffman encoding idea is getting seriously

Re: Blocks and semicolons

2002-09-12 Thread Ken Fox
Luke Palmer wrote: > On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Ken Fox wrote: > > Perl already needs infinite lookahead. > > Really? Where? Indirect objects need infinite lookahead and they are in the core language. Hyper operators may need lookahead. Place holders may need lookahead. User def

Re: Blocks and semicolons

2002-09-12 Thread Ken Fox
Luke Palmer wrote: > This requires infinite lookahead to parse. Nobody likes infinite > lookahead grammars. Perl already needs infinite lookahead. Anyways, most people don't care whether a grammar is ambiguous or not -- if we did, natural human languages would look very different. People want

Re: Hypothetical variables and scope

2002-09-08 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > Though leaving optimization in the hands of the programmer > is generally a Bad Idea. That doesn't sound like a Perl slogan. > It's also a matter of syntactic consistency. It has to be := for > "inlined" bindings (i.e. rx/ $name:= /) because otherwise > we make = meta (whi

Re: Suggestion for perl 6 regex syntax

2002-09-07 Thread Ken Fox
Mr. Nobody wrote: > /^([+-]?)(?=\d|\.\d)\d*(\.\d*)?([Ee]([+-]?\d+))?$/ > > would actually become longer: > > /^(<[+-]>?)\d*(\.\d*)?(<[Ee]>(<[+-]>?\d+))?$/ Your first expression uses capturing parens, but the captures don't bind anything useful, so you should probably compare non-capturing versi

Re: Hypothetical variables and scope

2002-09-05 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > Because what you do with a hypothetical has to be reversible. > And binding is far more cheaply reversible than assignment. Why not leave it in the language spec then? If it's too hard to implement, then the first release of Perl 6 can leave it out. Someday somebody might c

Re: Request for default rule modifiers in a grammar

2002-09-05 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > I would imagine that modifiers would be passed some > kind of hierarchical representation of the rule > they're modifying (i.e. a parse tree of it), and > would be expected to manipulate that structure > representation. Excellent. Will there be an abstract syntax for tree r

Re: regex args and interpolation

2002-09-04 Thread Ken Fox
David Whipp wrote: > But can I use a non-constant date? You didn't show us the iso_date rule. > Obviously we could put the onus on the module writer to write super-flexible > rules/grammars. But will there be an easy way to force interpolative context > onto this type of regex-valued subroutine

Re: Multimethod Dispatch

2002-09-04 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 9:10 AM -0400 9/4/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> So, just to clarify, does that mean that multi-dispatch is (by >> definition) >> a run-time thing, and overloading is (by def) a compile time thing? > > No. They can be both compile time things or runtime things, dependin

Re: Multimethod Dispatch

2002-09-04 Thread Ken Fox
David Wheeler wrote: > Ah, yes, the same thing exists in Java. I remember, now. I thought Java only has over loading? Over loading is what C++ has. It is not the same as multi-dispatch. The trouble with over loading is that the compiler uses static (compile-time) type information to select the o

Re: Hypothetical variables and scope

2002-09-03 Thread Ken Fox
Peter Haworth wrote: > Also the different operators used (:= inside the rule, = inside the code) > seems a bit confusing to me; I can't see that they're really doing anything > different: > > / $x := (gr\w+) /vs/ (gr\w+) { let $x = $1 } / > > Shouldn't they both use C< := > ? Depen

Re: Request for default rule modifiers in a grammar

2002-09-02 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > One possibility is that a modifier is > implemented via a special class: > > my class Decomment is RULE::Modifier >is invoked(:decomment) { > method SETUP ($data, $rule) { > ... > } > # etc. >

Request for default rule modifiers in a grammar

2002-09-01 Thread Ken Fox
The thing I'd like to do right now is turn on :w for all rules. A Fortran grammar might want to turn on :i for all rules. Maybe add modifiers to the grammar declaration? grammar Fortran :i { ... } It would also be convenient to allow the :w modifier to have lexically scoped behavior so a gra

Re: atomicness and \n

2002-08-31 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > No. It will be equivalent to: > > <[\x0a\x0d...]> I don't think \n can be a character class because it is a two character sequence on some systems. Apoc 5 said \n will be the same everywhere, so won't it be something like rule \n { \x0d \x0a | \x0d | \x0a } Hmm.

Re: @array = %hash

2002-08-31 Thread Ken Fox
Simon Cozens wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Damian Conway) writes: > >>> %hash4 = ("Something", "mixing", pairs => and, "scalars"); >> >>That's perfectly okay (except you forgot the quotes around the >>and you have an odd number of elements initializing the hash). > > Urgh, no. Either a pair is a

Re: Regex stuff...

2002-08-31 Thread Ken Fox
Piers Cawley wrote: > Unless I'm very much mistaken, the order of execution will > look like: > > $2:=$1; $1:=$2; You're not binding $2:=$1. You're binding $2 to the first capture. By default $1 is also bound to the first capture. Assuming that numbered variables aren't special, the orde

Re: backtracking into { code }

2002-08-30 Thread Ken Fox
Larry Wall wrote: > There's a famous book called "Golf is Not a Game of Perfect". Well now I'm *totally* confused. I looked that up on Amazon and it has something to do with clubs and grass and stuff. That's completely different than what I thought golfing was. ;) Seriously, though. I have a pos

Re: backtracking into { code }

2002-08-30 Thread Ken Fox
Larry Wall wrote: > On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Ken Fox wrote: > : Ok, thanks. (The "followed by a colon" is just to explain the behavior, > : right? It's illegal to follow a code block with a colon, isn't it?) > > I don't see why it should be illegal--it cou

Re: backtracking into { code }

2002-08-30 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > rule expr1 { > { m:cont/@operators/ or fail } > } > > Backtracking would just step back over the rule as if it were atomic > (or followed by a colon). Ok, thanks. (The "followed by a colon" is just to explain the behavior, right? It's illegal to follow a

Re: backtracking into { code }

2002-08-29 Thread Ken Fox
Aaron Sherman wrote: > rule { { /@operators/.commit(1) or fail } } > > The hypothetical commit() method being one that would take a number and That would only be useful if the outer rule can backtrack into the inner /@operators/ rule. Can it? I agree with you that a commit method woul

backtracking into { code }

2002-08-29 Thread Ken Fox
A question: Do rules matched in a { code } block set backtrack points for the outer rule? For example, are these rules equivalent? rule expr1 { { /@operators/ or fail } } rule expr2 { @operators } And a comment: It would be nice to have procedural control over back- tracking

Re: Light ideas

2002-08-03 Thread Ken Fox
Uri Guttman wrote: > but remember that whitespace is ignored as the /x mode is on > all the time. Whoops, yeah. For some reason I kept literal mode on when reading the spaces between two literals. The rules {foo bar} and {foobar} are the same, but some very low level part of my brain is resisti

Re: Light ideas

2002-08-03 Thread Ken Fox
Dave Storrs wrote: > why didn't you have to write: > > rule ugly_c_comment { > / > \/ \* [ .*? ? ]*? \* \/ > { let $0 := " " } > / > } Think of the curly braces as the regex quotes. If "{" is the quote then there's nothing spe

Rebinding can change type? [was: Static Values and Variable Bindings]

2001-11-02 Thread Ken Fox
Garrett Goebel wrote: > Just does compile-time typing for $foo? Not inlining the constant? You can't assume that the value associated with the symbol is the same each time through the code, so how can it be inlined? > I was thinking lowercase typed variables couldn't be rebound, because > they w

Re: Static Values and Variable Bindings [was RE: Perl 6 - Cheerleader s?]

2001-11-01 Thread Ken Fox
Garrett Goebel wrote: > worried about the loss of data-hiding with Perl6's lexicals. > Was that ever resolved? Here in the 10-step Perl 6 program we don't talk about resolution. We just learn to cope with change. ;) There were two issues I had. As a Perl 6 user I felt uncomfortable that Perl 6 i

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
"Bryan C. Warnock" wrote: > Generically speaking, modules aren't going to be running amok and making a > mess of your current lexical scope - they'll be introducing, possibily > repointing, and then possibly deleting specific symbols How much do you want to pay for this feature? 10% slower code?

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > Bzzzt! The line: > > %MY::{'$x'} = \$z; > > assigns a reference to $z to the *symbol table entry* for $x, not to $x itself. So I should have said: %MY::{'$x'} = $z; That's pretty magical stuff isn't it? Sorry I used the wrong syntax. I'm just taking it from yo

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > On the other hand, if we put the address of the lexical's PMC into a > register, it doesn't matter if someone messes with it, since they'll be > messing with the same PMC, and thus every time we fetch its value we'll Do > The Right Thing. Hmm. Shouldn't re-binding affect onl

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 02:05 PM 9/6/2001 -0400, Ken Fox wrote: > >You wrote on perl6-internals: > > > >get_lex P1, $x # Find $x > >get_type I0, P1 # Get $x's type > > > >[ loop using P1 and I0 ] > > > >That cod

Re: what lexicals do?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dave Mitchell wrote: > Can anyone think of anything else? You omitted the most important property of lexical variables: [From perlsub.pod] Unlike dynamic variables created by the C operator, lexical variables declared with C are totally hidden from the outside world, including any calle

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > I think you're also overestimating the freakout factor. Probably. I'm not really worried about surprising programmers when they debug their code. Most of the time they've requested the surprise and will at least have a tiny clue about what happened. I'm worried a little abo

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > ... you have to take into account the possibility that a > variable outside your immediate scope (because it's been defined in an > outer level of scope) might get replaced by a variable in some intermediate > level, things get tricky. Other things get "tricky" too. How abou

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-05 Thread Ken Fox
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Clearly caller() isn't what we want here, but I'm not > quite sure what would be the correct incantation. I've always assumed that a BEGIN block's caller() will be the compiler. This makes it easy for the compiler to lie about %MY:: and use the lexical scope being compi

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-04 Thread Ken Fox
Damian wrote: > In other words, everything that Exporter does, only with lexical > referents not package referents. This in turn gives us the ability to > easily write proper lexically-scoped modules. Great! Then we don't need run-time lexical symbol table frobbing. A BEGIN block can muck with it

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-04 Thread Ken Fox
Damian wrote: > Dan wept: >> I knew there was something bugging me about this. >> >> Allowing lexically scoped subs to spring into existence (and >> variables, for that matter) will probably slow down sub and >> variable access, since we can't safely resolve at compile time wh

Re: What's up with %MY?

2001-09-03 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > It would seem *very* odd to allow every symbol table *except* > %MY:: to be accessed at run-time. Well, yeah, that's true. How about we make it really simple and don't allow any modifications at run-time to any symbol table? Somehow I get the feeling that "*very* odd" can'

What's up with %MY?

2001-09-03 Thread Ken Fox
I haven't seen details in an Apocalypse, but Damian's Perl 6 overview has a bit about it. The Apocalypse specifically mentions *compile-time* scope management, but Damian is, uh, Damian. (DWIMery obviously. ;) Is stuff like: %MY::{'$lexical_var'} = \$other_var; supposed to be a compile-time o

Re: Prototypes

2001-09-03 Thread Ken Fox
"Bryan C. Warnock" wrote: > { > my $a = sub ($$) { code }; > gork($a); > } > > sub gork { > my ($a) = shift; > $a->(@some_list); # <- Here > } > > The reason prototypes aren't checked at "Here" is because there really > isn't a way to know what the prototype was. Um, that's not

Re: !< and !>

2001-09-02 Thread Ken Fox
"Bryan C. Warnock" wrote: > I'm waiting for someone to say that in tri-state logic, '!<' != '>=' That's what I thought it was. "$a !< $b" might be "!defined($a) || $a >= $b". In SQL this is "$a IS NULL or $a >= $b". - Ken

Re: Multiple-dispatch on functions

2001-09-02 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > Ken wrote: >> The one thing I'm curious about is whether different syntactic >> conventions affect the dispatcher or whether this is all just >> sugar for a single dispatch. > > Multiple dispatch is certainly not (practically) implementable via single > dispatch

Re: Will subroutine signatures apply to methods in Perl6

2001-09-01 Thread Ken Fox
Uri Guttman wrote: [Re: use strict 'typing'; my $rex = new Dog; $rex.bark] > then it should be a compile time error at the assignment to $rex > and not later. you can't trace $rex at compile time to see what > kind of object (if any) was assigned to it. so the illegal method > call can't (easily)

Re: Multiple-dispatch on functions

2001-09-01 Thread Ken Fox
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Dan, I don't immediately see how per object/class dispatch > control helps to make multimethods pluggable. The way to approach this problem is to profile Class::MultiMethods and figure out (a) where the hot spots are and (b) what core support would help eliminate those

Re: explicitly declare closures???

2001-08-28 Thread Ken Fox
Garrett Goebel wrote: > From: Dave Mitchell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Okay, to humour me for a mo', what should the following 2 examples > > output if Perl were doing the "right" thing? > > > > sub pr { print $_[0] || 'undef', "\n" } > > > > { my $x = 'X'; sub f { $F = sub {pr $x} }} > > f();

Re: Expunge implicit @_ passing

2001-08-28 Thread Ken Fox
Michael G Schwern wrote: > If you *really* wanted to write an optimized redirector, you'd > have the redirector eliminate itself. That's not always appropriate. In my frame system, an instance can over-ride its class method. An instance can also remove the over-ride and return to using the class

Re: explicitly declare closures???

2001-08-28 Thread Ken Fox
Dave Mitchell wrote: > The whole point is that closed variables *aren't* 'just local variables'. > The inner $x's in the following 2 lines are vastly different: > > sub foo { my $x= ... { $x } } > sub foo { my $x= ... sub { $x } } You really need to learn what a closure is. There's a

Re: Expunge implicit @_ passing

2001-08-27 Thread Ken Fox
Michael G Schwern wrote: > Any time you want to implicitly pass @_, you can just as easily > *explicitly* pass it or use goto. I never thought of using goto actually. "goto &$method;" actually looks clearer than the code I'm using. (Although with re-directors we want to minimize cost so the 10% p

Re: Expunge implicit @_ passing

2001-08-27 Thread Ken Fox
Michael G Schwern wrote: > I can't think of any reason why this feature is useful anymore, and it > can be a really confusing behavior, so what say we kill it in Perl 6? I've always thought is was pretty useful for implementing generic redirectors. I wrote a frame system that allows instances to

Re: Semi-OT: Good compiler book?

2001-08-26 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 04:38 PM 8/8/2001 +, Brian J. Kifiak wrote: > > > Unfortunately all the references I have for alternatives really > > > require what the Dragon Book teaches as a foundation. > > > > What are the references? > > ... Advanced Compiler Design & Implem

Re: explicitly declare closures???

2001-08-26 Thread Ken Fox
Dave Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > John Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Dave Mitchell wrote: > > > I think closures are a lot harder (or at least subtler) than > > > people think ... > > > > ... The scenario you gave seems rather far-fetched to me, in terms > > of real-world program

Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/

2001-02-11 Thread Ken Fox
[Please be careful with attributions -- I didn't write any of the quoted material...] Russ Allbery wrote: > >> sub test { > >> my($foo, $bar, %baz); > >> ... > >> return \%baz; > >> } > That's a pretty fundamental aspect of the Perl language; I use that sort

Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/

2001-02-11 Thread Ken Fox
Bart Lateur wrote: > On Fri, 09 Feb 2001 12:06:12 -0500, Ken Fox wrote: > > 1. Cheap allocations. Most fast collectors have a one or two > >instruction malloc. In C it looks like this: > > > > void *malloc(size) { void *obj = heap; heap += size; return obj; }

Re: more POST recitation

2001-02-09 Thread Ken Fox
"David L. Nicol" wrote: > # with POST > sub find_first_line_matching_array($\@){ > open F, shift or die "could not open: $!"; > POST{close F}; > while(){ > foreach $w (@{$_[0]}){ >

Re: Garbage collection (was Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/)

2001-02-09 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 04:09 PM 2/9/2001 -0200, Branden wrote: > > If I change the way some objects are used so > > that I tend to create other objects instead of reusing the old ones, I'm > > actually not degrading GC performance, since its work is proportional to > > live data. Right? > > Cor

Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/

2001-02-09 Thread Ken Fox
Branden wrote: > Ken Fox wrote: > > Some researchers have estimated that 90% or > > more of all allocated data dies (becomes unreachable) before the > > next collection. A ref count system has to work on every object, > > but smarter collectors only work on 10% of the

Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/

2001-02-09 Thread Ken Fox
Branden wrote: > I actually don't understand how traversing a graph can be faster than > incrementing/decrementing/testing for zero on a refcount. There are two main reasons advanced garbage collectors are fast: 1. Cheap allocations. Most fast collectors have a one or two instruction malloc

Re: Really auto autoloaded modules

2001-02-01 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 12:33 PM 2/1/2001 -0500, Michael G Schwern wrote: > > Have a look at AnyLoader in CPAN. > > Looks pretty close to what's needed. Care to flesh it out (and streamline > it where needed) to a PDD? Isn't the trick to detect the necessary modules at compile time? Run-time ca

Re: Really auto autoloaded modules

2001-02-01 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 02:04 PM 2/1/2001 -0500, Ken Fox wrote: > >Isn't the trick to detect the necessary modules at compile time? > > Nope, no trick at all. The parser will have a list of functions--if it sees > function X, it loads in module Y. (Possibly version Z) N

Re: Why shouldn't sleep(0.5) DWIM?

2001-02-01 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 11:57 PM 1/31/2001 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 05:35:03PM -0500, Michael G Schwern wrote: > > > grossly UNIX specific things like getpwnam's [can be pulled] > > > > But why? What is it going to buy you? > > Not that much. More than anything

Re: safe signals + sub-second alarms [was: sleep(0.5) should DWIM]

2001-01-31 Thread Ken Fox
Bart Lateur wrote: > What if we take the ordinary sleep() for the largest part of the > sleeping time (no busy wait), and the 4 argument select for the > remainder, i.e. subsecond? You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Sleep doesn't have the signal delivery problems that alarm has

safe signals + sub-second alarms [was: sleep(0.5) should DWIM]

2001-01-31 Thread Ken Fox
Branden wrote: > Actually, with event loops and threading issues, probably things like > the perl built-ins sleep and alarm won't ever be passed to the syscalls > sleep(3) and alarm(3). Sleep isn't usually a syscall -- it's often a library routine that sets an alarm and blocks or uses some other

Re: RFC 124 usefulness & implementation suggestion

2000-10-18 Thread Ken Fox
Bart Lateur wrote: > But isn't there going to be a large overhead, in populating such a > "hash"? If you need an ordered data structure the overhead would be lower than using a hash. > Doesn't the tree have to be reorganized every time you add a > single new entry? No. Sometimes you may have to

Re: RFC 277 (v1) Eliminate unquoted barewords from Perl entirely

2000-10-17 Thread Ken Fox
Nathan Wiger wrote: > Your point is assuming that STDERR retains its weirdness, and does not > become a simple scalar object ... sub STDERR () { $STDERR } or am I missing something? > Making STDERR into $STDERR is all hinged on fast vtable stuff in core ... Absolutely false. $STDERR does not d

Re: Ideas that need RFCs?

2000-08-31 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > I expect we'd want to have some sort of heavy-duty regex optimizer, then, > to detect common prefixes and subexpressions and suchlike things, otherwise > we end up with a rather monstrous alternation sequence... We need a regex merge function too -- then we could write macro

Re: implied pascal-like "with" or "express"

2000-08-29 Thread Ken Fox
"David L. Nicol" wrote: > Ken Fox wrote: > > IMHO, curries have nothing to do with this. All "with" really does is > > create a dynamic scope from the contents of the hash and evaluate its > > block in that scope. ... > But that doesn't give us th

Re: RFC 76 (v1) Builtin: reduce

2000-08-19 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > sub sort (^&comparator, @list) { > for (1..@list**3) { > my ($i, $j) = (rand(@list), rand(@list)); > @list[$i,$j] = @list[$j,$i] > unless $comparator->(a: $list[$i], b: $list[$j]); >

Re: implied pascal-like "with" or "express"

2000-08-19 Thread Ken Fox
Dave Storrs wrote: > On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: > > BTW, if we define C to map keys of a hash to named place holders > > in a curried expression, this might be a good thing: > > > > with %person { > > print "Howdy, ", ^firstname, " ", ^lastname; > > } > >

Re: RFC 84 (v1) Replace => (stringifying comma) with =>

2000-08-13 Thread Ken Fox
Piers Cawley wrote: >$ints_from = ^1 => sub {$ints_from->(^1+1)}; >$ints = $ints_from->(1); I think pairs should use array range syntax ".." and be folded into the array generator RFC (or at least referenced in that RFC). In particular, using a pair in an array context should interpret t

Re: RFC 54 (v1) Operators: Polymorphic comparisons

2000-08-13 Thread Ken Fox
Bart Lateur wrote: > On Tue, 08 Aug 2000 23:43:26 -0400, Ken Fox wrote: > >(assuming min() is polymorphic): > > > > min($a, $b) eq $a > > > >Ugly, but minimal changes to the language. > > We could adopt a syntax similar to sort(): > > $lo

Re: RFC 73 (v1) All Perl core functions should return ob

2000-08-08 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > The number of different vtables needed to deal with this (along with > the functions in those tables) is rather formidable, and it will tend > to impact performance. Hey! That sounds like an implementation topic... ;) (The internals should be able to handle this if the langu

Re: RFC 23 (v2) Higher order functions

2000-08-08 Thread Ken Fox
> Higher order functions This is a very nice proposal and I'd like to see it adopted. Since many other RFCs are bound to assume this functionality, can we put this one on the "fast track" approval process? ;) - Ken

Re: RFC 54 (v1) Operators: Polymorphic comparisons

2000-08-08 Thread Ken Fox
Michael Fowler wrote: > I would argue that you should be manipulating your data, or checking values, > so that numbers and strings are sorted how you wish. The proposed isnum(), > or way-to-determine-if-a-scalar-is-a-number would help. This should be an > explicit check, though, because you have

Re: Infinite lists (was Re: RFC 24 (v1) Semi-finite (lazy) lists)

2000-08-08 Thread Ken Fox
John Porter wrote: > Jeremy Howard wrote: > > Yes, they're not identical. What I mean of course is: > > (..-1) == reverse(map -__ (1..)); > > WHAT? So the semantics of .. are magically different in the context > of (..$n) so as to produce numbers in descending order? Both of those expressions

Re: ISA number

2000-08-08 Thread Ken Fox
Peter Scott wrote: > Have often wanted a way to tell whether a scalar was a number > way to get at the SvIOK and SvNOK results would be great. SvIOK, SvNOK and "is a number" are not the same thing at all. Often numbers are strings that just look like numbers. Perl doesn't eagerly convert stuff i

Re: Different higher-order func notation? (was Re: RFC 23 (v1) Higher order functions)

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Jeremy Howard wrote: > Anyhoo, there's no reason why you can't have ^1, ^2, and so forth, _and_ > allow named placeholders too. Although I don't see what this buys you. Argument ordering. We might be constrained by the caller as to what order the placeholders are passed in. Also, we want to make

Re: Different higher-order func notation? (was Re: RFC 23 (v1) Higher order functions)

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Mike Pastore wrote: > Ken Fox wrote: > > > Although, I suppose '&' would not work. > > > > Why not? I think it would work great. > > Well, what's the different between the placeholder &foo and the sub > &foo? That's the main rea

Re: Different higher-order func notation? (was Re: RFC 23 (v1) Higher order functions)

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
[Sorry, spent too much time thinking in the editor and did not see this before my reply.] Mike Pastore wrote: > - ^foo is the placeholder 'foo' That already has perfectly good meaning: XOR with the function foo(). > Although, I suppose '&' would not work. Why not? I think it would work great.

Re: RFC17

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > But, if we toss refcounts, and split GC cleanup and > end of scope actions anyway, we need to have a mechanism to hoist things > out of the current scope. Why say hoist when we can say return? I can think of several ways of returning values that don't require the caller to a

Re: Different higher-order func notation? (was Re: RFC 23 (v1) Higher order functions)

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Jeremy Howard wrote: > It is proposed that Perl introduce a new prefix '_', which indicates a > placeholder. This can be used either as '_identifier', which creates a named > placeholder, or '__', which creates an anonymous placeholder. This is a good idea, but it has a good chance of tripping up

Re: RFC 23 (v1) Higher order functions

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Damian Conway wrote: > That should of course have been: > > __ < 2 + __ * atan2($pi, __) or die __ Oh, yes, of course. Um, wait. Nope, I still don't follow. The expression above curries to: sub { $_[0] < 2 + $_[1] * atan2($pi, $_[2]) or die $_[3] } But the expression __ < 2 + __ * sin(__

Re: RFC 50 (v1) BiDirectional Support in PERL

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Perl6 RFC Librarian wrote: > BiDirectional Support in PERL I know nothing about bi-directional output. It doesn't seem like Perl has any assumption of left-to-right at all. What's the difference between right-to-left support in Perl and just editing/using Perl in an xterm that does right-to-left?

Re: RFC 49 (v1) Objects should have builtin string SCALA

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Nathan Wiger wrote: >$pw = getpwnam('nwiger'); >print "$pw"; # calls $pw->SCALAR, which prints 'nwiger' >die "Bad group" unless $pw->gid == 100; I'm ashamed that this feature would mess with my (bad?) habit of re-writing "$pw" to just $pw on the assumption that whoever wrote

Re: RFC17

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 02:09 AM 8/6/00 -0400, Chaim Frenkel wrote: > > uplevel 0, $Perl:Warnings=1;# Hit everyone > > uplevel -1, $Perl:Warnings=0; # Hit my wrapper > Yeah, I can see that. We're going to need a mechanism to hoist things to > outer scope levels internally (f

Re: Infinite lists (was Re: RFC 24 (v1) Semi-finite (lazy) lists)

2000-08-06 Thread Ken Fox
Jeremy Howard wrote: > (..-1) == map -__ (1..); That really confuses me. If the sequence (-4..-1) is (-4, -3, -2, -1) then I don't see how your semantics are consistent. I'll admit (reverse map -__ (1..)) is the same as (..-1) but reverse on a stream is undefined. (It should be a run-time error

Re: RFC 22 (v1) Builtin switch statement

2000-08-05 Thread Ken Fox
Glenn Linderman wrote: > [currying] appears to be powerful, and a kind of like generic programming on > the fly. I'd like to learn more: if someone would give a tutorial > reference that would be helpful. I'll try to find something. There's a bit of computer science snobbery related to functiona

Re: RFC 22 (v1) Builtin switch statement

2000-08-04 Thread Ken Fox
Glenn Linderman wrote: > For instance, > > if ( $v == @foo ) > > is clearly testing the size of foo against the value of $v. But > > switch ( $v ) { > case 1: { ... } > case 2: { ... } > case @foo { ... } > } > > does not! Then write the switch as: switch ( __ ) { ca

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