This Fortnight on Perl 6, October 2004
All~
Welcome to my first summary. Since I am relatively new at this game, I will just steal Piers' approach and start with Perl6 internals. But before that let me warn you that my ability to make strange characters with accents is not great, thus please do not be offended if I don't include them in your name. If you want them to appear in the future, a quick email about how to make them appear using a U.S. qwerty keyboard and Mozilla should suffice.
Also, groups.google.com does not seem to have picked up perl6.compiler yet.
With that legal disclaimer out of the way onward to:
Leo noticed that Configure doesn't rebuild things correctly. Takers
welcome. Nicholas Clark added a --prefix option for the make
install target.
http://xrl.us/divy
http://xrl.us/divz
http://xrl.us/div2
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Related Reading 
Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials |
Joshua Gatcomb accidentally introduced a dependency on Config::IniFiles. Since it is implemented in pure Perl he offered to add it to the repository. Warnock applies.
Jens Rieks found and fixed a coredump on OpenBSD. Thanks, Jens.
Joshua Gatcomb discovered some trouble with threads on Cygwin. It seems that there are problems with both the thread implementation, and the tests not being generous enough if accepting out-of-order input. Still unresolved, I think.
Nicholas Clark discovered a double free in the IO system. While his problem was solved by Jens, the underlying problem still remains.
Nicholas Clark asked why the install taget was not portable. Steve Fink responded that it was a quick hack at the time and made it better.
The namespace thread continues to churn. It is slowly making progress, but I believe there is a fair amount of people talking past each other going on. Perhaps Dan could step in and provide one final state of the namespaces?
http://xrl.us/div8
http://xrl.us/div9
http://xrl.us/diwa
Sam Ruby decided to pick up the Python on Parrot ball. To that end he enquired as to what PAST is. Leo provided answers and help. Will asked for more help. Leo once again provided.
http://xrl.us/diwb
http://xrl.us/diwc
Stephane Peiry provided a patch to JIT with some more opcodes. Leo applied. Stephane then provided a patch with tests. Jens applied that one.
http://xrl.us/diwd
http://xrl.us/diwe
Sam Ruby posted a link comparing various Pythons and their conformance to a test suite.
Dan admitted confusion as to what exactly metaclasses are/do. Papers and explanations were provided by Aaron Sherman, Michael Walter, and Sam Ruby.
http://xrl.us/diwg
http://xrl.us/diwh
http://xrl.us/diwi
William Coleda wondered if Parrot had a basic hash implementation (not a PerlHas). Dan said "D'oh!" and asked for takers. Coleda added a TODO.
Michael Pelletier's language Parakeet has hit 0.3 and been added to CVS. Everybody should play with it.
Leo conjectured about creating a parrot_config.c, which would
encode all of Parrot's configuration. Then Parrot would know its own config.
Jens suggested letting miniparrot generate it; Leo agreed.
Dan's register spilling problems give him free time. He used it to work on piethon a little.
Felix Gallo posted some questions/thoughts with respect to privileges. While Leo addressed Felix's question about the location of source files (and provided a nice plug for vim). The others all remain Warnocked.
Matthew Zimmerman supplied a patch to fix Tcl's make. William Coleda modified and applied it.
Andy Dougherty provided a patch to remove some old files from the manifest. Steve Fink applied it.
There was a little talk about names. Then a little talk about getting it posted to perl.org. In the end the 0.1.1 release did happen and even made it to Slashdot. Thank you to everyone who contributed.
Will Coleda added a TODO for Data::Dumper. Apparently it cannot dump FixedPMCArrays. Will conjectures that there are probably other new PMCs it cannot handle either. Patches welcome.
Jerome Quelin kicked off a thread that resulted in emacs getting better pir-mode support. Thanks to all involved, but I will continue to use vim. ;-)
Dan noticed that we did not have support for %= in PIR. There
was some confusion as several people rushed to the rescue. In the end, the
problem was fixed. Thanks all.
Will Coleda wondered why he could not push onto a Fixed Array. The answer was quickly provided that Fixed means that its size cannot be modified, not that it is bounded. This answer seemed reasonable enough to him. He then went on to ask why he could not pop a Resizable Array. The answer is, of course, because it is not implemented yet; patches welcome.
http://xrl.us/diwv
http://xrl.us/diww
Sam Ruby wondered how to create a subname num in imcc. The
answer, "No," and a workaround was provided by Jens.
Andy Dougherty provided a patch to improve the build system. Steve Fink applied it. Leo disliked it. Consensus seems to be not to use it.
Joshua Gatacomb has been fighting with Cygwin getting Parrot to work. Apparently we trip a few of its bugs. Read more if you like.
http://xrl.us/diwz
http://xrl.us/diw2
http://xrl.us/diw3
Jeff Clites raised some concerns about dealing with Python's bound and unbound methods. There was some discussion about it. In the end it just means a little more work.
Will submitted a patch to clean up the Makefile. There was some
back and forth about what parts of the patch should be kept.
Ron Blaschke provided a few patches for Win32 which Jens and Leo applied.
http://xrl.us/diw6
http://xrl.us/diw7
http://xrl.us/diw8
http://xrl.us/diw9
Steve Fink spent some time chugging away at dynclass and dynamically loaded
modules. There was some discussion of proper variable names and some working
out of problems. Friendly reminder -- when in doubt make clean; perl
Configure.pl; make.
http://xrl.us/dixa
http://xrl.us/dixb
--prefix ProblemsSteve Fink was apparently having troubles with ICU and locating necessary data files. Leo confirmed that it is a problem.
Jens has apparently had success working with MinGW. Yay!
Will had some ICU issues. Various suggestions and solutions were attempted. Any success?
Will wants .locals inside .macros. Apparently it
can only be done if your macro only takes PMCs.
t/pmc/signal.t
ImprovementsJeff Clites provided a patch with improvements to
t/pmc/signal.t. Warnock applies.
--pythonMichal at withoutane.com (whose last name I cannot find) wondered about the
--python flag. The answers and discussion that followed indicate
that it was a quick and dirty hack. Eventually it will be gone and Python will
have PMCs of its own (relatively quickly if Sam Ruby has anything to say about
it).
Sam Ruby fixed a small problem in PerlInt; Jeff Clites fixed a bug and
cleaned some warnings in darwin/dl.c. He also fixed some tests and
added a Parrot_memalign function for Mac OS X. Stephane Payrand
provided a patch to allow multiple identifiers on one line in pir. Stephane
also added a get_representation op. Bernhard Schmalhofer added
support for synchronous callbacks. Ion Alexandru Morega added more
functionality to complex PMC. Leo applied the patches.
Adam Thomason pointed out that amd64 lost a vital link flag somewhere in the shuffle.
Sam Ruby wondered about allowing pmcs to implement additional non-vtable methods. Leo thought it would be good. Sam provided a patch, chromatic tweaked it, and Leo applied it.
http://xrl.us/dixs
http://xrl.us/dixt
Jens wondered what happened to tinderbox.perl.org. Apparently it died a while back and has not yet been resurrected. Robert Spier also noted that it was a little difficult to deal with and said he is interested in creating a new one. He is also looking for help in this endeavor.
Leo has once again pushed forward his idea for register stacks and been Warnocked.
Andy Dougherty had some ncurses trouble. In particular, one of the error messages was exceptionally unhelpful. Now it is a little more helpful.
Leo would like to draw everyone's attention to docs/pdds/pdd07_codingstd.pod, and the fact that it should also apply to Perl code where appropriate. Thank you.
Rx_compile and FSAsAaron Sherman has some ambitious stuff in the works with respect to regular expressions. Stay tuned for details.
Matt Diephouse wants to know how to get a single character from STDIN. The answer seems to be no, but this has triggered Dan to go back to the IO/Event doc. Best of luck, Dan.
Paul Seamons noticed that some of the samples on parrotcode.org are really out of date. Will Coleda agreed and suggested that they should all be updated to PIR, too. Takers welcome.
Pratik Roy wondered if he could join into the work on Parrot or if he would remain an outsider looking in. Many people rushed to suggest ways in which he could help. So, please don't feel afraid to contribute. At worst a patch of yours will be turned away with an explanation as to why. At best, you will start being referred to by first name only in the summaries.
Sam Ruby wondered about how Python and Perl would interoperate. Leo, Steve Fink, and Thomas Sandlass have ideas and suggestions. I think the answer will be "magically."
Ovid pointed the world at Inline::Parrot. It looks cool.
http://xrl.us/dix4
http://xrl.us/dix5
Brian Wheeler had a problem with Parrot on x86-64. He provided a patch, but Leo couldn't apply it and asked for a resend. Silence thereafter. . . .
James Ghofulpo wondered if the Parrot examples page's factorial program was supposed to truncate output. Warnock applies.
Sridhar discovered that Configure.pl would fail if he told it to
--cxx=/usr/bin/g++-3.3; Jens pointed out that he would also need
to tell it --link=g++-3.3.
Matt Diephouse releases Parrot Forth 0.1. It has many cool features. Nice work. Perhaps this should go into languages/?
.return DirectivesStephane Payrard wants to remove the multiple meaning of
.return to provide a cleaner path forward. Everyone agrees.
Will thought he had turned up another GC bug with Tcl. This time he hadn't and it was his fault. Can't win them all I guess.
Will wondered how to determine a PMC's Boolean value. Leo pointed him toward
istrue.
Christian Jaeger noticed taht grsecurity was stopping on Parrot's attempts to execute JITted code. Leo pointed out that we already have support for doing the right thing, we are just failing to detect that we need to.
Sam Ruby wanted inheritance for PMCs. Apparently what we really need is a scheme for multiple inheritance of PMCs. Sam Ruby supplied several patches and Leo applied parts of them.
typedef struct Parrot_Interp
*Parrot_Interp Don't Play WellJeff Clites discovered that Parrot has troubles on Mac OS X because C++ does
not like typedef struct Parrot_Interp *Parrot_Interp. We need C++
to link ICU. Fortunately, that particular typedef is out of the ordinary and
violates our normal conventions. Brent "Dax" Royal-Gordon threatened to apply
the (fairly large) fix. Will tested Brent's patch and gave it the thumbs
up.
Leo proposed mandating that all JIT must be done interpreter-relative. This allowed some happy optimizations including constant table access. General response was favorable.
pmc2c2.pl --tree OptionBernhard Schmalhofer submitted a patch fixing the aforementioned --tree option. No answer yet, but it has not really been long enough to officially invoke Warnock.
Jacques Mony asked for help/advice porting Parrot to unununium. No responses yet...
Google groups still doesn't have Perl 6 Compiler, so this section won't have links. Sorry.
Jeff Clites put out a request for some basic P6 examples and resultant bytecode so that everyone would be on the same page. Warnock applies.
Herbert Snorrason had some basic questions about Perl 6's interaction with Parrot. He also wanted to know about whether he should be playing with the re_tests or if that was wasted effort. Finally he wanted to know about read-eval-print loops. Sadly Warnock applies across the board.
Google groups has nothing for Perl6.language between October 2 and 14. Is this really the case? (I had not signed up until shortly before volunteering to summarize.) If there is email that I just can't find, I would be appreciative if someone could produce a summary or a pointer to the missing mail for me. Thanks.
Nitin Thakur attempted to de-Warnock himself, apparently unsuccessfully. Sorry, Nitin.
Piers raised the white flag after several years as a wonderful summarizer. Having now just finished my first summary, let me say thank you for all of your hard work and if you ever want the job back its yours. ;-) I hope you don't mind my stealing your general format for these things.
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