This Week on Perl 6 (30 December 2001 - 5 Jan 2002)

Jan 5, 2002 by Bryan Warnock

Notes

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There were 373 messages across 112 threads, with 50 authors contributing. Most of the messages were patches. For 2001, about 340 folks submitted over 9000 messages across 1300 or so threads.

Generators

(8 posts) Clark C. Evans asked whether Parrot will support generators, a cousin to continuations. Dan Sugalski says coroutines and continuations are in, but didn’t really answer about generators. (As a sidebar, the rest of the thread was an interesting discussion about Python’s recent addition of generators and how they work.)

Platform Fixes

Win32 has had more work done on it; in particular, the continual makefile problems. LP64 environments, such as 64-bit Solaris and Tru64, also received a much-needed fix, allowing them to finally work.

Signed vs. Unsigned

A huge signed-to-unsigned migration was finally begun. Somewhere between the original design and the initial code, the use of an unsigned partner to INTVAL (The Type Formerly Known As IV) was dropped. It’s now been reintroduced, and implicitly unsigned values are slowly being converted.

Strings

There were a lot of cleanup and additions made to string support in Parrot. There was a mild discussion on being able to dereference a stringified address.

Fixed-sized Output Records

The language list received a question from Tzadik Vanderhood, asking if a fixed-sized output record will be allowed, in line with its input record counterpart: $/ =\80;.

Aaron Sherman gave a good response.