This Week on Perl 6 (8 - 14 Jul 2002)
by Piers Cawley
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
The first PARROT QUESTIONs
Sadly, the first PARROT QUESTION post didn't contain any actual questions. Ashley Winters pointed out that 'test_main.c' is a rather weird place to find parrot's main loop and wondered why parrot.c is empty.
His follow-up contained the actual questions, most of which were answered in the following thread, which is still ongoing.
Tom Hughes told us he was trying to make sense of the current status of keyed access at all levels, from assembler through the ops to the vtables and is getting more confused the more he looks; which can't be good. Melvin Smith agreed that things were confusing, but thought that things might get a little less confusing when he'd committed Sean's patches. Discussion is ongoing.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10926.html Ashley's background post.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10927.html Ashley's questions
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10930.html Tom Hughes on keyed access
More Docs
Stephen Rawls submitted rx.dev, an overview of the regular expression code. Brent Dax added some clarification.
Alberto Simões unveiled a pile of documentation for the Array, PerlArray and PerlHash PMCs, earning himself a few Hero Points from me.
Type Morphing
I'm not entirely sure I understood this thread. Sean O'Rourke submitted some patches to fix Parrot's PMC type morphing. Mike Lambert pointed at some ambiguities and then Sean showed some code that seems rather counter intuitive to do with type morphing and comparisons. He also provided a test file that shows some places where Perl 5 and Parrot seem to disagree on semantics.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10940.html
Glossary Requests
Mike Litherland made some suggestions about what should go in the glossary. Patches were welcomed, and Dan added some terms to the glossary, which is visible at http://www.parrotcode.org/glossary/
Meanwhile, in Perl6-language
The game of 'find a good description of continuations' rumbled on for a bit. I liked Mike Lambert's description involving a traveler in a maze (that's why Dan wants a Z-machine interpreter running on Parrot. Continuations are the 'maze of little twisty passages all similar').
Anyway, Dan also posted a splendidly clear and lucid explanation of
continuations. (Oh, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!) Peter Scott wondered
about serializing continuations, which is a tough problem because some
state really can't be serialized (filehandles for instance), which
lead Ted Zlatonov to suggest FREEZE {...} and THAW {...} blocks.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg10284.html Mike's 'maze' analogy.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg10275.html Dan's ``Continuations are just the stack, you know?'' version.
What's MY.line
Chip Salzenburg asked some hardish questions about MY, %MY and
the difference between them. Piers (continuations everywhere) Cawley,
proposed $a_continuation.the_pad, which should probably be
$a_continuation.MY on further reflection, which Dan seemed to think
wasn't utterly insane.
It was also proposed that things like
[localhost:~] $ perl
my $foo = 12;
print $foo;
my $foo = 'ho';
print $foo;
12ho[localhost:~] $
which is legal (with -w a warning) in Perl 5 should be illegal in perl 6. This was left as Larry's call.
Quote of the thread: 'And side effects like ``I call you, you modify me invisibly ... '' seems more like taking dangerous drugs than programming.' -- Melvin Smith
On seeing the quote of the thread, Richard (madman) Clamp popped up to point out that, with the aid of Devel::LexAlias, you could already do that in Perl 5. Which is nice.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg10290.html Thread starts here. Pretty much all worthwhile.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg10312.html Quote in context
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg10319.html Richard Clamp's bombshell
In Brief
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10803.html -- Mark M. Adkins announced a perl script that hunts down all the POD files in the Parrot directory tree and uses that to generate an HTML tree in a new subdirectory. It looks rather handy.
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/c/caching/caching-1.html -- Dan pointed us at an explanation of CPU caches
Robert Spier pointed everyone at http://www.parrotcode.org, specifically the Development Resources.
Sean O'Rourke proposed ripping a bunch of set_* ops out of core.ops
now that we've got 'proper' keyed access in the assembler. Dan
concurred.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10920.html Tanton Gibbs sent a patch that adds documentation and a .dev file for byteorder.c
Nicholas Clark is trying to eliminate compiler warnings.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg10925.html
Steve Purkis has a patch to add usleep(int) and sleep(int) to
the Linux version of Parrot. Dan likes the idea, but the patch won't
go in until it can be made to work on Win32 as well.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg10270.html Luke Palmer has a vim highlighting file for Perl 6.
The return of ``Who's Who in Perl 6''
This week, Allison Randal answered the new standard ``5Ws questionnaire''
- Who are you?
- I'm on the IT staff at the University of Portland. In my spare time I enjoy working on Perl 6. In my spare-spare time I like to swing in a hammock and read and ponder the ineffability of 42.
- What do you do for/with Perl 6?
- I dream in Perl 6 ... ;)
-
On the Perl 6 design team I'm the other linguist, or Damian's clone, or the assistant cat-herder, or sometimes the Devil's Advocate. It depends on the day, really.
- Where are you coming from?
- Perl 6 will be an incredible jump in power and flexibility. But it's also a lot easier to use. I think that fact is often missed. People see a flurry of changes, but they can't see the forest for the trees. It's not just about making the hard things more possible, it's about making the easy things easier. That's the message I want to carry.
- When do you think Perl 6 will be released?
- February 17, 2004 at 13:42 GMT. ;) Okay, no. :) But the current estimates of 12-18 months sound pretty reasonable, especially with the progress we've seen in Parrot.
- Why are you doing this?
- Life's too short to settle for weak coffee.
-
No, really, for the most selfish reason imaginable: I want to use Perl 6. Anything I can do to make it a better language or to help it reach production faster is well worth the effort.
-
And it's incredibly fun.
- You have five words. Describe yourself.
- Extreme Geekiness in Unusual Packaging.
- Do you have anything to declare?
-
Perl
rules!
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the denizens of #perl and #parrot for their, ahem, 'mad proofreading skeelz.' To Melvin Smith and Leon Brocard for their explanations of IMCC.
This summary was brought to you with the assistance of GNER tea, and the music of Waterson:Carthy and Gillian Welch.
Once again, if you liked it, then give money to YAS, if you didn't like it, well, then you can still give them money; maybe they'll use it to hire a better writer. Or maybe you could write a competing summary.
