This week on Perl 6 (week ending 2002-07-21)

by Leon Brocard
July 23, 2002

Another week, another Perl 6 summary. Cunningly this week I have taken over the summary from Piers in order to make it easier for me to namecheck myself. It's been a good week too, with more happening in perl6-internals than perl6-language. So that's where I'll start...

Parrot 0.0.7

The big news for this week is that DrForr has released Parrot 0.0.7 to the world (strange that lots of open source projects are releasing code just before the O'Reilly Open Source conference...). This release contains a Perl 6 grammar (with small, partial compiler!), functional subroutine, coroutine and continuation PMCs, global variables, an intermediate code compiler (imcc), a pure-Perl assembler and working garbage collection. "The name is Parrot. Percy Parrot."

http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg11090.html
http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/J/JG/JGOFF/parrot-0_0_7.tgz

Previous Perl 6 News

This Week in Perl 6, August 17-23, 2005 Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i seeing the most HLL discussion yet; p6l debating binding, parameters, and primitives; and p6c appreciating pretty graphics. This Week in Perl 6, Through August 14, 2005 Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with containers and metamodels on the Perl 6 compiler list, metamodel and trait questions on the Perl 6 language list, and opcode changes and test modules on the Perl 6 internals list. This Week in Perl 6, August 2-9, 2005 Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i seeing build and platform patches, p6l exploring meta-meta discussions, and p6c enjoying Pugs and PxPerl releases. This Week in Perl 6, through August 2, 2005 Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with PIL discussion on the Perl 6 compiler list, type and container questions on the Perl 6 language list, and a Lua compiler on the Perl 6 internals list. This Week in Perl 6, July 20-26, 2005 Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i discussing garbage collection schemes, p6l rethinking object attribute access and plotting GC APIs and access, and p6c reporting problems, documenting PIL, and discussing the grammar.

Note that the really cool Perl 6 compiler needs at least Perl 5.6. Oh, and check out imcc if you haven't looked at it yet.

Retro Perl

Nicholas Clark stated that "In October 2000 I believed that 5.005 maintenance *is* important for the acceptance of perl6, and I still do now". A first patch to the preliminary Perl 6 compiler was sent by Leopold Toetsch to make it work on 5.005_03 and seeing as Chip Salzenberg has restarted work on a new maintenance release of Perl 5.005 it's probably good for various parts of Parrot to run on retro perls. Shouldn't be a major problem.

Parrot docs

One of the big pushes last week was for more documentation inside Parrot. Writing documentation is always a problem for an open source project and it hit the wall last week. The good news is that lots of new documentation has been added to Parrot.

There was some discussion on the nature of documentation. The result is that inline C documention should write up API details and that longer discussions (say, the choice of algorithms, how to avoid overflows in unsigned arithmetic, the pros and cons of differing hash algorithms) would end up as .dev files inside the docs/dev/ directory, much as PDD07 "Conventions and Guidelines for Perl Source Code" says. A few more documentation patches followed.

Recently the mailing list and IRC channel have been quite busy and it seems like the new push for more documentation has attracted new people. Bonus!

http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@perl.org/msg11080.html

MANIFESTations

The Parrot MANIFEST file tends not to be kept up-to-date with recent additions. Andy Dougherty produced a patch to do this. Nicholas Clark asked: "Is CVS flexible enough to let us run a manifest check on each commit and generate warnings that get sent somewhere useful if it fails?". Robert Spier answered that it could and with any luck he'll get it in soon...

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