This week on Perl 6 (week ending 2002-08-11)
by Piers Cawley
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
The terribly named thread about different default values of true and
false rumbled on. Damian averred that code which 'relies on the poorly
specified standard values of truth and falsehood deserves to
break'. Damian also argues that Perl ought to have a proper boolean
type. After all, it has proper numeric and string types, and that they
should be used by all built ins. (Which does lead me to wonder about
code like 0 but true). Chip reckons that the standard values of
truth and falsehood aren't that badly specified, it's not like
they've ever changed since perl 1, though he does agree that a 'real'
boolean would be nice. Elsewhere in the thread, Chip worried about the
scoping of operator definitions and Damian reassured him a bit.
http://groups.google.com/groups
Use of regular expression on non-strings
Threads in perl6-language seem to be longer lived than those over in
internals. I wonder why? This was another thread that started last week
and kept on going. David Whipp clarified his original question and
various people responded. Err... I'm not entirely sure how to
summarise this one, and following the threading is a tad tricky
because Mr Whipp's mailer doesn't do the In-Reply-To: thing.
http://groups.google.com/groups is probably as good a place as any to start looking.
Autovivi
Luke Palmer wondered how autovivification was going to work with
specific reference to print %foo{bar}{baz}. Would %foo{bar}
still be created if it didn't exist? Answer: "NO! Thank ghod!". Unless
Larry says otherwise.
http://groups.google.com/groups
Perl summary for week ending 2002-08-04
See recursion. Miko O'Sullivan queried the throw-away comment that regexes were now called 'rules' and wondered if the term 'regex' would be going away. It turns out that I wasn't quite accurate, but that Damian still reckons that 'regexes' should be deprecated in favour of either 'rules' or 'patterns', at least in his own writing. For some reason this ended up spinning off into a discussion of regular, context-free and context-dependent languages and the nitty gritty details of when an expression was regular or not. Mark J. Reed ended up posting a fine essay to the list on the differences between the various types.
http://groups.google.com/groups
http://groups.google.com/groups
http://groups.google.com/groups -- Mark's essay.
while <> { in Perl 6
Adam Lopresto wondered if the while (<) {> idiom (with appropriate
DWIMmery) would be necessary in Perl 6 since, given a lazy list
implementation, one could probably get by with for <> {. Trey
Harris agreed. So did Larry, sort of. He's leaning towards only having
for <> {...} do implicit topicalisation, while will require
you to be explicit (damn, another spamassassin trigger word...).
http://groups.google.com/groups
http://groups.google.com/groups
In brief
Piers Cawley missed the point about doing copy on write of the entire stack when doing closuresque things. Various people explained, very politely that he was wrong. In a moment of selfish editorial wossname, I'll spare Piers's blushes by omitting the URL.
Josef added a couple of useful ops. Dan applied the patch, but wondered where
the tests were. Josef has, of course, tested the ops, but Dan wants
'Comprehensive tests in t/ for everything' so we notice when we
break things later. Nicholas Clark raised the spectre of 'The Schwern
with the big stick.' if we failed to meet that testing goal.
Mike Lambert posted the first of his patches which will, eventually, unify PMCs and buffers.
Steve Fink posted a patch to convert the hashtable from pointer based to index based, making the GC system happier. Applied.
Angel Faus posted a 'loop discovery' patch for imcc which attempts to avoid array spilling whilst in an inner loop. This patch was applied. Then Leopold Toetsch pointed out a few bugs, and Angel posted another patch, which hasn't been applied yet.
Andy Dougherty sent some patches to eliminate warnings under Solaris 8. Applied.
Jarkko sent in more warnings patches. Applied.
Sean O'Rourke offered a patch to hashes to do deep cloning. Dan asked him to hold on a sec, adding that if he hadn't addressed the issue inside a day or to we should nudge him. Dan, consider yourself heartily nudged.
Peter Gibbs has removed the set_string_unicode and
set_string_other vtable methods, which are, frankly,
unnecessary. Leopold caught perlundef.pmc, which had been missed
from the original purge.
Jonathan Sillito offered a patch to give scratchpads a pointer to their parent pads, and ended up with a new Scratchpad PMC. Warnock's Dilemma applies.
Peter Gibbs offers perlscalar.pmc, Aldo Calpini asked a few
questions, and Warnock currently applies.
Daniel Grunblatt announced that the PPC JIT is now working.
Dan noted that there are some size restriction -- we need to make sure that our chosen INTVAL is at least as big as a pointer. Andy Dougherty pointed out some possible caveats and noted that his warnings patch gave some assistance in this area.
Nicholas Clark found a bug in the assembler under perl 5.005_03. Simon Glover agreed it was a bug, but nobody is quite sure how to fix it. Nicholas is working on it though.
Boris "Thank heavens for cut and paste" Tschirschwitz wondered if the headers of the various PDD (Parrot Design Documents) were kept up to date, and if he could, in general, trust the docs to be accurate. Dan reckons they should be mostly up to date. Patches are almost certainly welcome.
In perl6-language, Chris Dutton wondered if we'd be able to create
anonymous classes ( my $foo = class {...} ) in the same way as we
currently create anonymous subs. Personally, I hope so. Chris worries
slightly about my $foo_class $foo_obj = $foo_class.new , but I
think he's getting his compile time and runtime constructs mixed
up. But what do I know?
SpamAssassin marked last weeks summary as spam in some mailboxes. John Porter suggested that 'Maybe people should add SpamAssassin rule that deducts 5 points if the message contains /leon brocard/ ?'
Who's who in Perl 6
- Who are you?
- Dave Mitchell. I work for a small UK-based software company.
- What do you do for/with Perl 6?
- I wrote PDD7 (coding standards), then got sidetracked into fixing perl 5 instead. I intend to get more involved in Perl 6 post 5.8.0 release.
- Where are you coming from?
- Sheffield?
- When do you think Perl 6 will be released?
- In about 2 years, then ready for production use in a further year.
- Why are you doing this?
- Because I love Perl and want to contribute to OSS development
- You have 5 words. Describe yourself.
- Lazy, apathetic, enjoyerofbugfixing, unsufferinggladlyoffools, rabidsceptic.
- Do you have anything to declare?
- My lack of genius?
Acknowledgements, corrections, threats and funding drives
Previous Perl 6 News |
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This Week in Perl 6, August 2-9, 2005
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This Week in Perl 6, July 20-26, 2005 |
Nicholas Clark would just like to clarify that, as far as right shifts of signed integers go, we should offer both arithmetic and logical right shifts. He doesn't appear to have any preference about which should be the default.
This summary was again prepared with the aid of GNER tea, supplemented this week by a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, the toasted sandwich of the gods (though their bacon and tomato toastie also has its adherents I remain faithful to good old ham and cheese.)
Thanks are also due to the wonderful Pete Sergeant, and to a certain person who I'll not mention again (but his favourite colour is orange) for their excellent proofreading skills. Anything which may have snuck past them (especially in this paragraph) is, of course, entirely my fault.
If your name appears in this, or any previous summary and you've still not sent me your answers to the perl6 questionnaire, please consider doing so. My "Perl 6 Who's who?" archive hasn't run out yet, but it'd be good to know that I'd got a good supply to fall back on.
Still no T?iBook, but this week's haul of egoboo is well up there. Many thanks to the flatterers in perl-golf@perl.org.
If you didn't like this summary, write your own. Go on, I dare you. If you did like it, send money to the Perl Foundation at http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ and remember, suitably large donations will earn you or your company a plug in a future summary. (You have to let me know though). See last week for details. And you'll be helping to fund the next generation of Perl, which will give you the warm fuzzies and a general feeling of virtue and well being. In the words of Mrs Doyle, "Go on, go on, go on, go on!"
