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This week on Perl 6 (10/20-27, 2002)
by Piers Cawley | Pages: 1, 2

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

Won't someone please think of the summarizer?

There were about 150 messages in perl6-language this week. The *vast* majority of them discussing the Perl 6 built in operator list. It all started weeks ago, when Damian wanted |, & and the_as_yet_unnamed_xor_operator as superposition generating operators. But that meant we'd need somewhere else to put the bitwise operators. And people like ^ as xor, but that's not likely because of hyper ops. And nobody likes _ as a concatenation operator. It's all become very complicated.

However, in answer to a summarizer's prayer, Michael Lazzaro has taken to posting a scorecard of his understanding of what the current list of built in ops is. (A list of diffs between these would be interesting to see...). Things that appear to be set in stone:

  • ~ is the new _, which was the new . and which nobody liked.
  • ~~ is the new =~. (Otherwise =~ -> match, and ~= -> string append could get somewhat confused...) !~ stays the same.
  • | and & make any and all type superpositions, respectively. Damian has an article on why superpositions are such a good idea forthcoming for perl.com. The phrase `in constant time' will probably not be used.
  • Nobody has any idea what xor will end up as.
  • Some people are worried that changing things too radically from old Perl/Algol type syntax will make for a harder learning curve. Other people tend to think that not many programmers use bitwise ops in Perl at the moment, so the change shouldn't matter too much.
  • It's a real shame that so many Unicode characters are so hard to type.

Here's a list of Michael's various opcode lists. They're usually good entry points to the discussion. (Which is kind of fascinating...)

http://groups.google.com/groups

http://groups.google.com/groups

http://groups.google.com/groups

Character Properties

Luke Palmer wondered whether we were planning on having properties on individual characters on a string; something he felt was an essential feature. There was a certain amount of debate about the use of the word `essential' in this context, leading Luke to give some more information about what he was driving at before he was eventually convinced that what he wanted was an ideal candidate for a module.

http://groups.google.com/groups

http://groups.google.com/groups

Perl6 Built-in Types

Michael Lazzaro asked for a list of Perl6 built-in types and offered his own first cut at such a list. Larry offered some corrections, but reckoned that the list Michael had just posted was the nearest thing we had to a definitive list.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Power of Lisp Macros

Adriano Nagelschmidt has been reading Paul Graham's articles about Lisp and its advantages, especially the macro system, and wanted to know whether the macros were really as useful as Mr. Graham claimed, and whether it was worth adding something like them to Perl. General consensus appears to be ``Yes, they're really good, and yes, Perl 6 will probably have something similar.'' Larry had an interesting post on the subject (no surprise there then...)

http://groups.google.com/groups

http://www.paulgraham.com

http://groups.google.com/groups

In Brief

There was a minor kerfuffle early in the week when the Parrot CVS repository ended up with the wrong permissions. Oops.

Leopold Toetsch has implemented the splice vtable method based on the semantics in PDD2. This sparked a short discussion about copying vs. cloning.

It looks like native types are going to get type numbers just like PMCs, but native types will be negative.

Rhys Weatherley added a bunch of infix operators to IMCC's syntax.

Jürgen Bömmels added `fingerprinting' to .PBC files. The idea being that Parrot can fail at load time if it tries to load a .PBC file that was generated with a different version of core.ops. The previous behavior involved weird, hard-to-track-down runtime errors.

Some spam got past the perl6-internals filters. We were shocked.

Michael Lazzaro announced an updated Perl6 OO Cookbook at http://cog.cognitivity.com/perl6/.

Who's Who in Perl 6?

Apparently, nobody is this week. I appear to have run out of answer sets for the questionnaire. If you've been mentioned in this, or any previous summary and you've not already answered, then please drop me a line and I'll send you the questions.

Acknowledgement, Apologies and All That Good Stuff

This summary was once again brought to you from my office on board the 0625 from Newark to London and from my comfy chair at home. Distractions were provided by Xmame, Perls of the North, broken AC Adaptors and my own natural `Procrastinate now!' instincts.

Proofreading services were provided by me. Having left it as late as I did, I just want to get this summary out of the door before next week's is due. So any speeling mistooks are orl myne.

And, the old refrain: If you enjoyed this summary, then please consider one or both of the following options:

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