This Fortnight on Perl 6, Weeks Ending 2004-04-18
by Piers Cawley
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Pages: 1, 2
Parrot Everywhere
I've not really mentioned his work in recent summaries, but Marcus Thiesen has been doing sterling work helping to get Parrot up and running on a bewildering variety of systems. Thanks for the sterling work Marcus.
http://www.luusa.org/~marcus/parrottest -- Marcus's Smoker
Warnocked
Bryan C. Warnock posted a patch to Parrot's CREDITS, correcting a long defunct email address. You might enjoy the patch:
N: Bryan C. Warnock
+D: Little things here and there in pre-Parrot days.
+D: And, yes, {sigh}, *that* Warnock.
+E: bwarnock@raba.com
He's too modest of course, Bryan started off writing the Perl 6 Summaries. When he stopped doing them due (I presume) to a lack of time, I missed them so much I started writing my own. So don't blame me for these, blame Bryan.
Rather appropriately, nobody commented on the patch.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-28383-84147.3.00438339593441@perl.org
Unicode Step By Step
Leo Tötsch posted a quick overview of steps to get Unicode support into Parrot. Right now, if you turn Unicode on, your (at least) first build is going to take a looong time.
Debate centered on whether or not the Parrot distribution should include the full ICU distribution. (It's looking like a qualified yes, but we will attempt to use an existing installation of ICU if we can find it.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4077F315.6060200@toetsch.at
Disappearing PASM Files in the Test Directory
Leo wondered what had happened to the generated .pasm files in t/*/ (he wasn't alone in this, but he was the person who posted). Will Coleda confessed that he'd doctored Parrot::Test so that they ended up in /tmp (probably). He didn't say why.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4077EC4D.3040806@toetsch.at
ICU Build Pains
I don't normally discuss issues people have with building Parrot on various different machines either (the threads usually die out quite quickly: "Did you do this?" "Oh! Thanks, that worked.") but the ICU check in seems to have caused no small amount of pain on Linux systems for some reason.
Alberto Manuel Brandao Simoes posted an error log for a failing build. Jeff Clites, our Guru of ICU set about helping him to track the problem down with incomplete success. Dan pointed everyone at Debian's patches to get ICU to build, and suggested that people wait for his patch to allow the use of an existing ICU installation.
Various other threads continued the discussion, at the end of which Dan had checked in a patch that seemed to solve the problems.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40784BF0.20608@alfarrabio.di.uminho.pt
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06100503bca05b379e6f@[10.0.1.2]
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06100505bca05f409099@[10.0.1.2]
Tangled Strings
Dan posted the beginnings of his plan for how strings are going to work in Parrot. On the face of it, not a contentious issue. However, strings are text, and text is a human cultural artifact, which means there's politics and really, really, really ugly complexities to deal with if you want to Do It Right (assuming you can decide what Right is). There was much discussion. And then there was some more. The trouble is, this stuff is Important (and it's very important that we get it right *before* we start implementing the matching engine, otherwise some of the assumptions it might make about how fast various string manipulations are might turn out to be very wrong indeed...) and Hard. Because it's Hard it's rather tricky to summarize, so I'm going to punt and just give you the root message.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06100500bca0384ce81c@[10.0.1.2]
Basic Library Paths
Dan finally got 'round to designing how Parrot was going to handle searching for libraries and such. Oh, and he and Jarkko engaged in some unseemly bragging about VMS which has had all this stuff fixed for ages. There was a fair bit of discussion, but the response was generally positive.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06100500bca449931036@[10.0.1.2]
Alternative Object Initializer Calling Scheme
Leo announced that he'd added a new, property based scheme for object initialization. Instead of initializing an object automagically with the __init method, you mark any method with the BUILD property and Parrot handles calling it for you. You do have to set the CALL__BUILD environment variable before starting Parrot to make use of it though.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40768F70.1010106@toetsch.at
Joseph Höök Is Back
Long time no see Joseph.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=381-220044011141848685@kth.se
Version Bump Time?
Dan suggested that, once the ICU patch is properly nailed down, it could be time to start the push to a 0.1.1 (or even 0.2.0) release.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06100502bc9cbc80e445@[172.24.18.98]
Lies, Damned Lies, and Benchmarks
Leo posted a set of benchmark timings for the OO examples when run with all current optimizations. The numbers are looking rather good: Parrot's faster than everything on all but one test, where it's outperformed by Python. Of course, these aren't the benchmarks that'll determine whether Dan gets a Pie at OSCON...
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=408009CE.2070804@toetsch.at
PMC Constants
Leo asked for comments on a proposal for dealing with PMC constants. No comments so far.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=407FF01A.2080102@toetsch.at
Meanwhile, in perl6-language...
Backticks
A proposal for a new use of backticks was made (because the proposer didn't think the current semantics deserved their privileged place in the language's Huffman table). Some people disagreed. Some people disagreed rather strongly. Toys were thrown out of prams. People called each other narrow minded. It wasn't pretty. With any luck people are going to calm down, apologize to each other for getting so aerated over something so trivial, and the list can settle down to the more rewarding task of dealing with the implications of Apocalypse 12.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040414121848.GJ3645@c4.convolution.nl
Compatibility with Perl 5
Dave Cantrell wondered how Perl 6 would spot legacy code. Everyone forgot to refer him to the appropriate section of Apocalypse 1 in which Larry lays down the two rules:
- Files that are pulled in with
requireetc will be deemed to be Perl 6 unless they contain apackagedeclaration. - Files that are run as scripts (
perl some_script.pl) are treated as Perl 5 unless it's obviously Perl 6. The proposed way of making this obvious would be to begin the script withmodule Main.
Easy eh? It didn't stop the thread running and running though (not helped by someone getting the rules of thumb rather badly wrong in the early stages).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040413121602.GA5213@bytemark.barnyard.co.uk
Oooh, Look, It's an Apocalypse
Apocalypse 12 finally stepped out of the drafty shadows into the glare of publicity. It's very long. I expect next week will be rather busy on p6l.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/04/16/a12.html
And We're Done
A reminder to everyone on perl6-language: Play nice.
If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl. You might also like to send me feedback at mailto:p6summarizer@bofh.org.uk.
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
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