This Week in Perl 6, July 5-12, 2005
by Matt Fowles
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Pages: 1, 2
Control Flow Graph Bugs
Curtis Rawls noted what he thought might be a bug in the
compute_dominators function. Leo confirmed that it was likely a
bug. Later he posted a note saying he was working on a new implementation for
some of the CFG algorithms. He asked for a hand, but Warnock applied. Actually,
I think I have looked at that code before. I would help be happy to take a
look, Curtis.
TODO: Steal Good Ideas from Dan
Will Coleda opened a ticket suggesting that we open tickets based on some of Dan's latest posts to Squaks of the Parrot. Remember: "talent imitates, but genius steals."
Punie
Allison Randal wants to add Punie (a Perl 1 compiler) to SVN. Response was positive.
Mobilizing PM groups
Will Coleda wondered if there had been any work mobilizing Perl Monger groups for the good of Parrot. Maybe I should finally look up the Cambridge or Boston PM group.
Perl 6 Language
As usual in p6l land, there are a couple of really long threads. As usual in p6summarizer land, they will get short summaries. Odd how that happens.
Conflicting Autogenerated Accessors
Last week, Stevan Little wondered what would happen with conflicting autogenerated accessor names. Larry said they would carp as soon as they were discovered.
DBI v2
The first really long thread has to do with the next version of DBI. I am not really a database person, but apparently those who are have strong opinions.
Time::Local
The next really long thread has to do with the next version of Time::Local. I am not really a Time person, but apparently those who are have strong opinions.
Submethods
Stevan Little and Larry Wall talked about submethods, their purpose, and their interaction with the metamodel. I must say that I have only partially wrapped my head around metamodels at all.
SMD Considered Harmful?
Last week, Yuval Kogman conjectured that MMD should be the one true MD, as it allowed nifty extensibility. This week, Stuart Cook offered a sort of compromise. I rather like Stuart's compromise.
Dependency Injection
Piers wants to be able to have classes that inject themselves in correctly
at use time, based on what is actually used. Larry commented, but one quote
really caught my attention: "Globals are bad only if you use them to hold
non-global values." <off-topic>There is an important lesson imbedded in
that quote. We really should learn rules not to follow them blindly, but so
that we understand the spirit behind them and respect that instead. Not that I
have had screaming matches with any programmers who blindly eschew globals and
gotos without understanding why. </off-topic> That was
more of a rant then just off-topic. Oh well.
File.seek
Interface
Wolverian wondered what the seek interface would look like for
handles. Larry likes the idea of it working entirely through opaque position
objects using ` to specify units.
Perl 6/Perl 5 ~ 82%
Michael Hendricks noticed that (according to Text::TypingEffort). Perl 6 requires 18 percent less effort than Perl 5. He suggests that this is a bad thing for the community's waistline. I conjecture that Perl developers will use the extra time they save for activities such as running and canoeing, and as a result will paradoxically lose weight from expending less effort at work.
Creating Value Types
Ingo Blechschmidt wondered how to create a value type. Luke Palmer suggested
using an is value trait. He then went on to speculate about
mutating value traits and COW semantics. Larry though that perhaps an is
copy trait was called for. Oooh, a preposition at the end of a sentence;
makes me want to occasionally split infinitives.
OO
.isa
Ingo Blechschmidt viciously lied when claiming to post a "quick"
isa question. This quickly went the way of the meta object. I
think I mentioned my take on those earlier (powerful, but ow).
Method Call on Invocant
The last really long thread has to do with the next chapter in the "method
call on self" saga. I am a bit of a "method call on self" person, and apparently
those who are have strong opinions. It's worth noting this time that Larry
updated the current state of the world. Now ./method is gone and
.method only works when $_ =:= $?SELF.
use
and require Question
Ingo Blechschmidt wondered what use and require
actually do. Gall Yahas suggested they return the last thing in the
used/required file. Larry agreed and held that they would also return the same
thing. He also warned that %INC would probably work differently in
Perl 6.
User-Defined infix
Autrijus wondered if an method infix:<===> would need
marking as export for a script that uses it to get the method.
Larry explained that the method infix:<===> would be
available by name, but would have to be marked as export for the syntactic
sugar of A === B to work.
Hackathon Notes
Autrijus posted a link to his Hackathon notes. This spawned several threads. David Storrs tried to convince people to change subject lines, with limited success. Much of the discussion focused on MMD and how confusing it was. Damian Conway posted his set of three rules that would prevent AIs from harming humans and his set of eight rules that would prevent MMDs from harming programmers, proving that MMDs are almost three times more dangerous than AIs.
Raw Binary Data
David Formosa wanted to play with raw binary data in Perl 6. I try and avoid raw things except sushi. Larry suggested that this would just be a string with its maximum abstraction level set to bytes.
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