This Fortnight in Perl 6, Jan. 19-31, 2005

All~

Welcome to another double feature summary. Sadly, this one was delayed because of an argument that I was/am having with my connection. Fortunately, a generous neighbor has allowed me to use his connection for the time being. So, with that random act of kindness in mind, I bring you �

Perl 6 Language

Perl 6 on E

Rich Morin wondered if Perl 6 would support the features of the language E. Larry told him it would support many of them, and “as a limiting case, you can always back out the entire Perl grammar and install the E grammar in its place.” He left this as an exercise for the reader.

Challenge the Palmer …

Luke Palmer produced answers to Austin Hastings’s “How do I” questions. Anyone else with such questions should send them to the list lest Luke’s learnedness loses luster.

Refactoring Perl automatically

Matisse Enzer re-re-raised the thread on refactoring Perl. This time he posted a link to EPIC, an Eclipse plugin that uses Devel::Refactor. Unfortunately, I think he is still using the Google Groups interface to post the language. I repeat, emails posted via Google Groups do not make it to the list itself.

Loops, Bare Blocks, and My Head Hurts

Juerd wondered if last/redo would work outside loops. Larry provided the long answer. The short answer is no, things act basically rationally so that return, next, and last all behave as expected.

Where Without Type

Juerd wondered if he could use a where clause with a type. The answer is yes, as it will useful to restrict values admitted to a multi-method. This led me to the evil thought of putting side-effects in a where clause on several multi-methods and watching the pain of resolution cause very difficult to find bugs. Sometime I think that my mind looks for nasty ways to write bad code a little too much.

Auto-threading

Luke Palmer posted his musing about auto-threading. I must say it looks powerful enough to blow off your entire lower body if you shoot yourself in the foot.

Perl 6 Compiler

Pugs

Not just ugly dogs anymore, they are also P6 interpreters written in Haskel. It sounds really cool to me.

Parrot

MMD and Meta-Stuff

In a thread posted also to p6l (sorry about that), I attempt to explain how parrot object system is already very close to the Common Lisp Object System and why it should become even closer. I am not sure if I succeeded. My ability to express really abstract thoughts without a whiteboard is poor.

RT Clean Up

Will Coleda has put an extensive amount of work into cleaning up Parrot for public presentation with a focus on RT and organization.

argv[0]

Wukk (who is Will when my fingers slip off key) wants the name of the invoked executable. Dan upped the ante by offering the full and base name variants of the interpreter, the program, and the invoked thing.

OSCON

Robert Spier put out a call for OSCON proposals.

Read and Readline

Matt Diephouse has been cleaning up read and readline.

Test_main.c

Bloves posted a patch updating test_main.c. Unfortunately, it turns out that this file is obsolete and needs removal.

MinGW Support

François Perrad provided a patch to improve MinGW support. Leo applied it.

Compile Problems

Will Coleda has a failing fresh build. Warnock applies.

NCI Improvements

Bernhard Schmalhofer provided a patch improving NCI stuff. Leo applied it.

VS.NET 2003

Sriram Krishnan fought through a build on VS.NET 2003. He overcame problems and even posted a summary. Unfortunately, he posted all of this to the Google Groups interface, as none of it made it back to the list.

Dynclasses Missing Dependencies

Leo put out a request for fixes to the problem with dynclasses missing dependencies.

Generational GC

Leo has put in the first part of his Generational GC system. It has bugs, but it is also cool.

Preemptive Multi-tasking via Continuations

Hugh Arnold wants to use timers and continuations to implement preemptive multitasking in a single threaded application. He wants to know if Parrot will support it. I think that the answer is yes.

Bound Methods, Attribute Lookup, and Python

Dan, Leo, and Sam have started to go around about how to implement method lookup and currying. Best of luck to all.

lib/Make.pm

Matt Diephouse noticed that lib/Make.pm is out of date and unneeded. He asked for its removal.

Interacting with the Mailing Lists

Someone suggested that I add a description of the preferred modality for interacting with the mailing lists summarized herein. I think this is a good idea and will add it to the standard footer.

To post to any of these mailing lists please subscribe by sending email to perl6-internals-subscribe@perl.org, perl6-language-subscribe@perl.org, or perl6-compiler-subscribe@perl.org. 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 feedback to ubermatt@gmail.com.

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