Perl 6 Summary for 2005-02-08 through 2005-02-22

Perl 6 Summary for 2005-02-08 through 2005-02-22
    All~

    Welcome to yet another fortnight summary. Lately p6l has been out
    stripping p6i in volume. While this used to be the norm, lately it has
    become a rare occurrence. Strange... Anyway, this summary would be
    brought to you buy cookies, but I ate them all. So instead this summary
    is brought to you by the remaining chocolate chips. In other news,
    Autrijus Tang has just officially been promoted to first name only
    status in the summaries based on both his stellar work with Pugs and his
    highly identifiable name. He now joins the ranks of Larry, Dan, Madonna,
    and Leo.

  Perl 6 Language
   do { } while?
    David Storrs wanted to know what the best way to say " do { }
    while($foo); " was. Larry told him that " s/do/loop/ " would suffice.

    <http://xrl.us/e77k>

   nest as a primitive looping operation
    Timothy Nelson gets credit for resurrecting the oldest thread I have
    seen brought back recently. Over two years ago, he mentioned a powerful
    looping structure that allowed for recursion. Now he has found a use for
    it.

    <http://xrl.us/e77m>

   Loop Entry
    Joe Gottman wanted to execute a closure every time a loop was entered,
    not upon every iteration. He thought ENTER happened only once ever, but
    it turns out that it will do what he wants.

    <http://xrl.us/e77n>

   pop %hash
    Rod Adams wants to be able to pop a key value pair our of a hash. Others
    wondered what it would be used for. Someone mentioned an OrderedHash...

    <http://xrl.us/e77o>

   higher order operators
    Timothy Nelson wanted to have meta-operators. Larry gave him the full
    unicode character set with which to define them. Tim was happy.

    <http://xrl.us/e77p>

   none and nor delimiter
    Thomas Sandlaß suggests using " \ " as a none junction delimiter. He
    then extended this idea to provide a logical nor, " \\ ". Autrijus
    suggested " ! " for none. There was some argument about whether nor
    deserved such huffmanization. Also, I think that the difference between
    " // " and " \\ " would continually escape me. I have enough troubles
    writing code to deal with windows filesystems.

    <http://xrl.us/e77q>

   Kudos to Autrijus
    Damian proudly welcomed Autrijus to the ranks of the last-nameless-ones.
    He also lauded his amazing work at forcing a lazy language to pull a
    lazier one. I think we all agree.

    <http://xrl.us/e77r>

   containers vs object references
    Rod Adams wondered whether there was a litmus test that could determine
    if something deserved its own sigil. The answer appears to be mostly
    history. Larry suggested a simplistic way to create new sigils, although
    it would not provide interoplation. I think a blessed method for
    defining new sigils which do interpolate and provide some sort of type
    constraint and context would be really nifty. Also I want a million
    dollars in small, non-consecutive, unmarked bills. If you have either of
    these please mail it to me.

    <http://xrl.us/e77s>

   printing true
    Autrijus wondered about true and fasle. Are they just 1 and 0? #t and
    #f? Larry answered bool::true and bool::false, but true and false would
    suffice when there was no ambiguity.

    <http://xrl.us/e77t>

   quoted => LHS
    Juerd wondered if " =" > auto-quoted its left hand side. Yes.

    <http://xrl.us/e77u>

   "@" x 75 ~ $zap =?= ("@" x 75) ~ $zap
    Juerd mistakenly thought that ~ bound tighter than x. Only unary ~ binds
    that tightly, so he is safe.

    <http://xrl.us/e77v>

   getting the key|value of a pair
    Steve Peters wondered how he could get the key or value from a pair. It
    turns out that the .key and .value method will do what he wants until
    some twisted soul overrides them...

    <http://xrl.us/e77w>

   Junctiuons and Autothreading
    By far the longest topic this week was junctions. Some people worry that
    their autothreaded behavior will cause plagues to ravage the earth and
    novices programmers to go blind. Others feel that without it Perl6 will
    be a language suitable only to pond scum and cobol programmers. While
    one side believes that autothreading repition of sid effects will crash
    any database that interacts with Perl6, the other side believes that
    requiring extra pragmas to unlock their full power will prevent
    junctions from curing cancer. Either way someone is going to be unhappy.
    It looked like the pendulum was swinging towards autothreading, but its
    chief proponenet will be away next week, so who knows if it can survive
    undefended. My favorite suggestion in all of this was to make Perl6 a
    pure functional language and introduce monads.

    <http://xrl.us/e77x>

    <http://xrl.us/e77y>

    <http://xrl.us/e77z>

    <http://xrl.us/e772>

   nullary vs nonslurpy
    Autrijus found it distressing that to get his quicksort to sort quickly
    he had to make an empty signature slurpy. Larry assured him that it was
    OK. This also led to a question of MMD tiebreaking. Remember to attach
    an is default if you want your ties broken!

    <http://xrl.us/e773>

   pairs
    Steve Peters had a few more questions about pairs, which made Osfameron
    notice that he could use pairs like lisp's dotted pairs. Larry admit
    that he could and was hoping that no one would notice.

    <http://xrl.us/e774>

   octal strings
    Luke Palmer wondered what strings would change radix and to what. The
    concensus was that something needed to change but they were not exactly
    sure what...

    <http://xrl.us/e775>

  Perl 6 Compilers
   Pugs 6.0.8
    Pugs continues to approach 2 * \pi with the release of 6.0.5 and later
    he decided that he should release more stuff and put out 6.0.8. It has
    many new features and a much improved test suite. You should contribute
    tests. All the cool people are.

    <http://xrl.us/e776> -- 6.0.5

    <http://xrl.us/e777> -- 6.0.8

   list of builtins
    Autrijus wondered if there was a list of builtins anywhere. Patrick
    pointed him to his start.

    <http://xrl.us/e778>

   Perl 6 Now
    Autrijus wondered if the unit tests for Perl 6 Now where available.
    Scott Walters told him that they were public domain. Autrijus gleefully
    sicked a small, ugly dog on them...

    <http://xrl.us/e779>

   pugs tests
    ??? proved that he was cool by providing pugs tests. So did Steve
    Peters, Benjamin Smith, and Stevan Little. I bet you wished you were
    cool too.

    <http://xrl.us/e78a> -- ???

    <http://xrl.us/e78b> -- Steve

    <http://xrl.us/e78c> -- Benjamin

    <http://xrl.us/e78d> -- Stevan

   pugscode.org
    Autrijus registered <http://pugscode.org/> and populated it.

    <http://xrl.us/e78e>

   %*ENV in pugs
    Rafael Garcia-Suarez wanted access to %*ENV. So he added it with tests.

    <http://xrl.us/e78f>

  Parrot
   GNU R
    Yves Breitmoser wants to improve the support for GNU R in perl. Aaron
    Sherman suggested using parrot asa a back-end for Parrot which would
    allow any language that target parrot to use R.

    <http://xrl.us/e78g>

   make html
    Markus Amslser submitted a patch to fix make html. Leo applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/e78h>

   Win32 bind(accept(listen()))
    Markus Amslser submitted a patch adding bind, listen, and accept on
    win32. Leo applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/e78i>

   commit priveldges
    Bernhard Schmalhofer received commit priveledges in recognition of his
    many high quality patches. Congrats Bernhard!

    <http://xrl.us/e78j>

   tiny webserver
    Markus Amslser also provided a patch to allow his tiny webserver to run
    on linux. Leo applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/e78k>

   FreeBSD build failure
    Adriano Ferreira fixed some problems with the FreeBSD build. Leo applied
    the patch.

    <http://xrl.us/e78m>

   Parrot 0.1.2
    Will Coleda continued pushing for a 0.1.2 release. Leo told him that
    there would be a release after the German Perl Workshop which should be
    ending soon...

    <http://xrl.us/e78n>

   Linux PPC
    Leo attempted to fix the longstanding issues with linux PPC configure.

    <http://xrl.us/e78o>

   failing python tests
    Andy Dougherty notices that some of the dynclasses/py*.t tests were
    ailing. He is working with Leo on providing enough information to solve
    the problem.

    <http://xrl.us/e78p>

   PyPy
    Christian Tismer posted to the list informing everyone about the PyPy
    sprint at Washington DC's PyCon 2005. As they are eager to compare notes
    with other developers.

    <http://xrl.us/e78q>

   string_init and ICU data dir
    Ron Blaschke noticed that Parrot would choke on an empty ICU data dir.
    Leo fixed it.

    <http://xrl.us/e78r>

   Win32 parrot
    Ron Blaschke wants to try and get Parrot building on Win32 better. He
    has offered to add the necessary PARROT_API macros and do other
    footwork.

    <http://xrl.us/e78t> -- PARROT_API

    <http://xrl.us/e78u> -- gdbm linkage

    <http://xrl.us/e78v> -- outdated rt ticket

    <http://xrl.us/e78w> -- old rt ticket

    <http://xrl.us/e78x> -- fix libnci_test

    <http://xrl.us/e78y> -- old ticket

    <http://xrl.us/e78z> -- out of date ticket

    <http://xrl.us/e782> --gdbm troubles

   tailcalls
    Bob Rogers wants to make tailcalls without knowing the last calls return
    values. Currently he just lies to imcc to make it work. Leo pointed him
    to " interpinfo .INTERPINFO_CURRENT_CONT " and also suggested that
    adding a tail_call op would be a good idea.

    <http://xrl.us/e783>

  The usual footer
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• Perl 6 Summary for 2005-02-08 through 2005-02-22 by Matt Fowles