Perl 6 Summary for 2004-11-22 through 2004-11-29

Perl 6 Summary for 2004-11-22 through 2004-11-29
    All~

    Rather than try to do something witty about the strange music I am
    listening to, or the stuffed animals who are assisting me. I will start
    this summary off with an entirely self-serving request. <abuse>A while
    ago I saw the quote "Computer Science is merely the post-Turing Decline
    of Formal Systems Theory." without an attribution. I have tried to find
    an attribution for it, but have been unable to find one. If any of you
    know it, that information would be appreciated.</abuse> With that out of
    the way, I bring you

  Perl 6 Language
   Deep Operators
    Last week, Matthew Walton wondered about Deep Operators and if they
    would work as he expected. As I tentatively predicted, the answer came
    back and was "yes". Then the thread got side tracked with context and
    Perl vs perl vs PERL concerns.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wj>

   gather to separate bins
    Dave Whipp wanted to know if he could use gather/take with multiple
    bins. Michele Dondi suggested using adverbs for it. Rod Adams pointed
    out that as gather is inherently lazy the two binned approach could
    cause strange results (like churning for a while filling one bin trying
    to get an element for the other). Of course, not being able to do it
    would mean possibly having to compute an expensive generate function
    more than necessary, unless it is memoized...

    <http://xrl.us/d6wk>

   « in here-docs
    Thomas Seiler has decided to test my copy-paste-fu by starting a discuss
    on characters that don't appear on my keyboard. His question was if «END
    could start a here-doc. The answer appears to be no.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wm> -- here-doc

   « != <<
    The above thread led to a discussion of the various quoting operators,
    and the differences between «» and <<>>. This led to much discussion on
    the finer points of qw, qx, and qq (among others). Juerd suggested
    scrapping qx and qw in favor of qq:x and qq:w, which Larry liked. Rod
    Adams suggested scrapping <<END in favor of qq:h/END/, which I like.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wn>

   unifying namespaces
    Alexey Trofimenko wondered about unifying the $, @, and % namespaces.
    Larry told him that this ship sailed long ago and that it was not
    changing.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wo>

   Lexing/Parsing Perl6 without executing code
    Adam Kennedy wants to be able to syntax color (and possible perform
    basic programatic manipulations of perl6 code). Anyone who has used a
    good IDE like Visual Studio, Eclipse, or IntelliJ probably understands
    where he is coming from. He does not, however, want to execute arbitrary
    code in the process of doing this. Much discussion ensued, but it does
    not look like he will be able to do this. Quite the tragedy, but perl is
    simply too dynamic to be docilly lexed like static languages.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wp>

  Perl6 Compiler
   Nice Work
    Nick Glencross has the honor of the only message on p6c this week. But
    his sentiment is shared by all. Nice work, Patrick.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wq>

  Parrot Internals
   Parrot_compreg.sig
    Bernhard Schmalhofer noticed that Parrot_compreg had a different
    signature then documented, so he submitted a patch to fix it. Leo
    applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wr>

   opcode numbering
    Leo added a TODO ticker for opcode numbering.

    <http://xrl.us/d6ws>

   tests pass, but create core files
    I reported that on my machine all of the tests claim to pass, but core
    files appear in the parrot directory. Dan confirmed my suspicion that
    this was a real problem. I tried to supply helpful information like
    backtrace, but Warnock applies.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wt> -- initial message

    <http://xrl.us/d6wu> -- squeeky wheel gets the kick?

   pcc cleanup
    Leo removed the recently deprecated P0, P1, P2 usage. Relatively few
    tests break as a result.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wv>

   Namespace-sub invocation
    Luke Palmer wanted to know if there was syntax for calling subs from a
    particular namespace. Leo provided the answer, call it as a method on
    the namespace PMC.

    <http://xrl.us/d6ww>

   Reserved Words Annoy
    Luke Palmer wondered if he could define a .sub "new" to get around
    reserved word problems. Leo added the support, but warned him not to use
    "spaces or such".

    <http://xrl.us/d6wx>

   Lexicals, Continuations, Register Allocation, and ascii art
    This thread (and the ones that preceded it) have made me wish that gmail
    and google groups had a fixed width font option. Sadly, this summary
    will probably not get me it, as it did not get me p6c either :-( Ah
    well. The problems associated with lexicals and continuations churned.
    There was a plea for guidance from Dan. Hopefully he will guide us
    shortly.

    <http://xrl.us/d6wy> -- one thread about it

    <http://xrl.us/d6wz> - and another (with plea)

   old Parrot question
    Bloves had a question about assemble.pl in the parrot 0.0.1 source.
    Warnock applies.

    <http://xrl.us/d6w2>

   Parrot on Linux PPC build
    chromatic managed to track down some of the PPC build issues for linux.
    Leo wondered where all of the config hackers went, I think he wants
    someone to fix it.

    <http://xrl.us/d6w3>

   preprocessor problems
    Flavio S. Glock noted that the preprocessor did undesirable things. Leo
    suddenly realized that it was woefully out of date and need major
    fixing/disabling. Flavio submitted a small patch for it, but Leo pointed
    out that this was not enough to actually fix the preprocessor.

    <http://xrl.us/d6w4> -- initial message

   new push_eh opcode
    Leo added a new push_eh opcode and derprecated the old set_eh.

    <http://xrl.us/d6w5>

   TODO and RT wrangling
    Will Coleda continued his stellar work managing the RT queues. Brent
    'Dax' Royal-Gordon patched the first one.

    <http://xrl.us/d6w6> -- remove Perl* PMCs (done)

    <http://xrl.us/d6w7> -- the patch

    <http://xrl.us/d6w8> -- make Perl* PMCs dynamic

    <http://xrl.us/d6w9> -- IMCC Documentation needed

   PMC does "hash|array|monkey"
    Will Coleda added a ticket for the does functionality. He promptly
    closed it when Leo pointed out that it already existed in the form of
    the "does" op. So Will up and started using it.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xa> -- initial request

    <http://xrl.us/d6xb> -- Tcl takes advantage

   Strings are in
    Dan announced that the last of his string stuff was checked in and he
    would like brave souls to help him merge it back into the tree.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xc>

   Language TODO tests
    Will Coleda thanked Josh Wilmes for fixing the Language TODO tests. And
    apparently one of Tcl's has mysteriously started working.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xd>

   minesweeper broke
    Jens Rieks noticed that somewhere in the shuffle minesweeper got broken.
    As a professional minesweeper-er, this shocks and offends me. Leo
    offered a pointer as to where to start looking to fix it.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xe>

   @ANON subs
    Leo added some support for anonymous subroutines. People liked them and
    began. Luke Palmer prompty tried combining it with @IMMEDIATE and began
    to wonder if it was immediate enough.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xf>

   Parrot Grammar Engine issues
    I think that I shall continue to spell out PGE for a little while, but I
    may decide to use only the acronym in some later summary without
    warning, be prepared. Oh right, the whole reason I mentioned it in the
    first place... Will Coleda pointed out a few issues including (1)
    doesn't compile by default and (2) doesn't compile at all. Nicholas
    Clark fixed (2), and Patrick figured that (1) could wait until it was a
    little more mature. Personally, I feel that maturity is over rated,
    poo-poo head.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xg>

   (Java|ECMA)Script on Parrot
    David "liorean" Andersson wondered if there were any projects to run
    JavaScript on Parrot. While there does not appear to be, many people
    thing it would be a good idea and offered useful pointers.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xh>

   Rules Engines
    Cindi Jenkins posted a link to an interesting blog entry on Rules
    engines. Unfortunately, I think she posted it to google groups as it did
    not find its way onto the list. Also, unfortunately, it is a post about
    logic rules engines a la prolog and not grammar rules. although who
    knows, there might be some overlap...

    <http://xrl.us/d6xi>

   PIR examples on the website
    Herbert Snorrason noted that there were no PIR examples on the website
    and opened a ticket for it. Will took a first pass at it.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xj> -- original message

    <http://www.parrotcode.org/examples/>

   testj string_102 issues
    Luke Palmer found a subte looking problem in string_102.pasm. Leo
    couldn't reproduce it and suggested that it might be a redhat thing.
    Peter Sinnott chimed in with a possibly unrelated failure also on
    redhat.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xk>

   Tuning and Monitoring
    Matt S posted a question about how much internal tuning and monitoring
    Parrot would allow. Unfortunately, I think he posted it to google
    groups, as it didn't show up in my inbox. I am honestly not sure how
    much is available/in the works.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xm>

   missing directory in MANIFEST
    Andy Dougherty submitted a patch fixing a missing directory in the
    manifest by allowing ops2pm.pl add it.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xn>

   Objects, Classes, Metaclasses, and tall people's heads
    Dan posted a refresher on the current state of the object system. He
    then went on to explain where it was headed and conjectured that this
    would be enough. Just reading his description of it hurts my head enough
    that I do not wish to guess if he is right or not.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xo>

   eof opcodes
    Brian Wheeler wondered why there was no "eof" opcode. Leo told him that
    it was a method on a PIO object. Apparently most of the IO opcodes
    should actually be PIO methods, go figure.

    <http://xrl.us/d6xp>

   ops to deprecate or not
    Leo attempted to trim down the core by removing some opcode variants.
    Dan did not appreciate the change and told Leo to roll it back.
    Fortunately, Dan went on to explain the longer term goal (which should
    satisfy Leo).

    <http://xrl.us/d6xq> -- initial posting

    <http://xrl.us/d6xr> -- CVS commit message

    <http://xrl.us/d6xs> -- the goals

  The usual footer
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    <http://donate.perl-foundation.org/> -- The Perl Foundation
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• Perl 6 Summary for 2004-11-22 through 2004-11-29 by Matt Fowles