Perl 6 Summary for last week

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021020
    I'm sorry to have to inform you that I've returned from my holiday (no,
    base jumping and paragliding were *not* involved) and that this week's
    summary will not be written by the estimable Leon Brocard. Sorry about
    that. Leon is currently taking a rest cure.

    So, with the customary mention of Mister Brocard out of the way good and
    early this week, it's time to take a look at what's been discussed on
    the internals list:

  Regarding JVM - Parrot Compatibility
    Newcomer Karthik Kumar is interested in writing a tool to convert java
    ".class" files to parrot ".pbc" files and asked for information on what
    had been done in this area. Leon Brocard says it's very easy to get the
    basics working because of the low number of JVM bytecodes. But getting
    the fundamentals (classes, objects) right is hard. Ramesh
    Ananthakrishnan commented that it might be a little early for anything
    more than proofs of concept at the moment as Parrot is a rapidly moving
    target. Ramesh also came up with the idea of compiling `real machine'
    assembly language to `virtual machine' parrot assembler.

    Karthik commented that the real issue seems to be one of what level of
    support Parrot will offer for objects, and until that is known the
    class->parrot problem is almost pointless to solve.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?S18F26432

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?C19F22432 -- Ramesh clarifies his `Linux
    in Parrot' idea.

  The Getting Started Guide
    Erik Lechak is still not loving POD but, despite his distaste he posted
    version 0.4 of his getting started guide in POD format. Thanks a lot
    Erik. Marty Pauley suggested that Erik take a look at the Simple
    Document Format which may meet his needs better than POD

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?F2AF11432

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z5BF34432

  C# and Parrot
    Rhys Weatherly, author of Portable.NET, part of the DotGNU project made
    a welcome appearance on the list. Apparently the DotGNU people are
    looking into compiling C# down to parrot bytecode and hoped that there
    might be parrot people who were interested in trying to complete their
    compiler and system library.

    Rhys wanted to know how to make a user-defined class in Parrot; what the
    convention is for which registers must be saved across a call; the size
    of "int" and whether there was a way to store and access auxiliary data
    in a Parrot bytecode file.

    Answers were provided. Sadly, the answer to Rhys's question about
    user-defined classes was "You don't, yet." Other answers were more
    immediately useful.

    The DotGNU weekly IRC meeting discussed Parrot this week, Leon and Dan
    managed to cover both sessions between them, and there's a log
    available.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?M2CF21432

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?J1DF11432 -- Condensed summary of the
    meeting

    http://ajmitch.dhis.org/dotgnu/ -- unedited logs available here

  Variable/Value Split Prelims
    Leopold Toetsch rather confused me when he replied to a two week old
    message (I thought I'd completely screwed up setting the `limit by date'
    values in my summary buffer) about the conceptual split between
    variables and values. Leo wanted some clarification which Dan provided.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?M4EF21432 -- Dan's old message

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?C3FF22432 -- Leo's questions

  PMC Initializers
    Leon Brocard attempted to kick start discussion of Jonathan Sillito's
    patch to pass more information when creating new PMCs. Leopold Toetsch
    and Josef Höök both said they thought that something along those lines
    was a good idea, but the discussion seemed to die there. Later in the
    week, Dan introduced the new "init_pmc" function to PDD02, which works
    along the lines suggested.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?V20023532

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?I11021532

  PerlHash questions
    Clinton A. Pierce wondered about how to do the equivalent of "exists
    $hash{$key}" in Parrot when one doesn't necessarily know the types of
    the things in the hash. Leo Toetsch pointed to "exists_keyed" and
    "type_keyed". Jason Gloudon pointed out that the docs for "type_keyed"
    referred only to PMCs, with no mention of 'primitive' types. He wondered
    if PerlHash shouldn't just dictate that its contents were all PMCs.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?M62042532

  Meanwhile in Perl6-language
    The language group is trying to catch up with internals in number of
    posts. They managed 89 posts this week compared to internals' 96. If you
    discount attachments, language probably won on volume (and it certainly
    wins hands down on the `difficulty of summarization' metric).

  Draft Proposal: Declaring Classwide Attributes
    The discussion of how to declare classwide attributes rumbled on from
    last week; I'll just pick out a few nuggets.

    * "HASH", "ARRAY" etc will likely become "Hash", "Array" etc, and
       there's a good chance that "UNIVERSAL" will become "Object"
    *  Implicit invocants can participate in multiple dispatch
    *  It's worth taking a look at Smalltalk metaclasses, or Ruby's classes.
    * "Putting Metaclasses to To Work" might also be worth a read

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?X13021532 -- Thread starts here

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?P64013532 -- the Metaclasses book

  Perl6 Operator Precedence Table
    The `Operator Precedence' thread kept on rolling from last week. The
    current game appears to be `working out how to free "&" and "|" to
    become superposition constructors', which means hanging the bitwise
    operators somewhere else. Various ideas have been proposed, but people
    really didn't like "|||" and "&&&". The current front runners appear to
    be:

    * "$a b& $b"
    * "$a .& $b"
    *
            my @a is bitmap($a);
            my @b is bitmap($b);
            my @c is bitmap($c); 

            @a = @b ^|| @c; # Correcting what I assume is Larry's typo

    It looks like this whole area is still somewhat fluid though.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?B55022532

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?S26053532

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?M27021532

  "untaintby" property
    Miko O'Sullivan proposed an "untaintby" property which `restricts which
    modules may untaint the data or data derived from that data.' The
    feedback wasn't that positive, but Larry came up with the idea of
    callbacks on properties which look rather cool. (`too cool!' according
    to Miko).

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?W28062532

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?L19022532

  Indeterminate Maths
    Michael Schwern opened a can of worms when he wondered if "1/0" would
    throw an error or just return a value representing an indeterminate
    result. Leon wondered if it'd be possible to, for instance have a module
    which did all its arithmetic in, say, integers module prime P. Dan
    thought yes, with lots of overloading. Adam Lopresto thought "1/0" would
    be a good place for the new "fail" semantics. We ended up in a debate
    about the mathematical values of "$n/0" (apparently x/0 is indeterminate
    when x is zero and undefined otherwise).

    This thread also saw discussion of: the nature of Object Orientation and
    the benefits of instance based inheritance; the semantics of NaN. (Did
    you know that "NaN != NaN"; the use of exceptions; proofs that 1/0 is,
    necessarily, undefined; Lukasiewiczian logic (SQL type NULLs); Miko's
    `inner Larry Wall'; and the hypothetical "Math::Perverse" module, which
    sounds like a candidate for the Acme namespace to me.

    Larry seems to think that a combination of pragmas and overloaded
    classes should be enough to do the job.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?J5A012532

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q3B042532 -- complete with citation of
    www.userfriendly.org

  A concept for Exceptions
    Miko O'Sullivan has been doing some serious thinking. After wowing us
    with his "untaintby" proposal, he came up with some proposals for
    exceptions which would allow for all sorts of cunning tricks. Dan
    pointed out that at least one of the cunning tricks wasn't actually
    possible, but that you could get something like it by throwing
    continuations with your exceptions.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?N2C064532

In brief
    The effort to fix the JIT core when compiled with optimizations on x86
    boxes continues (with a certain amount of discussion of how to use the
    test modules).

    Simon Glover sent a covey of patches, mostly adding tests (yay!) along
    with one to fix up and document the ".include" assembler macro. Applied.

    Chromatic did some copy editing of the docs and sent in a patch with his
    fixes. Applied.

    Leopold Toetsch has a large patch for the GC system which tries to deal
    with some of the problems. It's not a complete fix, but Leo thinks it's
    a start.

    Simon Glover noticed that lib/Parrot/PMC.pm is marked as autogenerated
    and therefore removed by a "make clean", which would be okay, but
    there's no rule in the makefile to regenerate it. Steve Fink fixed it
    using Simon's suggested solution.

    Dan's fixed the docs for the splice vtable entries in PDD2. Leopold
    Toetsch promised to implement it.

    Michael Lazzaro offers a summary of variables and assignment at
    http://cog.cognitivity.com/perl6/var.html. Thanks Michael.

Who's Who in Perl 6
    Who are you?
        Brent Dax

    What do you do for/with Perl 6?
        I manage Configure changes and occasionally work on embedding and
        extending, the regex engine, misc.c, or whatever catches my fancy.

    Where are you coming from?
        The end of a day in high school (or sometimes the middle of the
        day...) :^)

        Seriously, I think Perl 6 is an excellent idea. Perl is a great
        language, but it's been in need of a de-crufting for some time.

    When do you think Perl 6 will be released?
        Hmm...probably next year sometime. Not soon enough for me to like
        it, but not late enough to complain about it.

    Why are you doing this?
        Because it's fun and interesting. And I get paid to manage a Web
        site, so Perl eq money. And I'm actually taken seriously.

    You have 5 words. Describe yourself.
        Hubristic hacker who really knows_little.

    Do you have anything to declare?
        No, of course not. No need to search this suitcase. Nope, not a bit.
        The customs dogs must have smelled a doggy treat or something.

Acknowledgements
    Thanks are, of course, due to Leon Brocard for ably filling my shoes for
    the past couple of weeks and making sure that the summaries got through.

    I'd also like to thank Rhys Weatherly and Gopal V for popping up on the
    internals list. I think it's *great* to see good communication and
    cooperation between the different projects working in this field.

    Thanks too to my army of crack proofreaders who help to turn the
    misspelled morass of bad grammar that is my first draft into something
    that's readable. This week's team was: Chris Ball

    The Perl 6 Summary was produced with the aid of GNER tea, the
    distractions of MAME and *10 Yard Fight* and with money from O'Reilly
    and Associates. If you liked it, please consider giving money to the
    Perl Foundation at http://donate.perl-foundation.org and feedback
    and/or NeXTcubes to me, <mailto:pdcawley@bofh.org.uk>.

    The fee paid for publication of this summary on perl.com has been
    donated directly to the Perl Foundation.


-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?

• Perl 6 Summary for last week by Piers Cawley