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Re: This week's summary
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From:
Michael Joyce
Date:
December 26, 2003 00:25
Subject:
Re: This week's summary
Message ID:
AEB81953-3721-11D8-891C-000A95A53558@telus.net
Thank you for a lovely Christmas Present.
Michael
On Dec 24, 2003, at 2:37 AM, The Perl 6 Summarizer wrote:
> The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20031221
> Welcome one and all to the penultimate Perl 6 Summary for 2003. The
> nights are long, the air is cold, freezing fog made the journey
> home
> from watching *The Return of the King* a deeply fraught experience
> (though probably not as fraught for us as for the chap who
> obviously
> didn't see the roundabout in time and went straight over it).
>
> If you're in the southern hemisphere, feel free to ignore the
> foregoing
> flavour text.
>
> It should come as no surprise to you by now that we start with the
> internals list.
>
> Namespaces II
> Dan returned from a bout of paying work to finish up the current
> understanding of how namespaces are managed in Parrot. A namespace
> selector becomes a multidimensional key (using a multidimensional
> key
> instead of a single long namespace name makes for easier sharing of
> namespaces between languages; there's no need to go guessing what
> separator the other language uses in its namespace naming because
> that's
> essentially irrelevant at the Parrot level). Looking up a
> particular
> variable in a namespace is still a two step process, first get the
> namespace, then do the lookup within the namespace. Dan explained
> that
> this is a win because it should allow for holding onto namespaces
> in a
> register when dealing with multiple variables.
>
> Leo Tötsch wasn't entirely convinced by the new syntax introduced,
> and
> proposed a mechanism which used the standard syntax for accessing
> multikeyed structures with a proposed Namespace PMC.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2wtkd
>
> Another keyed ops proposal
> Leo continues to make proposals for rethinking keyed ops. Somewhat
> surprisingly, Dan didn't entirely reject the latest one involving a
> possible new set of key registers.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2za5t
>
> Leo adds threads
> Leo Tötsch checked in a patch to allow Parrot to spawn threads. As
> he
> admitted, there's a lot missing, but it's a start. He solicited
> comments
> and further pointers.
>
> Later in the week he asked for some design decisions related to
> making
> various of the interpreter's internal data structures thread safe.
> Elizabeth Mattijsen had several comments to make, based on
> experience
> with Perl 5's ithread system. In essence her suggestion was that
> as many
> things as possible should be made copy on write between threads.
> (I have
> a faint recollection of Nicholas Clark delivering a wonderful
> lightning
> talk/dance explaining his proposal for making Perl 5 use copy on
> write
> structures for ithreads. It's worth seeing if you get the
> chance...)
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3egyu
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yrjrm
>
> PDD03 and method calls
> Leo queried the design of Parrot's calling conventions for calling
> a
> method and proposed a slightly different convention with the
> object put
> in P5 rather than P2. Dan thought that the calling conventions
> documented was the right way to go, but didn't seem to convince
> everyone.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2npnn
>
> Rolling back "clone"
> Leo pointed out that "clone"'s semantics had got altered to take an
> uninitialized destination PMC as an argument back when the GC
> system was
> flaky. He suggested switching back to a version that creates the
> new PMC
> itself now that GC was working properly. Dan told Leo to go for it.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/35c57
>
> Meanwhile, in perl6-language
> Um... sorry about this, but I'm punting on writing the promised
> Roles/Traits/Classes summary. I was planning on doing it today, but
> things have been hellish; I've spent about 8 hours fighting fires
> today
> rather than writing the summary. Sorry.
>
> Work on Perl 6's object system continues apace though; things are
> looking very good and powerful.
>
> By the way from now on I'll try and stick to Larry's usage of
> capitalizing 'Traits' when referring back to the Traits paper, and
> keeping it lower case when referring to Perl 6's compile-time
> traits.
>
> Runtime CHECK?
> Piers Cawley asked if Perl 6 modules that get loaded at runtime
> will
> have their "CHECK" blocks (or their equivalent) executed. Larry
> initially thought not, but Rafael Garcia-Suarez noted that Perl 5
> shouldn't be held up as exemplary and that there was definitely a
> need
> for some kind of special block that would get run at the end of the
> compilation phase of any arbitrary compilation unit.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2ytze
>
> "but true"
> Adam D. Lopresto wondered how the recent work on Roles, Properties
> and
> Traits fit in with already declared stuff like "but true". Larry
> confessed that he was still thinking hard about this, but that he
> thought "but" wasn't powerful enough yet.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2v2ef
>
> Acknowledgements, Announcements, Apologies
> Cross your fingers and toes, we might have link shortening in this
> version. Hurrah!
>
> Merry Christmas everyone.
>
> I make no promises about whether there will be a summary next
> week. Nor
> do I make any promises about whether there'll be a summary of the
> year
> (but I wouldn't hold your breath).
>
> If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, show your
> appreciation
> by contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the ongoing
> development of Perl. Money and time are both good. I'm always
> pleased to
> get feedback at p6summarizer@bofh.org.uk and traffic at my website.
>
> http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
>
> http://www.bofh.org.uk:8080/ -- My website, Just a Summary
>
>
Michael S. Joyce
http://www.negativespace.net - all things in between
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