Perl 6 Summary for 2005-02-22 though 2005-03-07

Perl 6 Summary for 2005-02-22 though 2005-03-07
    All~

    Welcome to yet another fortnight summary. Once again brought to you by
    chocolate chips. This does have the distinction of being the first
    summary written on a mac. So if I break into random swear words, just
    bear with me.

  Off list development
    In more related news, It has been pointed out to me that development
    goes on off list on places like IRC. I briefly contemplated, quitting my
    job and tracking such things full time, but then I decided that it would
    be better if I just accepted brief submissions for the summary. Thus I
    will be adding a fourth section to the summaries based on contributions.
    If you would like to make a contribution, email me with a brief summary.
    Please include the name by which you would like to be attributed (sadly
    the process I use is likely to mangle any unicode characters). Please
    make all links full, I will shorten them. Thanks

  Perl 6 Language
   not()
    It turns out that "not()" (with no arguments) made perl 5 core dump for
    a while, and it took us five years to figure that out. In perl 6 it will
    be a list op and calling it with no arguments will return a null list or
    an undef depending on context.

    <http://xrl.us/fdb9>

   junctions and threading
    I had hoped that last week the concerns about threading would have been
    addressed. I was mistaken. A new crop of concerns surfaced and died down
    fairly quickly (as the chief proponent, Damien, was away).

    <http://xrl.us/fdca>

   serializing to various languages
    Somehow the discussion of junctions morphed into a discussion of sets,
    which morphed back into junctions, which morphed into a discussion of
    serialization to different languages. Interesting stuff, but I wouldn't
    hold me breath for it...

    <http://xrl.us/fdcb>

   Performance Analysis and Benchmarks
    Adam Preble posted an offer to develop some benchmarks for perl 6.
    Unfortunately, I think he posted it to google groups. Also, he probably
    should have posted it to p6c or p6i as the language folk tend to wave
    their hands and say "magic occurs but correctness is preserved" when it
    comes to optimization.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcc>

   send + more = junctions
    Autrijus posted an example using junctions, instead of parents, to solve
    the classic

    SEND MORE + ===== MONEY

    problem. Markus Laire asked for a clarification, and Rod Adams pointed
    out that he felt that it would not work as the interdependence of the
    "e"s was not captured. This does lead to the question of how one should
    right prolog like code (including unification and backtracking) in Perl
    6. No answers were offered.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcd>

   Pairs as lvalues
    Ingo Blechschmidt wondered what the behavior of pairs as lvalues would
    be. The answer is that you would get an error for attempting to modify a
    constant.

    <http://xrl.us/fdce>

   Perl 6
    Roberto Bisotto wanted to know where he could download perl 6 to start
    playing with it. We embarrassedly told him that a full implementation
    was not yet available, but pugs was gaining ground quickly.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcf>

   hash keys
    Autrijus wanted to know if hash keys were still just strings or if they
    could be more. The answer is that by default they would be strings, but
    they could be declared as having a different " shape ". This led to a
    discussion of hashing techniques such as the .bits, .canonicalize, or
    .hash methods.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcg>

   Dynamically scoped dynamic scopes
    Dave Whipp wanted to make "dynamically scoped dynamic scopes". My head
    hurt, but apparently Larry's didn't as he replied "piece of cake, the
    syntax [and implementation] are left as an exercise to for the would be
    module author".

    <http://xrl.us/fdch>

   Parameters to rules
    Rod Adams asked how he could specify arguments to rules so they could be
    more function like. Larry explained that there were several syntaxes
    each of which would coerce its arguments in slightly different ways. He
    then mused that perhaps there were too many, I agree there are too many.

    <http://xrl.us/fdci>

   compile time signature checking
    Ahbijit Mahabal wondered how type checking would work for cases where it
    was not easy to determine the types at compile time. The answer:
    checking will be defered to runtime. In the end it seems that Perl 6
    will blur the line between runtime and compile time heavily. Perhaps it
    will provide nifty support for staged programming, meta-perl6 here we
    come...

    <http://xrl.us/fdcj>

   %*CONFIG and %?CONFIG
    Brian Ingerson asked about the CONFIG hash and what sort of secondary
    sigil it would have. Larry explained that $?CONFIG held to config for
    the machine compiling the program and $*CONFIG held the config for the
    machine running the program. Then he made some noice about parsing,
    compiling, and running all on different machines. Then he suggested that
    this way led to drug induced madness...

    <http://xrl.us/fdck>

   sigils and structural subtypes
    Thomas Sandlaß proposed using sigils to provide a structural type system
    as opposed to its class/signature based one and its constraint based
    one.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcm>

   optional binding
    Luke Palmer wondered how optional arguments and slurpy ones would
    interact. Brent and Larry explained that they would snap up whatever
    arguments they could. But you can always beat them back by piping in
    your slurpy stuff with " ==" >.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcn>

   types, classes and junctions
    Thomas Sandlaß wants to know how the type system and the class system
    interrelate. He drew a happy tree of A, B and its junctions. Really it
    confused me, and I agree with him that I don't understand the value of
    the one junction in the context of types.

    <http://xrl.us/fdco>

   Code Indentation
    Wolverian does not like any of the ways he can indent his long function
    declaration when traits are involved. He wants to allow a comma in them
    to solve fix this dilemnia. Larry and others suggested a few
    alternatives. This led to a discussion of module loading and
    header/module files. Larry admitted that eh would not mind if Perl6
    developed Ada like module files.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcp>

  Perl 6 Compiler
   Pugs Releases and patches
    Autrijus released Pugs 6.0.9 and 6.0.10 with help from many people.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcq> -- 6.0.9

    <http://xrl.us/fdcr> -- 6.0.10

   various PUGS patches
    Luke Palmer added more qq delimiters and fixed a unary - bug. Yuval
    Kogman posted a fix that made anonymous blocks both parse and run.
    Stevan Little un-TODOed a bunch of tests that started working; he went
    on to add some new tests that do not yet pass. I suspect that he is just
    providing more for him to un-TODO later... Yuval Kogman submitted
    several patches including array interpolation, a CATCH {} test, a test
    for an assignment bug, and a fix for a conditional of expected. Garrett
    Rooney cleaned up given.t, added a test for %hash.kv, one for declaring
    variables in a loop, and another for $?LINE AND $?FILE.

    <http://xrl.us/fdcs> -- qq patch

    <http://xrl.us/fdct> -- unary minus

    <http://xrl.us/fdcu> -- anon blocks

    <http://xrl.us/fdcv> -- un-TODO

    <http://xrl.us/fdcw> -- more tests

    <http://xrl.us/fdcx> -- array interpolation

    <http://xrl.us/fdcy> -- CATCH

    <http://xrl.us/fdcz> -- more un-TODO

    <http://xrl.us/fdc2> -- assignment bug

    <http://xrl.us/fdc3> -- given

    <http://xrl.us/fdc4> -- conditional

    <http://xrl.us/fdc5> -- more given

    <http://xrl.us/fdc6> -- %hash.kv

    <http://xrl.us/fdc7> -- loop

    <http://xrl.us/fdc8> -- $?FILE

   where to post things?
    Abhijit Mahabal wondered if p6c was the correct place to post questions
    about pugs and bugs in pugs. Patrick and Autrijus aggreed that p6c was
    indeed the correct place for most initial questions and things would be
    escalated to p6l only when the apocalypses|exegesis|synopses were not
    clear.

    <http://xrl.us/fdc9>

   argument binding problems
    Abhijit Mahabal found and analyzed a bug in pugs argument binding. No
    solution yet.

    <http://xrl.us/fdda>

   no more numeric postfix operators
    Do to the space eating postfix dot, Larry declared that there would be
    no numeric postfix operators. A great cry went out as if there had been
    a huge disturbance in the force or not.

    <http://xrl.us/fddb>

   &?SUB and pointy subs
    Garrett Rooney was having trouble using the &?SUB variable in pointy
    subs. That is because they don't use it. &?SUB is only for full fledges
    subs. That way you can call &?SUB from within a for loop in a sub and
    get the nice recursive behavior you likely want.

    <http://xrl.us/fddc>

   when is $_ set
    Autrijus asked Larry for clarification of which circumstances set $_.
    Larry explained that -> topicalized its first argument but full subs
    undefed it until something else set it, while methods bind it to their
    first invocant.

    <http://xrl.us/fddd>

   parens on method calls
    Luke Palmer was having trouble getting " for %hash.keys { ... } " to
    parse correctly. Larry replied that it is problematic if methods were to
    be parsed in the same manner as subs, fortunately the parens are
    mandatory when their are arguments in addition to invocants.

    <http://xrl.us/fdde>

   @x = @a == @x = @a[]
    Autrijus wanted to verify that

    my @x = @a; my @x = @a[]; my @x[] = @a;

    were all the same. Larry confirmed it.

    <http://xrl.us/fddf>

   misleading compiler messages
    Terrence Brannon notices a very confusing error message from PUGS.

    <http://xrl.us/fddg>

   integration testing
    Darren Duncan has offered to get the ball rolling with Perl6 integration
    testing. He is going to translate a few modules he has written to Perl6
    so that they can act as more wholistic tests for Pugs and Perl6. There
    is an interesting conversation about CPAN and Perl6 involved too.

    <http://xrl.us/fddh>

   Refs in Scalar context
    Stevan Little found a bug involving refs in scalar context.

    <http://xrl.us/fddi>

  Parrot
   Parrot_get_runtime_prefix
    William Coleda found a bug in Parrot_get_runtime_prefix. Leo admitted
    that it was a mistake.

    <http://xrl.us/fddj>

   Z machine
    Leo put up his tiny Z machine for adoption. Steve Peters offered to
    adopt it.

    <http://xrl.us/fddk>

   MinGW build
    Michal Jurosz posted a link to his guide to building parrot with MinGW.

    <http://xrl.us/fddm> -- post

    <http://xrl.us/fddn> -- link

   splitting VTABLE into interfaces
    Leo and Sam posted their thoughts about splitting VTABLEs.

    <http://xrl.us/fddo>

   checking an attributes existence
    Cory Spencer wants to check for the existence of an attribute, or at the
    very least catch the exception thrown when an attribute is not found.
    Leo told him that it was on the list of things to do.

    <http://xrl.us/fddp>

   calling c routines
    Vlad Florentino wanted to know if he could call C library routines from
    Parrot. The answer is NCI. Look at the SDL bindings as an example.

    <http://xrl.us/fddq>

   here doc for PIR
    Bernhard Schmalhofer asked about adding heredoc support to PIR. This led
    to Melvin ranting that PIR was not meant to be written by people. PIR
    was intended to be an intermediate language targeted by compilers and
    was not supposed to have human niceties like heredoc. Of course, for PIR
    to reach that state, we need a high level language that actually targets
    it...

    <http://xrl.us/fddr>

   PPC Linux troubles
    Once more chromatic and Leo worked trying to fix Parrot for PPC Linux.
    http://groups-beta.google.com/group/perl.perl6.internals/browse_thread/t
    hread/33d379077b32a52a/dce84b845fefd8c5#dce84b845fefd8c5
    <http://xrl.us/fdds>

   automatic verification of Parrot assembly
    Steve Coleman wants to develop a research project to verify assembly for
    security purposes. Thus he had some questions about Parrot Assembly.
    Melvin happily provided some answers.

    <http://xrl.us/fddt>

   tail_call improvements
    Bob Rogers supplied a patch that improved the .tail_call support in
    imcc. Leo applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/fddu>

   Strings support
    Leo announced that Dan's string patch has been merged into the current
    CVS head. Thanks go to Will Coleda for doing all the heavy lifting.
    String content in assemblers now require a charset prefix.

    <http://xrl.us/fddv>

   Where are thou, Dan?
    Edward Peschko wondered where Dan was. Will Coleda provided the answer.
    He is MIA.

    <http://xrl.us/fddw>

   string encoding bug
    Bernhard Schmalhofer found a bug with string encoding in PBC files. Leo
    fixed it.

    <http://xrl.us/fddx>

   Parrot 0.1.2 "Pheonix" or counting is fun
    Leo proudly announced the release of Parrot 0.1.2. Thank you everyone
    for all your hard work.

    <http://xrl.us/fddy>

   test suite cleanup
    Bernhard Schmalhofer provided a large patch which cleans up some of the
    test suite. Leo gave him the go ahead to apply it.

    <http://xrl.us/fddz>

   dynclasses cleanup wanted
    Leo posted a plea for a cleanup to dynclasses. No takers yet.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd2>

   Parrot Installer
    Olivier Thauvin wants to make a Parrot RPM for Mandrake. Leo and Will
    gave him pointers on where to start.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd3>

   warnocked documentation patch
    Matt Diephouse wondered what the status of a patch he sent in was. Still
    no response. ::nudge::

    <http://xrl.us/fdd4>

   OS X build problem
    Will Coleda found an OS X build problem. Leo slapped himself on the
    forehead and fixed it.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd5>

   strip the strip
    Jarkko Hietaniemi posted a patch fixing a Tru64 build problem. Leo
    applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd6>

   gpm linkage
    Ron Blaschke supplied a patch fixing gpm linkage. Leo applied it.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd7>

   Failing tests on Win32
    Ron Blaschke posted a list of failing Win32 tests. He then mentioned
    that he was going to fix the missing export symbols problem.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd8>

   objects and VTABLE changes
    Leo posted a summary of his proposed changes and how they effect MMD and
    objects.

    <http://xrl.us/fdd9>

   Rogue 0xA0 characters
    Jarkko Hietaniemi found some random 0xA0 characters in parrot header
    files. He removed them and Leo applied the patch.

    <http://xrl.us/fdea>

   Parrot Config
    Adrian Lambeck wondered how he could query Parrot config. Will pointed
    him to 'library/config.imc'.

    <http://xrl.us/fdeb>

   Tinderbox
    Leo put out a request to get the tinderboxen revived. Steve Peters asked
    if it would be useful to build it into Perl's current smoke report.

    <http://xrl.us/fdec>

   OS X test failure
    Leo found and fixed a problem with dynclasses tests on OS X.

    <http://xrl.us/fded>

   Flatten return values
    Bob Rogers wants to flatten a variable number of return values. Just as
    he can flatten a variable number of arguments. Leo felt that it was
    reasonable request.

    <http://xrl.us/fdee>

   Major changes
    Leo proposed a set of core changes that should take parrot to 0.2 and
    beyond. Roger Browne and Melvin Smith provided comments.

    <http://xrl.us/fdef>

   ncurses_life.imc error
    Uwe Voelker had a problem with ncurses_life. chromatic sent him a patch
    to try and see if it fixed it.

    <http://xrl.us/fdeg>

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• Perl 6 Summary for 2005-02-22 though 2005-03-07 by Matt Fowles