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Crumbs. I've remembered to write the summary this week. Now if I can just remember to bill O'Reilly for, err, 2003's summaries. Heck, it's not like waiting for the dollar to get stronger has paid off.
Ah well, no use crying over spilt milk. On with the show. Maybe, just maybe, darwinports will work its magic and I'll have a working Haskell compiler by the time I've finished writing.
I'd probably forgotten this, but Larry pointed out that, in Perl 6 there would
no longer be a function undef() and a value undef. Instead there'd be a
function undefine() and a value undef. But he thought that we should
usually fail() to construct our undefined values.
I'm not sure I understood what TOGoS was driving at with a suggestion about keys and properties. Luckily Leo, Dan and Chip all seemed to. The discussion continued through the week.
Oh no! It's the register allocator problems again. One of these days I swear I'm going to swot up on this stuff properly, work out whether it's really the case that full continuations break any conceivable register allocator and summarize all the issues for everyone in a nice white paper/summary.
Nick Glencross posted some of his issues with getting parrot up on an HP-UX machine. After a good deal of discussion and tool chain fettling he got things building and posted a patch to fix the knowledge which was promptly applied (r8280 for those of you with the svn chops to know how to take advantage of that).
Jeff Horwitz announced that mod_parrot now comes bundled with mod_pugs, which means that you can now write Apache extensions in Perl 6. I don't know about you, but my mind is still boggling.
Parrot spent most of the week in a feature freeze for the release of Parrot 0.2.1 "APW" which went ahead as planned on the 4th of June.
Peter Sinnott reported problems with Parrot on Solaris. It turns out that
different implementations of atan behave slightly differently, which isn't
good. I believe the problem remains unresolved.
Joshua Juran's questions about getting Parrot running on MacOS Classic were Warnocked.
Continuing the drive for consistent testing structures everywhere in Perl land, chromatic applied a patch to Parrot::Test which makes TODO tests work in a way that Test::Builder understands. Hurrah!
Dan was somewhat bemused to find that the MMD functions' defaults had disappeared when he did a sync with subversion. He wondered whether this was deliberate. Turns out that it was. I'm not sure whether Chip's ruled that it was Right though.
groups.google.com[192.168.0.8]
Remember earlier when I talked about IMCC's register allocation? Well Dheeraj Khumar Arora is looking at working on improving IMCC's optimizations as part of Google's summer of code 2005. The usual thread ensued.
Not content with getting Parrot to build on HP-UX, Nick Glencross next set his sights on getting nci/dynclasses working on HP-UX. It sounds like there'll be a patch forthcoming some time next week.
groups.google.com -- Nick paints the big HP-UX picture
Roger Browne announced another new language that targets Parrot. It's called amber, and it borrows a good deal of syntax and semantics from Eiffel with a large sprinkling of Ruby for good measure.
xamber.org -- the Amber website
Leo posted a quick discussion of the correct use of exception handlers in Parrot. Essentially, the rule is, your exception handler should jump back to the point just after the exception handler block:
push_eh except_N
# Code that might fail
clear_eh
resume_N:
...
except_N:
...
goto resume_N
Easy eh?
Remember when I discussed this thread two weeks ago? It's still going strong.
Larry ended up stating that there will be an optional property identval on
operators which will be set by default on all operators with obvious identity
values. Or it might be called initvalue.
groups.google.com -- Larry makes up his mind
Carl Franks wondered about how object constructors would work. It turned out that the code he'd carefully written by hand pretty much described the default behaviour. Damian and Larry provided details. Hopefully some keen p6porter has already incorporated any new information into the appropriate synopses.
Patrick responded to his own post last week to clarify some things about the capturing behaviour of various rule types. He, japhy and Thomas Sandlaß thrashed out the gory details.
Larry addressed Ingo Blechschmidt's questions about class methods.
Class is a role? My head hurts.
returns and contextGaals Yahas wondered how to specify the signature of a context-sensitive function. The consensus seems to be to use a junction, like so:
sub foo() returns Str|Int {...}
Adam Kennedy had wondered how much compile time optimization of constants would happen. Damian thought not as much as Adam thought, but you could use macros to get more optimization if you needed it.
The good thing about localtime et al is that everyone knows them. The bad
thing about them is that they're at such a low level that you either end up
reinventing wheels, getting it wrong or boggling at the size of the library you
need to install to get access to good Time manipulation. I wonder what Perl 6
will end up with.
Luke wondered if {} should be an empty hash rather than empty code, and why
{ %hash } no longer makes a shallow copy of hash, but code that returns
%hash. There was some discussion, but no answers from anyone else on the
design team.
chars in a list contextJoshua Gatcomb revisited a long Warnocked subject. He wants
@chars = 'hello'.chars; # <h e l l o> ie. In a list context, C<chars> should return a list of the characters in the string. Stuart Cook thought it was a good idea.
Um... I'm not sure what Thomas Sandlaß and Juerd were talking about. I'll tell you what, let's swap places: you read the thread and write me a summary of it.
Millsa Erlas wondered if it would be possible to make variable sigils optional. Short answer: yes, with a pragma, and probably left for CP6AN.
BÁRTHAZI András wondered about using rules in web templating system he was working on. Aankhen supplied an answer.
(Look, it's two messages, any summary I wrote that told you more than the above sentence would be about as long as the original messages.)
Dakkar wondered how he could get at the long name of a multi sub. Rod Adams thought it'd be:
&foo<Array, Int>
&foo<Hash, Int>
but also thought it might have been changed. Thomas Sandlaß agreed that it had changed to:
&foo:(Array, Int)
&foo:(Hash, Int)
Easy.
BÁRTHAZI András wondered about the behaviour of flattening arguments in Pugs when compared to that described in Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials. Answer: The book's right, they're just not implemented in Pugs. Yet.
return() in pointy blocksOh boy. Ingo Blechschmidt opened a can of worms when he asked about return within pointy subs. However, because the worms were slow getting started you'll have to wait for Matt's summary next week when he explains:
sub callcc (Code $code) { $code(-> $r {return $r}) }
Once upon a long time ago, Jon Orwant threw coffee cups and swore. And Perl 6 was born. Later that afternoon, Dan Sugalski started doodling design sketches for what was to become Parrot. Parrot's first README in CVS dates from August 11th 2001 and the first mailing list post about it that's archived is from August the 1st 2000, but that's a reply...
As well as being Parrot's original developer, Dan is also Parrot's first commercial user.
Last week he announced in his blog that, having already given up his designer's hat earlier this year, he's stopped doing any parrot development. The plan is that he'll be publishing a few design documents and historical explanations of various bits of Parrot design on his blog, but otherwise, that's all he wrote.
I'm not the first, and I'm sure I won't be the last to say this. Dan, thank you very much for all the work you've put into Parrot over the years. Good luck with whatever you do next.
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donate.perl-foundation.org -- The Perl Foundation
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