To see what is currently happening visit http://www.perl6.org/
Surprise! It's me again. You may be wondering what happened to last week's summary (I know I was) and where Matt had gone. Well, I'm not entirely sure where exactly he is now, but last week was moving week for him.
Those of you reading this on the mailing lists may also be wondering why this summary is so late. Um... three words: World of Warcraft.
As a Summarizer, when you see the 'last fortnight' view of a mailing list containing 21 messages, several thoughts spring, unbidden, to your mind: Is my mail broken again? Has everyone given up? Phew, this group won't take long to do.
It turns out that the answer to both of those questions is "No." What actually happened was that most of the stuff that normally happens in mail happened at the Austrian Perl Workshop and Leo Tötsch's house, with a side order of IRC conversation. Oh, and a bunch of spin off threads in p6l and p6i.
So, in the last fortnight Pugs reached the point where it has a (mostly) working Parrot back end and BÁRTHAZI Andras wondered if we shouldn't start a perl6-general mailing list.
use.perl.org - Autrijus's Pugs development journal
groups.google.com - perl6-general anyone?
140 messages in this one. p6c lulled me into a false sense of security. Again, you may notice a bewilderingly fast rate of change this summary. It turns out that they weren't just working on Pugs at Leo's house. Perl 6 Hackathons give great productivity.
There's been some serious work going on under the Parrot hood in the last two
weeks. The calling conventions have been drastically reworked and now uses 4
new opcodes, set_args, set_returns, get_params and get_results. At
the time of writing, IMCC doesn't give you full syntactic help with them, but
they're easy enough to use explicitly for the time being and the help is
getting there. Check out the PDD for details.
Also getting rejigged is the continuation/register frame architecture. Taking advantage of the fact that this is a virtual machine, we now have an unlimited number of registers per register frame. Combine this with the new calling conventions, in which arguments are passed outside the register frame and all of a sudden a full continuation becomes a simple pointer to the register frame and everything gets saved as if by magic. Which opens up a whole bunch of possibilities. Which has interesting implications for the register allocator.
svn.perl.org -- The new calling conventions
use.perl.org -- Chip's design notes
Alexandre Buisse posted his outline for a Google Summer of Code project to implement a shiny new Generational Garbage Collection scheme. Discussion of tunability and threading issues followed.
Steve Tolkin helpfully provided a summary of his thoughts about ordered
hashes: "An ordered hash that does not support deletes could cause a user
visible bug. At a minimum it should support the special case of delete that is
supported by the Perl each() operator." Dan pointed out that reusing the
ordered hash code for anything other than the lexical pad it was specifically
implemented for was just looking for trouble.
AKA "Attack of the 50 foot register allocator vs. the undead continuation monster". Piers Cawley and Chip had something of a disagreement about interactions between continuations and the register allocator. After discussion on IRC it became apparent that they were talking past each other. The new 'the register frame is the continuation' means that yes, the register allocator definitely can't rely on being able to reuse registers that persist over function calls, but that's all right because you can always grab more registers.
Remember the missing Multimethod functions I mentioned last time. At the time Chip hadn't ruled on whether taking them out was the Right Thing or not. He has since ruled that it was.
This is probably not quite the right place to suggest this, but what the heck. Maybe in future when user visible changes of this sort are planned they should spend at least one release period deprecated and throwing warnings when used.
William Coleda worried that PGE subrules appear to be globally scoped. It turns out that Patrick worries too, but is currently in the process of thrashing out how they should be scoped. He outlined his current thinking.
Klaas-Jan Stol wondered about the possibilities of overriding PMC behaviour with Parrot classes. He outlined possibilities and wondered if he was correct. Chip thought that it should be possible to implement (for instance) Perl's datatypes in pure PIR, if only for debugging and fun. I'm still not entirely sure if it's possible to make a ParrotClass that inherits from a PMC though.
It seems the design team have drunk deeply of the Software Transaction Memory (STM) Kool Aid. STM is, to quote Chip, a "wicked cool" way of doing threading. Expect a more fleshed out design document eventually.
According to the configuration scripts, Parrot looks for the GNU version of bc solely for checking that Parrot bc is working. Which is all very well, but there is no Parrot implementation of bc in the SVN repository. Apparently there's a broken version of it sat on Bernhard Schmalhofer's local hard disk.
None of which addressed the issue of why, even with a 'working' version, the tests needed to access GNU bc. Surely tests can be written statically, the only time you'd need an authoritative version would be when you were adding tests. Oops, editorializing again.
Will Coleda wondered if it was possible to do substitutions with PGE yet. Yes, sort of was Patrick's reply - you can substitute the first occurrence by grabbing the match data and using substr. Everything else is for another day.
Klaas-Jan Stol had some problems implementing delegated addition. Apparently
it's because he got caught out by the signatures of the __add method. Also,
it's a really bad idea to delegate to a method called __add because Parrot
expects some very particularly behaviour from it. Think about calling it add
instead.
Chip's put the slides of his Austrian Perl Workshop talk on the Parrot project and it's priorities up on feather. Check them out, they're good.
feather.perl6.nl -- slides
Will Coleda's been busy injecting a bunch of handy TODO items in the Parrot RT system. Check 'em out, you might be able to do some of them.
rt.perl.org|%8|$2|10$2|11$1|7$1|9%8|$11|DESCRIPTION$5|FIELD$8|OPERATOR$5|VALUE$18|Status != resolved$6|Status$2|!=$8|resolved%8|$11|DESCRIPTION$5|FIELD$8|OPERATOR$5|VALUE$18|Status != rejected$6|Status$2|!=$8|rejected%8|$11|DESCRIPTION$5|FIELD$8|OPERATOR$5|VALUE$14|Queue = parrot$5|Queue$1|=$6|parrot%8|$11|DESCRIPTION$5|FIELD$8|OPERATOR$5|VALUE$17|Subject LIKE TODO$7|Subject$4|LIKE$4|TODO$2|12$1|0$1|0&TicketsSortBy=Created&TicketsSortOrder=DESC&RowsPerPage=50
Michal Wallace announced the creation of a new list for work on pirate, a python compiler for parrot. So if python on parrot is your bag, I suggest you sign up.
Patrick wondered how to add methods to existing classes. It turns out that the
trick is to use find_type instead of findclass. According to Leo,
findclass is deprecated.
Hmm... 1242 GMT+1 on Thursday as I write this and there are... oh... 246 messages in perl6-language. This could get sketchy...
Wow! The 'Reduce metaoperator on an empty list' discussion is still going.
return() in pointy type blocksMuch to my personal chagrin, it looks like return() inside a pointy block
will use an escape continuation and will probably be picky about making sure
that the pointy block is invoked from somewhere dynamically 'below' the block
it was created in. So no cunning tricks like:
sub call_with_current_continuation(Code $code) {
$code({ return $^cc })
}
Which is probably a good thing...
caller and wantGaal Yahas asked for clarification about the behaviour of the caller
builtin. Larry provided it.
Adam Kennedy hoped that Perl 6 would have some sort of minimal set of hooks for handling events. (Personally I'd like a maximal set of hooks for anything that changes the runtime structure of Perl, but I'm greedy like that). Larry said that there would be such a thing, but that it wasn't designed yet. He appeared to volunteer Adam as an initial designer. Discussion ensued, but there's no concrete design yet. Slightly tangentially, Dan discussed his thoughts about a Parrot notifications manager on his blog, which might be useful to some.
In a thread discussing adding an eval STRING type behaviour to the right
hand side of a substitution, Larry said that "Deciding where (and where not) to
put the speed bumps is a pretty good description of my job. It's impossible to
have a language without bumps, so I reserve the right to put the necessary
bumps where I think they'll do the most good and/or least harm."
Well, I thought that was worth reading by more than just the list subscribers...
Chip threw up his hands and despaired of ever efficiently implementing:
multi sub is_equal(Integer $a, Integer where { $_ == $a } $b: ) { 1 }
Which is cute, but Chip claims you need Jedi Mind Powers if you want to make it work.
The Thomas Sandlaß popped up to say that, actually there was already a language called Cecil that allowed you to do precisely that sort of thing (called Predicate Dispatch) and there were several efficient implementation strategies. After a nudge from Chip he even provided a link. Larry thought it eminently doable too and sketched out a strategy.
That strategy (which applies almost everywhere in Perl when you think about) boils down to "If you can't do it at compile time, do it at runtime (and pretend you did it at runtime)".
Joshua Gatcomb worries about the state of the Synopses. He argued (quite persuasively) that the thing to do would be to put the synopses into public change control with global read access, but with write access limited to @larry. The community could then provide new documentation in the form of patches, which @larry would approve, reject or modify as appropriate. Which all hangs on whether @larry has sufficient tuits.
Patrick pointed out that this already exists and that he had volunteered as gatekeeper and patch dispatcher, but that there were very few patches so far. But now you all know about it, right?
Some discussion followed about how things would be fleshed out, but the important thing is the repository URL.
svn.perl.org -- That document repository
Piers Cawley wants to be able to write code like:
sub foo { my $x = 1; return sub { eval $^codestring } }
say foo().('$x'); # 1
In perl 5 this would give warnings about an undeclared variable. Chip maintained that this is actually the Right Thing. Piers understood that it may not be the right thing in all cases, but he wanted to be able to make it work when needed, if necessarily with predeclaration. There was some discussion, but nothing from @larry yet.
BEGIN {...} and IOIngo Blechschmidt noted that
that BEGIN {...} can be a little scary when you want to compile to
bytecode. Consider:
my $fh = BEGIN { open "some_file" err ... }
Which is okay, until you have a version of perl that compiles that to bytecode. The response ran along the lines of "Don't do that then!".
Personally I'd write that as
my $fh = INIT { open "some_file" err ... }
Assuming that my recollection that INIT blocks happen after the code is
compiled but before it starts to run. Or do I mean a CHECK block?
Ingo also wondered if anonymous macros (at compile time) were allowed. Larry had no problem with macros being first class objects during the compile. He also went on to wonder if they should be multidispatch too...
Whilst toying with pugs, Eric Hodges managed to overwrite the internal definition of the Object class. Which, obviously caused him pain. Larry reckons we'll have constructs like:
class Object is augmented { ... };
class Object is replaced { ... };
(names up for grabs). My personally preference is for making 'augmented' the default behaviour, but I'll live if I can have a pragma that makes it that way.
%hash1 »...« %hash2David Formosa wondered about the behaviour of hyperops when applied to a pair of hashes. He wanted things arranged so that if you had a hash with keys in common then those would be kept together by the hypering process. Luke agreed that it would be useful (so do I for that matter) and then everyone started talking about inner and outer joins and my database comprehension head is swapped out at the moment...
With a small correction for syntactical niceness, Piers wondered if
my @y := @foo[0...][1]
would bind @y to a 'column' of the two dimensional matrix represented by @foo[][] so that writing to @y would affect @foo and vice versa. @larry hasn't said anything yet.
alias the RubyMeterBÁRTHAZI Andras wondered if Perl 6 would have something like Ruby's rather
lovely alias. Larry thought you should be able to write a macro to do the
job, but wasn't entirely sure how exactly it would be done. Further discussion
centred on whether the feature was a good idea and whether it had the right
name. One school of thought thinks it already exists and is called :=, but
I'm not quite so sure.
&?CALLER::BLOCK vs. any hope of efficiencyChip hopes that using &?CALLER::BLOCK as a general-purpose block promoter will be disallowed unless the calling block has already marked itself as callable. Larry thought that this would be okay, noting that he saw &?CALLER::BLOCK being mostly used for introspective purposes.
Wow! Perl 6 isn't even finished and already Andras is talking about writing a web templating engine for it. He outlined his plan and wondered how to go about implementing it. Ingo and he discussed it.
Thomas Klausner has been playing with »~« and uncovered some weirdness. Said
weirdness lead to a discussion of the default strings/patterns in split and join.
sub my_zip (...?) {}Autrijus worried that the current Pugs implementation of zip was
signature less which, amongst other things, makes it uncompilable to Parrot. He
wondered what it's function signature should be. Larry came up with the
(admittedly slightly weird) goods.
Gaal Yahas wondered if he'd be able to write a class method as:
method greet(Class undef:) {...}
when his class methods made no references to the class object itself. Damian thought that the syntax should actually be:
method greet(FooClass ::class) {...}
and that subs and methods should complain about unused non-optional non-invocant parameters. There's more, see the sub for details.
Autrijus wondered about the semantics of a scalar reference in the face of stringification and numification. He provided an example of Pugs' current behaviour that may, or may not be correct. Larry described broken behaviour before thinking again and describing the really correct behaviour along with a summary of his raccoon problems.
given as readPiers wondered how to write a function that would look like a given block to
any whens inside it. It turns out that you can't, yet. Damian thought that
the right way to do it would be:
sub factorial (Int $n is topic) {
return 1 when 0;
$n * factorial($n - 1);
}
Reading this again, I find myself wondering if the return is really
necessary.
./methodPeople don't like ./method. Other people don't like .method in
methods. I think we have what we have on the 'least worst option'
principle. But I would say that, I don't like ./method.
AUTOLOAD and $_Sam Vilain wondered about the prototype of AUTOLOAD. In the discussion that
ensued it was felt that whatever happened, AUTOLOAD should return a code ref
that perl would call.
I remember now why I gave up writing summaries in the first place. First I started missing weeks, which meant that there was so much to write up in the fortnightly summaries, and then discussions got interesting, which meant writing them took so much longer because there were hard things to understand first.
Still, once in a while is refreshing, but I really should stop putting things off until the last minute.
Ahem.
If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
donate.perl-foundation.org -- The Perl Foundation
dev.perl.org -- Perl 6 Development site
Or, you can check out my website. Maybe now I'm back writing stuff I'll start updating it.
Vaguely pretty photos by me can be found at: