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Welcome to another Perl 6 Summary. Sadly, this week's summary is not brought to you by cookies as I already finished them. Sadder still, it is also brought to you a week late. On the plus side, Mike Doughty's "Haughty Melodic" is quite good.
This was a shockingly high volume fortnight for p6c with 5 different threads on it!
Juerd thought that now would be a good time to evaluate the usefulness of feather to the community. Warnock applies, but he probably found answers off list...
groups.google.com#c95fc3fdf6d46f5b
Patrick announced "significant internal updates" to PGE. It looks like things are coming along very nicely. Yay, Patrick!
groups.google.com#7135f5627205f9ca
Patrick also announced the subrule PGE::Text::bracketed which is similar to Text::Balanced from Perl 5. Now where, did I put my darn push-down automata.
groups.google.com#19e4709aa8d2ecd6
Stevan Little posted some of his thoughts about how the meta-model can be built up from run time primitives. It is pretty neat.
groups.google.com#f34b165f8a919dcf
Christian Renz wondered how to get at Parrot's PMCs from Pugs. Autrijus admitted that that feature was not currently available, but offered a commit bit and suggested that adding tests would be a good start.
groups.google.com#d200cbd33f975d1d
Michael Cartmel fixed a few spelling errors in README.win32. Joshua Hoblitt applied the patch.
groups.google.com#f5fdce20a19d50a9
Roger Browne offered a patch fixing documentation in parrot-config.imc. Warnock applies.
groups.google.com#43969cc2f25a0f7b
In the RT clean up, an old ticket has resurfaced. Parrot needs to be updated to use flex 2.5.31, which is incompatible with 2.5.4. Patches welcome.
groups.google.com#f24be3c94a3dfba7
Patrick and I had a brief back and forth about detecting PGE recursion. The short answer is that it is possible in the static case, but not in the face of changing rules. Stupid halting problem, where did I put my PDA.
groups.google.com#d934e5866bdc9a43
Will Coleda is tired of special casing void functions and wants () = function() to be legal in PIR.
groups.google.com#74dcbe2b279de204
Joshua Hoblitt noticed that the newer Bisons have slightly different error messages than older ones. He felt that we should either standardize on the newer bison or explicitly declare error messages. No official ruling on which...
groups.google.com#c9d1a7dd3236d16b
Patrick needed a way to distinguish __set_pmc_keyed_int from __set_pmc_keyed. Leo gave it to him.
groups.google.com#9a125b4a7524b9f2
Roger Browne wondered how he could set HLL type mappings from PIR. Leo said it was not yet implemented or speced. Roger suggested adding a few opcodes.
groups.google.com#39be8e39b16b9d71
Jonathan Scott Duff submitted a patch which swapped @directives to :directives everywhere. Leo applied most of it in several smaller patches. Language maintainers are encouraged to look over this patch and apply appropriate portions to their languages.
groups.google.com#13ae0b79e9c553f6
Nick Glencross noticed that cygwin was having troubles submitting smoke tests. It appears bzip/gzip related. He put out a request to have Compress:Bzip2 installed on the smoke server.
groups.google.com#9862e551191a367a
Michael Walter found and removed some obsolete Win32 Exports. Jonathan Worthington applied the patch. Weren't we planning on auto generating these?
groups.google.com#c2204a5aa4abb714
Matt Diephouse announced the deprecation of get_name_space in favor of get_namespace.
groups.google.com#496252734de3c217
Jonathan Scott Duff posted a patch to split on strings rather than regular expressions. Warnock applies.
groups.google.com#49961b1f96ba1d3d
Nick Glencross fixed a few typos he found. Will Coleda applied the patch.
groups.google.com#a8349a945bba7680
Patrick submitted a patch adding __delete_keyed_int support to PMCs. Warnock applies.
groups.google.com#35c911a33187bd30
Leo warned people that variable sized register frame changes were starting to hit Parrot.
groups.google.com#42d66ddeb1c6a841
Alberto Simões is having trouble with Parrot leaking memory and a bad free. Warnock applies.
groups.google.com#d6bf452421c9afc5
Leo posted a patch for comment which updates some of our double printing code to get around -0.0 issues. Simon Vogl seemed happy with the patch, but I don't know if it got applied...
groups.google.com#e525f44a4f66462e
groups.google.com#3f5948de4d9e8fe0
Joshua Hoblitt resurrected (and applied) an old patch from Nick Glencross which sets execute permissions for libraries for some platforms.
groups.google.com#32fbd116b1008910
Alberto Simões was having troubles with Tiger. Jonathan Worthington provided a little C wizardry, and Alberto was happy. He asked to have the patch applied, but Warnock did instead.
groups.google.com#28269791686ba344
Alberto Simões found a new build problem on Darwin. Jonathan Worthington admits to making the problem and announced its fix.
groups.google.com#e8554aa12c9e0c95
groups.google.com#e28bce3e45ed8146
Jonathan Worthington announced that he was making progress on his debug segment work, but would soon half to dive into IMCC. As a slight corollary all existing PBCs were invalidated.
groups.google.com#5d66bb20275a4eea
Nick Glencross uncovered a mmap issue on HPUX. Later, he posted a patch to fix it.
groups.google.com#fa8ba049e0a887d7
groups.google.com#a6a624b201e1bdd6
Joshua Hoblitt has been going through RT fixing up tickets to have a more standardized subject of the form "[TODO] <subsystem/component/topic> - <summary of task>". This will probably make many lives easier.
groups.google.com#80b1832e5ddc7ad3
Nick Glencross skipped a few tests and set up a smoke test for HP-UX. Joshua Hoblitt applied the patch.
groups.google.com#a7b0d1cae01c774e
Joshua Hoblitt suggested a checklist of things to do when resolving a patch. Leo thought that perhaps it would be better if RT were scripted to do it automatically.
groups.google.com#d8eb5334ba03cd9c
Leo opened a todo for ARM mixed-endian doubles, apparently Parrot doesn't handle them correctly.
groups.google.com#29684702727e69bd
Leo warned that he was running low on tuits and that people with commit bits should apply some of the, now piling up, patches.
groups.google.com#fe29289fd365e421
Jonathan Worthington had some questions about the copyrights in Parrot. Allison Randal provided some cogent answers.
groups.google.com#e0ea40afc7f2eba5
groups.google.com#9add159e356016eb
groups.google.com#3feaab277a3ba40c
IO opcodes will eventually be removed, thus tickets about them failing will also be removed eventually.
groups.google.com#cad8b4f20dc0868c
Nick Glencross has been working to relax Parrot's dependency on parrot_config files. Leo found a few issues, apparently more work is needed.
groups.google.com#6c967b2630d1b8d1
Chip has declared that all pbc files will have a UUID in the header to allow parrot to avoid leading multiple copies. It sounds like people are leaning toward using and MD5 or similar hash algorithm to generate the UUIDs. Although I am not sure that any official decision has been made.
groups.google.com#e427b0109818f8f3
Jonathan Worthington has decided to try translating .NET byte code to PIR for his thesis. Now he just needs a catchy name like .PET or something.
groups.google.com#9e47ccd9b3eb8518
There have been some long threads here
Like Lord Farquaad, Ingo Blechschmidt set out to destroy magical things (in Ingo's case pairs). Like Farquaad, Ingo stirred up a lot of controversy (or at least confusion). Unlike Farquaad, Ingo succeeded. Thus, according to Larry "the compiler will be able to determine at compile time which pairs are intended to be named arguments and which ones positional parameters".
groups.google.com#efde30a45f1982f4
Sam Villain noticed that S06 is missing boxed complex types. Larry admitted that it was an omission, and Autrijus fixed it.
groups.google.com#f7db55d44fe707a2
Alfie John wanted to know if parrot would support multiline comments. Luke Palmer explained that it would in the form of POD comment blocks that would not disturb the rest of the documents POD. Alfie was happy.
groups.google.com#c495229e08ee248d
Ovid and Piers managed to come to what they felt was a satisfactory conclusion to their issues with roles and trust, using my multi to do the dispatch for them. Piers, the ever summarizer friendly, posted the results of the #perl6 discussion back to the mailing list. Thanks, Piers!
groups.google.com#22b3673a0d539a78
err the One Line Try BlockAustin Hastings decided that he liked the idea of having a single line try/catch called err. Perhaps it will catch on...
groups.google.com#297d5cbc79274684
chromatic opened a can of worms when he claimed "Closed classes should not exist". Naturally this led to arguments about freedom and commercial viability.
groups.google.com#d833c086c0e86bf4
Luke Palmer asked a question that I know was on my mind: "What the is a submethod good for?". Damian posted an example that uses submethods but does not answer the question. Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon noted that the use of them in BUILD could be subsumed into more powerful cascade methods, which I like.
groups.google.com#d833c086c0e86bf4
Dave Whipp, while reading theory.pod, wondered about automatically testing and assert axioms (like pre and post conditions) on code. This led to some discussion about the usefulness of randomly generated tests.
groups.google.com#d992a506fe56afcb
Stevan Little often makes my head hurt. I think we should abandon the whole metaclass system for a nice simple easily understood object system like Javas.
groups.google.com#825b5b730a34cb31
groups.google.com#bf56458c6400d661
Rob Kinyon wondered if Roles and Classes should be merged. The consensus was that while they might be very similar internally, they signalled different intent and thus would remain separate.
groups.google.com#ed8f419d6836f85c
Yuval Kogman started a migrating to perl 6 page on the pugs wiki. The basic intent is to have a book like this come out about the same time as perl 6, with the wiki page serving as a sort of brainstorming space.
groups.google.com#e55bcc826b2d93cf
Markus Laire wondered if Perl 6 would have any gui primitives in its core library. People felt that this would best be farmed out to a library and people could use whichever library they wanted.
groups.google.com#64792caa1cc97dd3
Yuval Kogman posted an analysis of a JoelOnSoftware article about using code tagging (marking variable names as safe or unsafe manually). Seems like a useful idea...
groups.google.com#8335ad9bd6265c49
Uri Guttman has the chance to try and sell some CS faculty on Perl 6, so he asked the list for some good selling points.
groups.google.com#c606810b09cce3c0
Aaron Sherman reported that his free time was running low and, as a result, his S29 work was also slowing. As a result he opted to narrow the focus of his work and push on.
groups.google.com#479aa14fa8d2f17f
In an cruel attempt to make my head hurt more, Stevan Little posted some pretty diagrams of the metamodel in action. Don't fall for his ploy of making things more accessible so he can throw harder stuff at you. Resist checking the link.
perlcabal.org -- pictures
groups.google.com#aa30137ee6ffe7be -- posting
Peter Makholm was having issues with the transliterations of ranges do to stringification issues. Larry indicated that there => appeared to be autoquoting its left argument a little to eagerly.
groups.google.com#9d242a50a38f2868
Darren Duncan wondered how to make his pair of associated classes act intelligently. Larry, Stevan Little, Rob Kinyon, and Luke Palmer all provided suggestions.
groups.google.com#c04499ca1a85d706
Tim Bunce wondered if anyone would be able to hack in run time role composition for the perl5 module Class::Role. Warnock applies.
groups.google.com#216eea4dc05dd1a2
Rob Kinyon proposed a new meta model that is much closer to the prototype paradigm. Warnock applies.
groups.google.com#f0328ff817ddcd5b
Nicholas Clark wondered how he could get access to multiple different versions of a module at once. This spawned a lot of debate.
groups.google.com#382367c9a26a1f71
Juerd (probably inspired by some of the aforementioned debate) started a list of Perl 6 Fears. The idea being that, given a comprehensive list of fears, we can efficiently assuage peoples recurring worries.
groups.google.com#4e1b3ebe898c05b2
Stevan Little proposed that class methods should not be inheritable. This sparked a large debate which Stevan apparently lost (by his own omission).
groups.google.com#dcc9daf13767acfd
++ should mean ++$_ Juerd wonderd about making more operations (like ++, +=, and x=) all operate on $_ by default. Response seems mixed but favorable.
groups.google.com#490144d7dd7da86f
$_ ~~ bool::true Ilmari Vacklin noticed an error in S04 centered aroud given/default. Luke Palmer and Larry agreed that it was a problem.
groups.google.com#0a05e33dff79c0a8
Mark Reed wondered how to zip several arrays given that zip was an infix operator. Luke Palmer explained that it was actually a listfix operator like ,.
groups.google.com#21152a256284c5e8
Larry announced that there would be a new class sigil, namely ¢. This allows you to write functions like sub sametype (¢T $x, ¢T $y) {...} . People generally like the idea but not the charcter. I must admit that I agree with people.
groups.google.com#66354fc1198e61d4
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