Perl 6 Summary - March 2006.
Perl 6 Compiler
Sean Sieger asked if synopses were publically available. Jonathan
Scott Duff and Will Coleda responded with information on read-only
access to the archives.
First barest-bones Relation implementation committed
Darren Duncan announced that he has begun to implement a Perl 6 Relations
class, and described some of the features of the class.
[svn:parrot] r12294 - trunk/languages/perl6/lib
Nick Clark commented on this revision, which was not the final form of
the patch. He also had a question on POD and whitespace, which
Patrick R. Michaud answered.
Infix macro := reparsing the LHS?
Audrey Tang asked for details on the infix macro where she felt that
specifications did not clear up how it would be used in practice. Larry
Wall obliged with a clarification, and, following a conversation on IRC,
posted more information.
Will Coleda reported a problem with building r10048. Darren Duncan suggested trying r10054, which did not have the same problem for him.
Error building pugs: "Could not find module `Data.ByteString'"
Dave Whipp reported a problem with installing pugs r10142, but then updated
to r10166, which solved the issue..
Perl 6 Language
Yuval Kogman offered his opinion on how temp should react with an earlier
my declaration in an outside scope. Several people responded.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8504 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Audrey Tang submitted a patch relating to the S06 document. Nick Clark
asked why unint autoboxes when int does not. Amos Robinson suggested an
alternate interpretation of the text, which turned out to be correct.
Replacement of $
In early April, "Larry" suggested replacing $ with the Euro symbol. Darren
Duncan pointed out that $ is used in several countries, and not just in the
US and proposed using the gold standard of 'Au' to prefix variable names.
The thread continued with further April Fool's day silliness, ending with
Yuval Kogman noting that if Larry had participated in the keysigning party
at OSDC this joke wouldn't have been possible.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8532 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Audrey Tang submitted a patch to fix capitalization. Uri Guttman picked
an even smaller nit, and then they discussed having a docathon at
YAPC::NA::Chicago.
Curly-quotes
Jonathan Lang wrote to propose having ` quotes in both single and
double variations to be used with ' and ", which would allow them to
match the way parentheses and brackets do. Larry Wall pointed out some
of the difficulties in using characters outside of Latin-1 Unicode.
Context and coercion
Joshua Choi asked what the conceptual difference is between context and
type coercion. According to Larry Wall, there's no difference. Larry
then helped defined coercion.
Do junctions support determining interesections of lists
Joshua Gatcomb wrote to the list with additional questions on junctions,
following up from his post of the previous year. Larry Wall answered that
Sets have replaced Junctions for the use described.
Set Theory (Was: Do junctions support determining interesections of lists)
Jonathan Lang asked if Perl6 Sets will include set negation or a
universal set. Larry Wall noted that some existing functions sort
of consider this question, although not for Sets defined by rule.
Discussion continued, with others joining in.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8569 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Following another patch post, Rutger Vos asked if the purpose of the list
was to receive subversion logging messages. Jonathan Scott Duff added his
opinion that patches were a part of the language design.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8573 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Revision r8573 introduced some changes that TSa questioned and Juerd
disliked. Damian Conway explained the reason the changes were needed,
and several people offered alternatives.
$a.foo() moved?
Matt Fowles noted that there had been a change and asked when it happened,
noting that he preferred the previous style. Larry Wall replied that it
had changed at the last hackathon but was still being debated. Some of
the debate spilled in to the thread.
On signatured code attributes of a class
Joshua Choi asked if it was possible to use a particular syntax, and noted
that #perl6 is quite active. He requested that someone summarize the
channel.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8609 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Larry Wall submitted a patch and then commented on the patch. Nick
Clark had a question on the long dot form and Larry Wall and Ruud H.G.
van Tol offered perspectives.
Another dotty idea
Larry Wall returned to the subject of the long dot, which he felt was
too specific. He made a new proposal involving the delayed postfix
problem. There was a long discussion on this suggestion.
slurp, quine and context sensitivity
Dan Kogai requested a version of slurp() which would unconditionally
return a scalar, and proposed swallow(). Damian Conway offered some
suggestions within the current framework.
The "whatever" context
Yuval Kogman proposed 'whatever' to return the natural context of an
operation regardless of the actual context. Larry Wall noted that the
example, which involved grep, already had this functionality, and Yuval
asked if this was also true for other functions.
Herbert Breunung wrote that in the Perl 6 book there was 'Integer context'
and 'Numeric context' but that he had not noted 'Integer context' in the
synopses. He wondered if the concept had been discarded. Larry Wall
clarified that it still exists.
foo..bar or long dot and the range operator
TSa was unclear on what the numerous long dot discussions had accomplished
and asked about a few cases. Larry Wall attempted to clarify, and TSa
had some further questions. chromatic was also uncertain of the purpose
of the long dot, and Daniel Hulme saw his point. Damian Conway tried to
further define the problem.
Placeholder vs. lexical variables
Dan Kogai ran in to a failure with Pugs while trying something defined
in s06. Audrey Tang noted that the compiler list would have been more
appropriate, but that r9913 fixed the issue.
Dave Whipp felt that it was an omission that capture objects do not
consider the verb. Audrey Tang responded with an answer.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8883 - doc/trunk/design/syn
A submitted patch sparked a discussion on the verb 'parse' on #perl6,
which Audrey Tang summarized. 'token:w' was seen as a better form of
removing the ambiguity. Others also posted comments on the synopsis.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r8899 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Uri Guttman replied to a patch by saying that he was confused by many
of the recent changes. He requested additional examples. A few people
also addressed the documentation changes in that patch.
Audrey Tang merged some ideas after seeing similarities between them, and
wondered if it could be seen as a general case for = to return the next
thing. Larry Wall expressed some concerns, to which Audrey responded.
Subversion links for the Architecture section on the website?
Elyse M. Grasso suggested that the synopses could link to the svn site
because the versions are lagging on dev.perl.org. Robert Spier responded
that he had modified the dev site for more regular updates.
Markus Laire asked for an example of how two sections of s05 relate to
one another. A couple of people attempted to answer the question.
Jonathan Lang asked how adverbs were defined and accessed within a subroutine.
Larry Wall and Damian Conway answered.
S5 - Question about repetition qualifier
Joe Gottman noted that the repetition qualifier described in s05 seems
restrictive. Several people responded on whether the additional suggestions
would be used.
Perl 6 built-in types
Darren Duncan had a few comments after reading s06. He discussed this
with Larry Wall, and others added their two cents.
Values of undef and JavaScript
Stéphane Payrard wondered about the nature of 'undef' as a value vs. 'undef' as the uninitialized variable state, especially in the context of interoperability with JavaScript.
S02 - s/environmental variables/environment variables/g please
Randal Schwartz issued a plea for consistent use of 'environment variables'
over 'environmental variables'. There was a brief discussion on whether
these described two different concepts.
Herbert Breunung announced that he is at work on a German-language
version of the Perl6 tutorial and requested help from anyone fluent
in German.
Parot Porters (formerly perl6-internals)
The parrot-porters list was called perl6-internals during the period covered by this summary.
Audrey Tang is in the process of porting Pugs's native PIL VM to Parrot,
which gave her the idea of translating the concept of 'value objects'
to Parrot. Joshua Isom, Leopold Toetsch and Chip Salzenberg responded
to the suggestion.
MSWin32 (Visual C++ 8.0) Test Results (r12017)
Ron Blaschke reported failing tests in r12017. chromatic replied that
it was fixed in r16032.
[perl #38823] [BUG] solaris 10 w gcc
Leopold Toetsch noted a bug ([perl #38823]) caused by the configuration
system ignoring commandline options.
[PATCH] My first patch, for builtins.*
Andy Lester supplied a patch and said he hopes to do the same sort of
source code cleanup in Parrot that he's been doing in Perl 5. It was
applied as r12096. There was a brief discussion on how to coordinate
cleanup.
[perl #38840] Use File::Spec instead of /dev/null
In [perl #38840], Will Coleda noted that direct references to
/dev/null/ should be updated to use File::Spec.
[perl #38841] [TODO] Split exec run core into two distinct run cores
Bernhard Schmalhofer created ticket [perl #38841] to address some
improvements for JIT.
[perl #38844] [TODO] Make lint, splint and tags targets
Andy Lester requested a few changes, such as renaming the lint target
to splint.
[perl #38849] Move internal header files out of 'include/parrot'
In [perl #38849], Bernhard Schmalhofer proposed that some header
files which are only included by C source files be moved to another
location.
[perl #38850] [BUG] Getopt/Obj.pir dies on non-existent options
Allison Randal reported bug [perl #38850], which Bob Rogers felt
could be attributed to r11444. The problem involves how get_options
reacts to a non-existent option.
Allison Randal posted an early draft for exceptions and requested feedback.
Bob Rogers posted a contribution to the document. This led to a discussion
on HLL exception handlers.
[perl #32642] [TODO] Remove Perl* PMCs from parrot's basic PMCs, src and languages
In [perl #32642], Bernhard Schmalhofer noted that
Perl* PMCs are no longer used in the Parrot core. He asked if it
was possible to rename or move the PMCs. Several people agreed,
but it was pointed out by Patrick R. Michaud that Chip Salzenberg
did not want Parrot to change significantly until 1.0.
Re: [perl #32507] [TODO] ResizableIntegerArray missing vtables (e.g., pop)
In April, [perl #32507], which turned out to not be related to PGE,
was marked as resolved.
Sean Sieger asked if there was a problem with Parrot, and Nick
Glencross offered an installation suggestion.
Re: [svn:parrot] r12129 - trunk/src
Nicholas Clark was afraid r12129 was masking the real bug, but Leopold
Toetsch explained the reasons behind the patch.
t/examples/streams.t issue on Windows
Ron Blaschke reported a failing test on Windows and suggested changing
svn:eol-style to "LE" or to have tests normalize CRLF to LF.
[perl #38888] PGE::P5Regexp failures.
In ticket [perl #38888], Will Coleda noted that the Tcl test suite
has failures. There was some discussion on the location of the problem,
and a patch was created and applied as r12181.
[perl #38896] [TODO] Integer PMC missing math methods.
Will Coleda reported in [perl #38896] that there are many math
ops that work on Float PMCs but not Integer PMCs. Nicholas Clark and
Patrick R. Michaud expressed some concern over the behavior. More
discussion followed.
[perl #38897] [TODO] fail during makefile generation if line ends in '/'
Jerry Gay made a request in ticket [perl #38897] for slash
replacement during makefile creation.
[perl #38903] Tcl - namespace borkage
In [perl #38903], Will Coleda reported that Tcl's use of globals
in the _Tcl namespace was causing issues.
Parrot_init shouldn't be described in doc/embed.pod
Pawel Murias submitted a patch which removes Parrot_init. It was applied
as r12200.
[perl #38907] namespace-related bus error
Will Coleda reported a Parrot bus error in ticket [perl #38907],
which was resolved with r12201.
[perl #38914] perl Configure.pl fails on Mac OS X 10.4.6 on Intel iMac
Gregor N . Purdy created a ticket ([perl #38914]) which turned out
to be a false alarm.
chromatic noted that a patch replaced @slash@ with / in the Makefile
and wondered if the former was still required or even desired. Both
Jerry Gay and Will Coleda recommended using /.
[perl #38929] [TODO] Get executable code out of .h files
Andy Lester proposed, in ticket [perl #38929], that functions in
include/parrot/jit_emit.h be removed and up in a .c file.
Re: [perl #38931] [RFE] Double-quoted strings automatically determine string type
In [perl #38931], Patrick R. Michaud noted that double-quoted
strings are assumed to be ASCII unless prefixed by a charset identifier
such as 'unicode:'. He felt it would be useful if PIR emitters in
Parrot automatically used \u or \x in double-quotes to generate an
identifier. Nick Clark said that he felt the reason for the ASCII
assumption was to avoid the ambiguity that comes from assuming the
identifier. There was further discussion, and in the end Patrick
withdrew his request.
Namespaces TODO list, April 16 '06
Chip Salzenberg posted a list of things to do to bring Parrot in line
with the namespace revisions in pdd21. chromatic asked for clarification,
which was provided.
Will Coleda reported a possible namespace bug. Leopold posted a workaround,
and Chip Salzenberg fixed it in r12310.
tcl lexical failures, PDD20, PDD21
Will Coleda had some thoughts on why Tcl was having failures, and
answered his own post due to an off-list contribution from Matt.
[perl #38957] hash test failures
In [perl #38957], Will Coleda reported a persistent failure. There
were other reports of failures, and some of successes.
[perl #38958] hash/iterator failures
In [perl #38958], Will Coleda reported some long-running bugs.
Matt Diephouse reported that he did not see the problem.
Alberto Simões reported that there was a proposal to create a compiler
for LISS. chromatic thought it sounded like a good idea, and Ruben
Fonseca expressed interest. The discussion continued in another thread.
What version of perl is required?
Andy Dougherty reported a mismatch between documentation and configuration
as to which version of Perl 5 was required. This was resolved.
[perl #38960] [BUG] test troubles
In In [perl #38958], Leopold Toetsch reported some failures. Some
additional questions were asked, and Megavlad expressed interest in
Parrot bytecode.
Tyler Coumbes posted to inform that he is working on getting the Python PMCs
to compile with the current Parrot release (0.4.3).
[perl #38964] .sub names can't be Unicode.
In [perl #38964], Will Coleda reported a bug. It was addressed with
r12863.
[perl #38969] parrot source does not conform to standards
In [perl #38969], Jerry Gay reported that there are many exceptions
when running per tools/dev/check_source_standards.pl.
[perl #38975] [PATCH] Update PLATFORMS
Several failing tests were reported in [perl #38975]. Andy
Dougherty offered a patch, which was applied as r12427.
[perl #38976] ResizablePMCArray uses too much memory
Andy Dougherty created ticket [perl #38976] to report a massive
increase in memory requirements.
[perl #38978] [PATCH] Fix unitialized register error in t/pmc/file.t
Andy Dougherty supplied a patch with [perl #38978], which was applied as
r16031.
[perl #38979] [PATCH] Explictly close file in t/pmc/mmd.t
Andy Dougherty supplied a patch with [perl #38979], which was applied as
r12424.
[perl #38982] [TODO] refactor long test files
Jerry Gay proposed that some test files be refactored, as they were
too long. This was in ticket [perl #38982].
chromatic asked for some suggestions on handling nested data structures
for his work on is_deeply() in Test::More in PIR. Leopold Toetsch and
Audrey Tang offered suggestions.
Patrick R. Michaud reported that he had checked in r12442, which contains
a large set of updates to PGE.
MSWin32 (Visual C++ 8.0) Test Results (r12442)
Ron Blaschke reported a series of failing tests, some of which were
already reported. Others were fixed, and others were known TODO items.
[perl #39013] [PATCH] Two more uninitialized registers
Andy Dougherty supplied a patch in [perl #39013], which was applied
as r12503.
[perl #39018] t/pmc/complex failures on Solaris 8/SPARC
Andy Dougherty created [perl #39018] to document some non-urgent
failures.
Andy Dougherty reported many failing tests, and Patrick R. Michaud
asked for clarification.
[perl #39035] [BUG] r12465: dynpmc build fails on win32
Jerry Gay reported this problem in [perl #39035]. It was quickly
resolved. However, there was another error, which was then put in
ticket [perl #39038] (see also another thread).
Acknowlegements
Yuval Kogman created Mail::Summary::Tools (coming soon to a CPAN mirror near you), which made it much easier to write summaries.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
Thank you to everyone who has pointed out mistakes and offered suggestions for improving this series. Comments on this summary can be sent to Ann Barcomb, [email protected].
See Also
Comments