Re: Perl, the new generation
On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 12:55:55PM -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote: Atoms- Unicode. If everything is Unicode, you're going to have to grok Unicode (at least tangentally) to be able to use perl. Bah. Rubbish, no more than you need to grok Unicode to use Perl 5.6. Do you know what data of yours 5.6 is storing in Unicode? No. Do you care? No. Do you need to? No. All filenames in Windows 2000 are, I'm told, in Unicode now; I don't *think* that means that anyone who wants to use Windows 2000 has to grok Unicode. -- [It is] best to confuse only one issue at a time. -- KR
Re: Perl, the new generation
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 11:14:57AM -0700, Dave Storrs wrote: afraid of, and to express your concerns about it. However, the way that you chose to do that (Once quick and dirty dies, Perl dies.) implies that the only thing that Perl is good for is q-n-d A veritable lesson in logic! Here's an equivalent statement. Once all the oxygen suddenly disappears from the atmosphere, humanity is wiped out. That naturally suggests that the only thing humanity is good for is is respiring oxygen, right? And it's an almost *exactly* equivalent statement, because it's almost as likely that Perl will stop being good for quick 'n' dirty stuff as all the oxygen dropping out of the atmosphere. -- Twofish Pokemon seems an evil concept. Kid hunts animals, and takes them from the wild into captivity, where he trains them to fight, and then fights them to the death against other people's pokemon. Doesn't this remind you of say, cock fighting?
Re: perl5 to perl6
On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 03:22:04PM -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote: This is quite a simple little script. The majority of the changes that are being talked about won't ever show up in this. It'd be nice if you could show something a little more complex. The problem is that some people are convinced that Perl 6 will be nothing like Perl 5. The majority of the changes, they say, won't ever show up in *any* given piece of code you give them. These changes are hidden, lurking, ready to bite; they're there in the obscure details, in the nooks and crannies. Never mind the fact that for the majority of programs, there won't be any changes at all - these programs are, obviously, just too simple. And so, you can give these people any number of programs where Perl 6 is almost identical to Perl 5, and they really won't believe that the languages are almost identical. Of course, they argue, it's only when you get into really complex magical weird programming that Perl 5 differs from Perl 6. On the other hand, so what? -- Actually Perl *can* be a Bondage Discipline language but it's unique among such languages in that it lets you use safe words. -- Piers Cawley
Re: SECOND SYSTEM EFFECT!
On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 01:15:09PM +0100, Michael G Schwern wrote: The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result ... is a 'big pile'. -- Fred Brooks Jr, The Mythical Man-Month p 55 This is, however, the sixth system. It's just that most of the people doing the sidetracking haven't thought much about the first four. Maybe even the first five. -- If you do not wish your beer to be served without the traditional head, please ask for a top-up. With the subtext: Your traditional head will then exit via the traditional window. Arsehole. - Mark Dickerson
Re: Perl, the new generation
On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 04:41:09PM -0400, David Grove wrote: Anywhere else? :) FreeBSD comes to mind, among others. Hm. You initially restricted your survey to commercial vendors, but now you are moving the goalposts. Can we get back to the subject now? Certainly. The subject was whether or not Perl 5.6.x has been taken up by the industry. I think we've proved that it has. Can we go back - uh, forward - to Perl 6 now? -- I think i'll take my girlfriend to vegas for a win'98 burn/upgrade -- Megahal (trained on asr), 1998-11-06
Re: Not revisiting the RFC process (was: RFC 362...)
On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 12:00:45PM -0800, Edward Peschko wrote: So I ask you - *why* make an artificial deadline? What's the point? Do you currently believe we're all sufficiently focused on getting the job done? I ask merely for information. -- You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all alike.
Re: Not revisiting the RFC process (was: RFC 362...)
On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 05:17:10PM +, David Grove wrote: Do you currently believe we're all sufficiently focused on getting the job done? What was the question? Do you currently believe we're all sufficiently focused on getting the job done? -- Do you associate ST JOHN'S with addiction to ASIA FILE? - Henry Braun is Oxford Zippy
[m_to_simon_cozens@wickline.org: perl6 not stagnant]
- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 20:13:17 -0600 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: perl6 not stagnant To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Real-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: English,en perhaps another way perl6 could appear less stagnant might be to revive the old rfc-announce list for the purpose of distributing pdd's (or better still, create a pdd-announce list, then announce it's existance on the perl6 announce list) I believe the rfc announce list had many subscribers (and probably still does). I suspect that a pdd announce list would be similarly popular -matt - End forwarded message - -- What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. - Dave Barry
Re: perl6-language needs admin help too :)
On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 09:57:13AM -0500, Kirrily Skud Robert wrote: Would anyone like to volunteer to do weekly summaries Well, don't forget that I *do* have people helping me out with the weekly summaries. I don't know how people want to play this. Do you want: * One weekly summary of everything (You're getting this, like it or not. :) * One weekly summary of each list * One weekly summary of each list feeding into a weekly summary of everything * Something else? -- linux-2.3.99-pre9.tar: limbo program - plan9 has a bad day
Re: This week on the perl6 mailing lists (04--11 Feb 2001)
On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 04:46:08PM +0100, H.Merijn Brand wrote: Would it be possible to make this summary subsribable, so I can drop my subscribtions to p6-internal? To you, and to everyone else who has asked, yes. I'm working on setting up a list right now, hosted at netthink. It's currently subscribable, but there are some teething problems with posting. (Which needn't concern you, except that if you subscribe right now, you'll see a flurry of test posts for a while.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the magic address; at some point in the near future, I might move the perl5-porters digest there as well. -- There is no distinction between any AI program and some existent game.
Re: This week on the perl6 mailing lists (04--11 Feb 2001)
On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 10:11:33AM -0800, Ask Bjoern Hansen wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the magic address; -digest has a specific meaning with many mailing list managers. I would suggest calling it perl6-summaries or such to avoid confusion. Yuh, I thought of that the second after telling the boys to set it up. However, it parallels the perl5-porters list, which is [EMAIL PROTECTED] We use ezmlm, anyway, which doesn't care about the -summaries thing. And I've announced it now, and people have been subscribing so I think it would cause more confusion to change it. -- fga is frequently given answers... the best are "Date::Calc", "use a hash", and "yes, it's in CPAN" or Data::Dumper or mySQL or "check your permissions" or NO Fmh THAT'S WRONG or "You can't. crypt is one-way" or "yes, i'm single" or "I think that's a faq." or substr! or "use split" or "man perlre" - #perl
Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl
On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 06:57:03AM +, Simon Cozens wrote: Likewise. More so since I didn't even receive it. I retract that; I've been having mail problems all weekend and it's since arrived. Brian, you're not in my good books today, this month or this year. Please sort it out. Now. I retract that, too, it was completely uncalled for. -- There seems no plan because it is all plan. -- C.S. Lewis
Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl
On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 11:28:45AM -0500, brian d foy wrote: okay. i quit. Well, hm. I'd rather we actually made something positive out of this. There's obvious FUD out there and we don't seem to be giving the impression of getting much done, or doing anything to counter it. Part of the problem is that we don't currently have anything that we can point to and call progress. That's a problem in itself, because if people don't see progress they lose interest and go away. In order to do something about this, I suggest that we should: i) maintain a weekly summary of what's going on on the mailing lists. I'm happy to do this when I do the p5p summary; it could be hosted on www.perl.com or www.perl.org, I suppose. I'll post the summaries to perl6-meta and people can do what they will with them. ii) maintain a white paper style document on dev.perl.org detailing what we've decided, what we've considered, our rationales and so on. Roughly, a distilled summary of *all* of the mailing list traffic, ever. I can make a start on that tomorrow. That way people have something to look at and see where we're at. Other suggestions as to how to tell the world what we're doing appreciated. -- Sauvin Remember: amateurs built the Ark; _professionals_ built the Titantic.
Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl
On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 05:03:12PM +, Simon Cozens wrote: In order to do something about this, I suggest that we should: i) ... ii) ... I forgot iii)... Ask, could we have the PDDs placed up on dev.perl.org in the same way as the RFCs, please? So far we have http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg02116.html and http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg02305.html There's also the suggestion for the PDD format http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00631.html Thanks a load! -- Halfjack Ah the joys of festival + Gutenburg project. I can now have Moby Dick read to me by Stephen Hawking.
This week on the perl6 mailing lists (04--11 Feb 2001)
7]The Art of Unix Programming, something Perl 6 people would do well to read. Unfortunately, he wasn't particularly complimentary about Perl, claiming that both Perl 5 and Perl 6 are currently stagnant and stalled. This led to a rather acrimonious discussion about our public image, and it was resolved that these summaries might help us let the public know what's going on. So here we are. And there we were. Until next week I remain, your humble and obedient servant, _____ [8]Simon Cozens * [9]Notes * [10]Autoloading Modules * [11]Packaging * [12]Vtables * [13]Subroutine return values * [14]End of Scope Actions * [15]Garbage Collection * [16]kdb * [17]ESR on Perl 6 References 1. http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-language%40perl.org/msg05694.html 2. http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg02305.html 3. http://dev.perl.org/rfc/271.html 4. http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html 5. http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg05693.html 6. http://www.kx.com/ 7. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/taoup 8. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 9. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#Notes 10. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#Autoloading_Modules 11. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#Packaging 12. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#Vtables 13. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#Subroutine_return_values 14. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#End_of_Scope_Actions 15. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#Garbage_Collection 16. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#kdb 17. file://localhost/home/simon/work/perl6/summaries/THISWEEK-20010211.html#ESR_on_Perl_6
Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl
On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 01:46:42AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote: brian d foy [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Simon Cozens wrote: Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't you supposed to be preventing this from happening? no, it isn't. I find this response somewhat mysterious. Likewise. More so since I didn't even receive it. (I think he means that it isn't stagnant. But who can tell?) Hey, Brian, you're meant to be the PR guy. Your strategy might work in the corporate world, but in the open source world, the first rule of PR is to actually make sense. This may come as a bit of a shock, I know. The second rule... well, if you didn't know the second rule, you wouldn't have taken the job on, right? Brian, you're not in my good books today, this month or this year. Please sort it out. Now. -- A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. -- Dennis M. Ritchie
Art Of Unix Programming on Perl
Eric Raymond's book-in-development ``The Art of Unix Programming'' says this about the future of Perl: Perl usage has grown respectably, but the language itself has been stagnant for two years or more. Bah. Looks like my Perl5-Porters summaries have been completely in vain. :) The past two years have seen extensions to the language, its portability and its internals. We've added full Unicode support, a new threading model that allows fork emulation on platforms like Windows which don't support fork, (further carrying Unix concepts everywhere we go) new syntax features such as lexical warnings, lvalue subroutines, weak references, and other bits and pieces. Many hundreds of lines of documentation have been written or revised. We've had new hardware support, including another four supported platforms, (bringing the total to, what, must be about 82 by now?) plus large file and 64-bit support. And the user base keeps growing. I'm not sure "stagnant" is the best choice of word to describe that. Perl's internals are notoriously grubby; it's been understood for years that the language's implementation needs to be rewritten from scratch, but an attempt in 1999 failed and another seems presently stalled. If that other is Perl 6, I don't think we're stalled, are we? Language design is waiting on Larry to produce the spec, and internals design is going on quietly but steadily. We're in the design stage. That'll probably last a while because scripting languages and interpreters aren't easy things to design, and are even harder to get right. Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't you supposed to be preventing this from happening? Simon -- An ASCII character walks into a bar and orders a double. "Having a bad day?" asks the barman. "Yeah, I have a parity error," replies the ASCII character. The barman says, "Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off." -- from Skud
Mail problems? [simon@cozens.net: Re: Now, to try again...]
This is the fourth time I've sent this mail to perl6-internals-api-parser, but it doesn't seem to be arriving. None of my other mail is affected, and perl5-porters is, for once, behaving itself; why this list in particular? - Forwarded message from Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Damn this is annoying. Is it perl.org that's dropping mail or me? - Forwarded message from Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] - On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 08:09:23PM +, David Grove wrote: Thinking of just the parser as a single entity seems to me to be headed into trouble unless we can define in advance what type of role these dialects will play in the language, and at what point they merge into a single entity and how. I can understand each word in this sentence, but put together they don't appear to make much sense. I think you're getting needlessly hung up on this idea of "dialects", whatever you seem to believe they are. We're not parsing dialects, we're parsing *COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS*. Python is not a dialect of Perl. There are a number of ways we could do this. We could allow the user to use source filters to turn Python into Perl, which is what happens currently, with some success. We could allow the user to write their own parser and turn Python into an op tree, which allows much greater flexibility. Or, we could allow the user to override parts of the parser's operation, allowing for ease of modification. Or all three. (or worse, multiple "parser/lexer/tokenizer single-entity parts"... meaning redundant duplication of extra effort over and over again repeatedly). Huh? I'm just thinking of a system of callbacks. You can overload operators in Perl, and while this is slightly confusing, it isn't earth-shattering. Now, I'm hoping that you'll be able to overload parser operations in Perl 6. - End forwarded message - -- Almost any animal is capable learning a stimulus/response association, given enough repetition. Experimental observation suggests that this isn't true if double-clicking is involved. - Lionel, Malcolm Ray, asr. - End forwarded message - -- Sigh. I like to think it's just the Linux people who want to be on the "leading edge" so bad they walk right off the precipice. (Craig E. Groeschel)
Re: Critique available
On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 10:11:56AM -0500, Mark-Jason Dominus wrote: My critique of the Perl 6 RFC process and following discussion is now available at http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/perl6rfc.html Agree 100% to every point. -- "The best index to a person's character is a) how he treats people who can't do him any good and b) how he treats people who can't fight back." -- Abigail Van Buren
Re: Critique available
On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 11:12:50AM -0500, John Porter wrote: As an RFC author and persistent discutant, I always assumed that all/most/many of such qualified internals folks would be reading the perl6 lists, and would squawk when appropriate. On the whole, driving a spike between language and internals by giving them separate lists was not a good idea. -- Almost any animal is capable learning a stimulus/response association, given enough repetition. Experimental observation suggests that this isn't true if double-clicking is involved. - Lionel, Malcolm Ray, asr.
Re: Transcription of Larry's talk
On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 10:32:32AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote: Rename the local operator? Yeah, I think we ought to do that. It confuses people when we call it local(). The problem is, of course, that this is not a perfect solution--they haven't come up with the right name here: savetmp, tmpsave, scratchpad, etc. You're learning Japanese, right? It's gotta be "toriaezu".[1] :) [1] 'For the time being', roughly speaking. -- deus_x Anyone who takes words on the screen personally should not be on IRC.
Re: Transcription of Larry's talk
On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 10:58:45AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote: @foo wa kaite kudasai; Wahey, INTERCAL in Japanese. "Now, we have to start over from scratch". That's INTERCAL. -- The debate rages on: Is Perl Bachtrian or Dromedary?
Re: Transcription of Larry's talk
On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 02:37:16PM -0400, John Porter wrote: http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-language@perl.org/msg00517.html No, and no, and no. -- Sendmail may be safely run set-user-id to root. -- Eric Allman, "Sendmail Installation Guide"
Re: I18N of Perl 6 (was: how the FreeBSD project gets its core members)
On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 04:59:50PM -0400, Jorg Ziefle wrote: Detailed information should follow soon. Should I write an RFC to discuss about, though I would come a bit late? :( RFC 313 not good enough for you? :) -- Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code. -- Dave Olson
Re: Reading list
On Thu, Oct 12, 2000 at 02:42:24PM +0200, H.Merijn Brand wrote: This one's double: Compilers,Principles, Techniques and Tools Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools. You should read it twice. -- IBM Pollyanna Principle: Machines should work. People should think.
Re: Continued RFC process
On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 12:34:33PM -0700, Dave Storrs wrote: is there some way we can duplicate/adapt their process so that we can simultaneously put to rest both David Grove's concerns about elitism and Dan Sugalski's concerns about lack of planning? No. -- Everything that can ever be invented has been invented - Charles H. Duell, Commisioner of U.S. Patents, 1899.
Re: Continued RFC process
On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 03:11:54PM -0500, David Grove wrote: Perhaps, then, there should be one more officer, chosen by Larry himself. This person would be responsible for collecting public opinions and representing them to the developer group, who needs to follow that guidance as long as they're technically capable. Well, we have two. One for the users, and one for the corporates. This person should also determine the timing of releases, or agree to the timing based on public opinion. No more of this releasing versions before they're ready or withholding modules. This is screamingly insane. The people who do the development are the people who are best placed to know when it's time to ship. Consider: "Public Opinion": Hey, we need Perl 6 stable in three weeks. Coders: But, uhm, we haven't started coding yet. No, no, no, no. He who leads the development *must* lead the release schedule. This is open source, David. You might have heard of it. Don't think that our current "information officer" is capable of accurately or faithfully filling this role, you'd be off by several hundred miles. You kind of have to justify statements like that, I'm afraid. -- buf[hdr[0]] = 0;/* unbelievably lazy ken (twit) */ - Andrew Hume
Re: Continued RFC process
On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 03:38:17PM -0500, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: Perhaps it's just me, but I don't see a problem yet. If Perl were somehow being "taken over", then I expect the Perl community (at the very least, one David Grove :-) to be up in arms about it. And then they could fork, and Perl would stay free. Crisis over. IT'S OPEN SOURCE. David, go understand what that means. -- IBM: It may be slow, but it's hard to use.
Re: Continued RFC process
On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 11:09:08AM -0500, David Grove wrote: I realize that's hard to do, and "core" developers get swamped, but without a public voice Perl 6 Public Relations - brian d foy The public relations side of development relays important events and happenings from the development side of Perl to the general public, including the press and Perl community. It's not a problem, David. -- We use Linux for all our mission-critical applications. Having the source code means that we are not held hostage by anyone's support department. (Russell Nelson, President of Crynwr Software)
Re: Continued RFC process
On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 01:10:57PM -0500, David Grove wrote: Perl 6 Public Relations - brian d foy Public relations? Uh, who is the Perl 6 information officer? I don't have the faintest idea. -- "You can have my Unix system when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
