The Perl 6 Summary for the six days ending 2004-07-31
As I threatened last week, I'm moving the rollover point for these
summaries from midnight on Sunday/Monday to midnight on Friday/Saturday,
but rather than do it in one swell foop I'm doing a couple of six day
weeks. The theory is that, once I become a student teacher I'll be
rather busy during the week, but I should still be able to make time to
write the summaries at the weekend.
That's the theory at least. You'll note that this didn't get posted to
the mailing lists on a Sunday. Blame my cousin for getting married. It
won't happen again.
Pie-thon
Good news! Guido is a gentleman and declined to throw a pie at Dan.
Bad news! The Perl Community is a bunch of savages, and they paid $520
to be able to throw pie at Dan.
Good news! There are photos.
http://xrl.us/ck3f
http://xrl.us/ck3g
Notes to self
1 Americans pronounce 'maths' as 'math'.
2 Don't make silly cracks about American rectitude
3 Oops.
Leo's proposed calling conventions
It's been apparent for a while now that Leo Tötsch isn't happy with
Parrot's current calling conventions. This week he posted a proof of
concept patch implementing a proposed new scheme. Luke Palmer agreed
that it was probably worth consideration. We'll see what Dan has to say
when he gets back from OSCON.
Stack based language
RaghavendraK asked about the difference between stack and register based
virtual machines. Brent Royal-Gordon gave good advice.
http://xrl.us/ck3h
ICU outdated
Joshua Gatcomb noted that the ICU that comes with Parrot is, not to put
too fine a point on it, old and buggy. The ICU developers have suggested
that Parrot move to version 3.0. Josh proposed various ways of doing
this. Leo wants ICU out of the Parrot CVS, but Dan's argued in the past
that it should be in there because he doesn't want to force people to
chase round fetching a raft of required libraries before they can build
parrot.
http://xrl.us/ck3i
Jarkko proposed for a CVS checkin rights
Following a raft of high quality patches from Jarkko Hietaniemi, Leo
proposed him for membership of the "cvs ci" club.
http://xrl.us/ck3j
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
What's core?
Larry and Dan Hursh discussed what would be going in the standard Perl 6
distribution. Dan argued that we should be concentrating on producing a
distribution akin to the current Perl 5 distribution, but with a few
fewer kitchen sinks. Larry argued that we should concentrate on two
distributions:
1 Bare bones, just able to build itself and with enough capability to
bootstrap everything else.
2 Extended. The bare bones system + a set of libraries fetchable from
CP6AN that constitute the Perl 6 'supported' library; modules that
are maintained by the Perl 6 equivalent of perl5-porters and which
will be supported over a long time frame.
I don't think Dan's been convinced yet. Elsewhere in the thread Luke
Palmer coined the delightful acronym 'EYEWTIBWATA' -- Everything You
Ever Wanted To Install But Were Afraid To Ask -- or eye-witty-bwattle.
I'm unsure about whether it's going to rank up there with Tim-toe-tidy
though.
http://xrl.us/ck3k
Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements
I'm getting bored of typing 'Palmer' and 'Tötsch' once a week, so I'm
considering treating Luke and Leo like Larry, Dan, Damian and, if you
insist, chromatic.
So, if you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider
contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of
Perl. You might also like to send feedback or contributions to a
'getting Piers to OSCON 2005' fund to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site
