NB: The links are probably broken at present. Normal service will
hopefully be resumed once Google gets caught up with the perl6 lists.
The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-08-27
Where does the time go? I blame folk festivals. Once I'm getting busy
with the teacher training I'm going to have weekends free to write the
summaries. And if you'll believe that...
We start with perl6-internals.
Incremental garbage collection
Discussion of implementing incremental garbage collection continued.
Calling conventions for unprototyped subroutines
Mattia Barbon asked for some clarification of how the calling
conventions work for unprototyped subroutines in IMCC. Specifically,
whether IMCC was behaving as documented in the Parrot Design Document
(PDD3). Leo reassured him that the TODO entry that had caused his
disquiet was obsolete and that IMCC does the right thing.
http://xrl.us/cw77
Compile op with return values
Steve Fink asked how to go about returning something from dynamically
compiled code. He, Leo and Dan went over the issues. An unnamed (and as
yet unvolunteered) volunteer will probably write it all up and add it to
the parrot compiler FAQ.
http://xrl.us/cw78
NCI and callback functions
Stephane Peiry and Leo continued to work on getting NCI callbacks
working with the GTK library. They finally tracked the problem down, but
it looks awfully like Stephane's going to have to reimplement the
"gtk_main" loop to get everything working. Best of luck Stephane.
ParrotGTK would definitely be a cool thing.
http://xrl.us/cw79
Planet Parrot
Robert Spier announced the creation of Planet Parrot, an aggregator of
Parrot related blogs. If you have such a blog, Robert would probably be
interested in hearing from you.
http://xrl.us/cw8a
http://planet.parrotcode.org/
GC/DOD API
Leo and Dan continued to discuss and work on documenting Parrot's memory
management API.
http://xrl.us/cw8b
NCI GC issues
Dan noticed a problem with garbage collection and NCI PMCs. Leo tracked
the problem down and fixed it.
I love it when a plan comes together.
http://xrl.us/cw8c
Opinions on base behaviour
Base behaviour is disgusting and should be stamped out I tell you. We
have a moral duty to...
Ah...
Actually, the subject refers to Dan and Leo's desire to nail down the
behaviour of Parrot's basic types. He outlined the issues and asked for
discussion. And that's what he got.
It looks like Parrot's going to have a reasonably complete set of
numeric types which will allow accuracy nerds to avoid reals for as long
as possible. Which will be nice.
http://xrl.us/cw8d
http://xrl.us/cw8e
http://xrl.us/cw8f
http://xrl.us/cw8g
http://xrl.us/cw8h
Concat, Cows & Basil
Comfortably winning the "weirdest subject line of the week" award, Sam
Phillips laid out some of the problems he's having implementing a Basil
compiler which targets Parrot. Leo supplied answers.
http://xrl.us/cw8i
Low level math[s] op behaviour
As well as discussing basic types, Dan opened a discussion of the proper
semantics of Parrot's low level maths (yeah, he spelt it 'math', but I'm
English and I'll spell it correctly) operators. In particular he
proposed variants that throw exceptions if strange things happen.
http://xrl.us/cw8j
Benchmark stuff
Joshua Gatcomb posted some patches he'd made to F<parrotbench.pl> to
make it a little less fragile and more useful. A few days later he
announced a slightly more finished set of patches (Leo had checked his
original patches in rather sooner than expected).
http://xrl.us/cw8k
http://xrl.us/cw8m
Resuscitating a mod_parrot
Dan Sugalski looked upon mod_parrot and saw that it was cool, to the
point of being laid out on a mortuary slab. He thought that the time had
come to try and put some life back into the project, now that Parrot's
so much more capable. He asked for volunteers and Jeff Horwitz seems to
be (the only?) one of 'em.
http://xrl.us/cw8n
PMC instantiation
Leo posted another of his discussion documents, this time on
instantiating PMCs. No response so far.
http://xrl.us/cw8o
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
Return with no expression.
In the usual freewheeling perl6-language way, a thread entitled 'return
with no expression' ended up discussion how to disambiguate a "::" which
is part of "... ?? ... :: ..." expression and "::" in its role as module
sigil. (According to Luke it's easy; white space is required).
http://xrl.us/cw8p
Synopses discussed
Discussion of the draft synopses continued
http://xrl.us/cw8q - Synopsis 2
POD tables?
Aaron Sherman wondered if Perl 6's incarnation of POD would have support
for tables. Luke wasn't overly keen on Aaron's proposed syntax, and
Larry pointed out that they'd managed to use Perl 5's POD and some
clever processing to write tables for the third edition of Programming
Perl. Once again, it seems that everyone agrees that POD is great, but
could be greater, but nobody can agree on how to *make* it greater. Me,
I think Larry got it right enough.
http://xrl.us/cw8r
Constructors and mixins
Ovid had some questions about how Constructors work in Perl 6 and about
how to disambiguate methods when using Roles. Larry and Damian provided
answers.
http://xrl.us/cw8s
Instantiation
Instantiation was on Aaron Sherman's mind too. He proposed some
syntactic sugar for creating objects at 'use' time. For some reason,
syntactic sugar proposals do seem to create lots of discussion.
http://xrl.us/cw8t
Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements
I am reliably informed that a lot of last week's links were broken.
Which is odd because the code to generate them hasn't changed. It looks
like the problem's down to the gateway between nntp.perl.org and
groups.google.com being slightly radished at present.
However, I'm going to stick with the Google links in this summary in the
hopes that normal service will be returned shortly and things will get
backfilled. If anyone has a handy tool for getting from a message id to
an archive URL that works then I'd be happy to hear from them.
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
Amazingly, there's a small amount of newer content on my website this
week. Will wonders never cease?
http://www.bofh.org.uk/
