The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2005-04-12
Whoa! Deja vu! Where'd Matt go?
Don't worry, Matt's still writing summaries. As you may have noticed,
Matt's been writing summaries every two weeks. And now so am I. Because
we love you, we've decided to arrange things so I write summaries in the
weeks when Matt doesn't. We could do it the other way, but that could be
seen by some as self-defeating. Heck, when I say 'some' I probably mean
'all'.
So, bear with me while I remember how to type all those accented
characters and get back into the swing of writing these things (and of
reading everything in the mailing lists once more -- someone should
write a summary for us summarizers...)
I'll be sticking to my old 'lists in alphabetical order' scheme of
writing summaries. So, let's get going
This week in perl6-compiler
Array of arrays, hash of hashes, elems, last
Lev Selector asked for confirmation that Pugs didn't support compound
data structures, @ar.elems or @ar.last. Autrijus and others
confirmed that they didn't then, but they do now.
http://xrl.us/fq99
MakeMaker6 stalls on takeoff
Darren Duncan pointed out that, whilst last week's summary had claimed
he was working on implementing MakeMaker in Perl 6 which is, sadly not
the case. He reckoned he'd possibly look into it again when he had tuits
and Pugs was more complete (supporting objects, for instance).
http://xrl.us/fraa
Declaration oddness
Roie Marianer pointed out what looks like some weirdness in Pugs'
parsing of lexically scoped subroutines. Warnock applies.
http://xrl.us/frab
Toronto pugs hackathon
John Macdonald asked for people who wanted to come to the YAPC::NA pugs
hackathon to get in touch with him beforehand as spaces there are
limited. If you're interested, drop him a line.
http://xrl.us/frac
Pugs slice oddities
Andrew Savige noticed some weirdness in pugs's slicing behaviour. He
posted some example code showing the problem. Autrijus agreed that there
was a problem and explained that he was in the process of rewriting all
the variable types, symbol tables and casting rules to agree with the
Perl 5 model as described in perltie.pod. The rewrite is currently
failing tests, so he posted a patch for people who want to play. On
Sunday, he bit the bullet and committed the entire 2500 line patch which
'touches pretty much all evaluator code'.
http://xrl.us/frad -- Autrijus's patch
http://xrl.us/frae -- Autrijus on the patch
http://xrl.us/fraf
Meanwhile, in perl6-internals
Tcl, Unicode
William Coleda has been trying to add Unicode support to his TCL
implementation and he fell across issues with missing methods in
charset/unicode.h. Leo waved a magic wand and checked in an
implementation which he fenced about with disclaimers.
http://xrl.us/frag
The status of Ponie
Nicholas Clark confessed that Ponie had been pretty much stalled for
some time, but sweetened the pill by announcing that it's about to
restart and that he would be able to allocate at least one day a week to
the project. He pointed people at the Ponie roadmap which breaks down
the required tasks between here and a first release, complete with time
estimates. If you're interested in getting Ponie to a ridable state,
this would be a good place to start.
People were pleased.
http://xrl.us/frah -- Ponie intro/roadmap
http://xrl.us/frai
Monthly release schedule
Chip donned his Fearless Leader hat and announced that, effective,
Parrot would be moving to a monthly release schedule (with an initial
three week 'month' to get things into sync). There was some debate about
whether Solaris/SPARC should be one of the officially required monthly
release platforms (darwin, linux-x86-gcc3.* and win32-ms-cl were Chip's
initial blessed three). This morphed into a discussion of Tinderbox;
apparently there are cool things happening behind the scenes.
http://xrl.us/fraj
Calling convention abstraction
What do you know? You go away for n months and when you come back people
are *still* talking about calling conventions.
http://xrl.us/fram
Dynamic Perl, Part 1
William Coleda announced that he was starting work on removing the
core's dependence on Perl* PMCs in favour of using language agnostic
PMCs internally and loading the Perl ones dynamically as required.
Everything but PerlArray was dealt with quickly and names and ways
forward with that tricky case were discussed. It looks like we're going
to have a 'ResizablePMCArray' added to the core once people have the
tuits.
http://xrl.us/fran
Subversion
Another discussion that wouldn't go away back when I was last writing
summaries has come to a head. Parrot's finally migrating from CVS to
Subversion. By the time
