Re: The Perl 6 Summary
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Monday 18 August 2003 10:29 am, Piers Cawley wrote: Packfile fun So long assemble.pl, it's been good to know you. http://xrl.us/puu Google gives me an error on this: Unable to find thread. Please recheck the URL. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/QT2Xx533NjVSos4RAh0IAKCl0G9i1qfOKk1/ex98afUhIv96qgCbB4DL Rg56ptBwVdgylGCwhQO2HVI= =Jk9W -END PGP SIGNATURE-
The Perl 6 Summary
Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030817 Picture, if you will, a sunny garden unaffected by power cuts, floods, plagues of frog or any of the other troubles that assail us in this modern world. Picture, if you will, your summarizer sat in this garden with a laptop on his knee, cursing the inability of LCD display manufacturers to make displays that are legible in sunlight. Picture your summarizer returning to the comfortable chair in the shade of his book room casting around for a witty and original way to open another Perl 6 summary. Picture him giving up and starting to type. Here's what he writes: We start, as usual, with the the internals list. Tail call optimization Leo Tötsch has started to work on getting IMCC to detect tail calls and optimize them to either a simple jump or an invoke. If you're not sure what tail call optimization is I can recommend Dan's What the heck is a tail call? article on the subject. http://xrl.us/pun http://xrl.us/puo -- What the heck? Leo's QUERIES from last week Last week, Leo bundled up a bunch of outstanding questions for Dan, and Dan answered them. Benjamin Goldberg queried Dan's answer about find_method, which, if I'm reading things correctly is currently implemented in the interpreter. Benjamin argued (convincingly I thought) that, although the method hashes needed to be stored in the interpreter structure, find_method should be implemented on default.pmc, allowing for different classes/languages to override its behaviour. http://xrl.us/pup Why ~ for xor? Michal Wallace wanted to know why ~ maps to both unary bitwise-not and binary bitwise-xor in IMCC; he expected xor to be ^ and ^^. Leo explained that it was, at one point at least, the way Perl 6 did it but that he'd stopped keeping up with the developments in perl6-language. He noted that, if the Perl 6 operator had been settled, then IMCC should use that. A quick skim of my copy of *Perl 6 Essentials* tells me that Perl 6 now uses +, +| and +^ for bitwise and/or/xor, with ~, ~|, ~^ for stringwise and/or/xor. http://xrl.us/puq http://xrl.us/pur -- My review of *Perl 6 Essentials* Raising Hell Michal Wallace's Py-Pirate project continues to exercise the edges of Parrot as he implements more and more of Python's semantics. This time he needed to know about raising (and catching) exceptions. In particular he wanted to be able to catch an exception when find_lex failed to find an appropriately named variable. (Currently, a find_lex failure doesn't raise an exception, it just kills Parrot). Jos Visser told him that there were plans to have find_lex throw a real, catchable exception, or maybe just return undef. See last week's summary for a pointer to that discussion. http://xrl.us/pus Pirate status and help with instances Michal Wallace announced that he had just finished an all night coding spree and that Py-pirate could now handle: * functions (closures, recursion, etc) * Global variables * tuples (but they turn into lists) * dictionaries (create, setitem, getitem, print) * list comprehensions * raise (strings only) * try...except (partial) * try...finally * assert (At this point, I think we should all pause for moment of wild applause). However, he was having a few problems with instantiating objects of a class. (For those who don't know, Python instances are created by calling the Class as if it were a function). Leo Tötsch noted that almost nothing would work, since Parrot's classes and objects weren't actually finished yet. He agreed with others in the thread who reckoned that Python classes could be made to work by subclassing the standard class.pmc to allow it to respond to an invoke by by creating a new instance. Easy! Michal muttered something about faking classes with closures but I don't think he went through with it. http://xrl.us/put Packfile fun So long assemble.pl, it's been good to know you. http://xrl.us/puu Approaching m4 Leon Brocard, Sean O'Rourke and James Michael DuPont looked on in awe as Bernhard Schmalhofer announced that he'd been working on implementing m4 in Parrot. According to Sean, the implications are staggering... Sure, plenty of compilers can bootstrap themselves, but how many can generate their own configure scripts via autoconf? With p4rrot, we may live to see this dream. One does worry about Sean's dream life. http://xrl.us/puv Call and return conventions TOGoS has been thinking about the workings of the Parrot calling conventions. He wondered if there was a case for making calling and returning look exactly the same, allowing for cunning stunts with fake continuations in P1. Luke Palmer really
Re: The Perl 6 Summary
Piers, Regarding your Perl6 Essentials summary: Or, he can write code for IMCC using Parrot Intermediate Language (known as PIR for reasons that aren't entirely clear even to one who has been watching the mailing list since the Parrot project started) I suppose noone has much read the README in languages/imcc PIR is what I named the IMCC language and you are correct in your quote, but I've frequently seen people wondering where the name came from. It isn't really an overlay, it is a compiler with an optimizer and register allocator which just happens to emit PASM. If you have Steven Muchnicks book (spelling?) you will notice it is common to name intermediate languages as something with IR in it (MIR, LIR, HIR). Hope that answers your trivia. I suppose I could have provided some more explanation (I haven't read the book yet) but as the original author of IMCC PIR, I wasn't even contacted out of courtesy to write the chapter and was informed after the book was finished. :/ This has been a major stumbling block for me in getting back the motivation to help with Parrot again. -Melvin
Re: The Perl 6 Summary
MS == Melvin Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: MS I suppose I could have provided some more explanation (I haven't MS read the book yet) but as the original author of IMCC PIR, I MS wasn't even contacted out of courtesy to write the chapter and was MS informed after the book was finished. :/ MS This has been a major stumbling block for me in getting back the MS motivation to help with Parrot again. even though it is not my place as i had nothing to do with the book, i want to apologize for all for the oversight and slight. my impression is that the book authors didn't consult with many of the parrot/p6 people since it would have slowed down writing and production and they were on a very tight schedule. AFAIK others who should have been co-authors or should have been consulted were bypassed as you were. and note that it was o'reilly's decision on how they did the book and they are not parrot. so if that helps salve your wound, i am sure you contributions (past and future) to parrot are welcomed and appreciated by the parrot community (pretty much those on these lists) thanx,. uri -- Uri Guttman -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.stemsystems.com --Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding- Search or Offer Perl Jobs http://jobs.perl.org
Re: The Perl 6 Summary
Uri Guttman wrote: MS == Melvin Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: MS This has been a major stumbling block for me in getting back the MS motivation to help with Parrot again. so if that helps salve your wound, i am sure you contributions (past and future) to parrot are welcomed and appreciated by the parrot community (pretty much those on these lists) I second that. The imperatives of book production are mercantile, and have nothing to do with one's excellent participation in an Open Source effort, irrespective of the quality that a given editor may normally have. I'm certain that when a more definitive book is started, there will be much more time to ask all the interesting people for input. Please don't lose your motivation :) -- Robin Berjon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Research Engineer, Expwayhttp://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
Re: The Perl 6 Summary
Robin Berjon [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Uri Guttman wrote: MS == Melvin Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: MS This has been a major stumbling block for me in getting back the MS motivation to help with Parrot again. so if that helps salve your wound, i am sure you contributions (past and future) to parrot are welcomed and appreciated by the parrot community (pretty much those on these lists) I second that. The imperatives of book production are mercantile, and have nothing to do with one's excellent participation in an Open Source effort, irrespective of the quality that a given editor may normally have. I'm certain that when a more definitive book is started, there will be much more time to ask all the interesting people for input. Please don't lose your motivation :) Speaking of books. I keep mulling over the idea of attempting to write a 'Soul of a New Machine' type book for Parrot and Perl 6...
