The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-09-24
So, this is my last summary before I start my teaching practice.
Hopefully I've got things set up so writing the summary isn't going to
interfere with that, and vice versa.
This week in perl6-compiler
State of Rules
Discussion of the state of the Perl 6 compiler (with particular
reference to the rules engine) continued. People were concerned with
making sure that the rules engine that Luke and Patrick are working on
would be flexible enough to cope with different languages in 'closures'.
Synopsis 5 updated
Ed Peschko asked that there be some way of 'turning the rules engine
inside out' to make something which, given a rule, would generate
strings that could match against it. Actually, this is the second time
Ed asked for this, as Luke reminded him. Luke went on to implement a
generator in hypothetical perl 6, which seemed to please everyone but
Ed.
Rod Adams wins the 'making the summarizer smile wryly' occasional prize.
http://xrl.us/c8ax
Meanwhile, in perl6-internals
Problems Reimplementing Parrot Forth
Matt Diephouse fell foul of problems with the compile and compreg
opcodes in his efforts to reimplement Parrot Forth in PIR. Steve Fink
made some suggestions for workarounds based on his work on writing a
regular expression compiler.
From further discussion, it seems that, if you're implementing a stack
based language, you'd do well to manage the language's stack yourself
rather than using Parrot's User stack which is interestingly scoped.
http://xrl.us/c8ay
__init not being magically called
Will Coleda had some problems with a class's __init function not being
called magically. Nobody else could reproduce the problem. After a
certain amount of confusion, Will did make realclean; perl
Configure.pl; make; make test and all was well again.
If you're experiencing a weird problem, it's probably best to do the
rebuild before posting to the list. Or you could fix the build system to
have more accurate dependencies...
http://xrl.us/c8az
Incremental collector and finalization
Jeff Clites had some questions about how finalizers interact with the
work that Leo's been doing on implementing an incremental garbage
collector for Parrot. Leo had some thoughts, but noted that there's
still a problem with ordered finalization and destruction.
[Your summarizer is really starting to get a feel for why old school GC
types really don't like finalizers...]
http://xrl.us/c8a2
Python bytecode volunteers
Dan asked for volunteers to finish the task of getting python bytecode
working on Parrot; he reckoned that the work was mostly done, but that
neither he nor Leo have the time to go the last couple of yards.
Come on people, this would definitely be a cool thing to have.
http://xrl.us/c8a3
mod_parrot 0.0
Jeff Horwitz announced the release of version 0.0 of his mod_parrot
Apache module. It's remarkably powerful for version 0.0
http://xrl.us/c8a4
The compile op and building compilers
Dan had some thoughts on tidying up the spec for the compreg and
compile operators and asked for comments before he nailed the spec
down. Steve Fink and Leo had comments.
http://xrl.us/c8a5
Misc. remarks about YAPC::EU
Leo popped up to thank everyone who'd donated to The Perl Foundation and
thus supported the purchase of shiny new Apple Powerbook G4 that he'd
used to run his presentation at YAPC Europe in Belfast.
He went on to outline some of the things he'd done and heard in Belfast,
including the fact that one French teacher is using Parrot for teaching
assembly language.
http://xrl.us/c8a6
Parrot m4 0.0.8
Bernhard Schmalhofer announced version 0.0.8 of Parrot m4. There's no
new functionality 'just' some structural improvement and tidying.
http://xrl.us/c8a7
Parrot TCL
Will Coleda posted a progress report on his Parrot TCL implementation
which is progressing gradually towards being a full blown TCL
implementation; he's working towards using special Tcl* PMCs with real
TCL semantics instead of the current scheme which uses Perl PMCs.
http://xrl.us/c8a8
Namespaces, Part 1
Dan posted the first part of his Namespaces spec. There was, of course,
much discussion. Inevitably, there was another revision, and further
discussion.
http://xrl.us/c8a9
http://xrl.us/c8ba -- The revised version
Towards a new call scheme
Leo posted an overview of the work he was doing on Parrot's internals to
get a faster calling scheme in place (as discussed endlessly). The usual
perl6-internals discussion and revision process swung into action.
http://xrl.us/c8bb
Hello everybody
Remember the French teacher that Leo mentioned? Well, the man himself,
Christian Aperghis-Tramoni
