The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20031109
Traditionally this paragraph concerns itself with a few words on what
I've been up to before finally settling down to get the summary written.
But despite the fact that it's nearly four o'clock, it's been one of
those days where I seem to have done almost as much as Leon Brocard
generally does to warrant a mention each week.
So, here's what's been happening in perl6-internals to make up for the
lack of guff about breadmaking or whatever. (If you're interested, the
raisin borodinsky I mentioned last week was an unmitigated disaster. The
focaccia was fabulous though).
New glossary entries
Gregor N. Purdy has added a few entries to the Parrot glossary, so if
you've been bursting to know what PIR, IMCC and other Parrot specific
clusters of capitals stand for, check out docs/glossary.pod in the
parrot distribution.
http://xrl.us/3pv
String Encodings hurt my head!
Peter Gibbs is attempting to implement the DBCS encoding (whatever that
is) and has discovered that he can't implement skip_backward for it
because of the mixture of 1-byte and 2-byte characters. He offered seven
suggestions for the right thing to do at this impasse.
Michael Scott didn't have any suggestions about the Right Thing, but he
did point to a page on his very lovely Parrot Wiki which discussed most
things Unicode for parrot, and made a plea for Dan (or whoever) to
produce a Strings PDD.
http://xrl.us/3pw
http://xrl.us/3px - Michael's WikiWord
Perl 6 patches
Allison Randal posted a couple of patches to the current (very) mini
Perl 6 that comes with Parrot (in languages/perl6. A little later in the
week, Joseph F. Ryan contributed a Perl 6 patch. It's good to see this
receiving attention again.
http://xrl.us/3py
Documentation
Nick Kostirya wondered why docs/parrot_assembly.pod appeared to be
simply an old version of docs/pdds/pdd06_pasm.pod. He also worried that
docs/ops/ appeared to be empty in the 0.0.13 release of Parrot. Dan
noted that both of the parrot assembly docs were wrong, and that what
would probably happen would be that the PDD would be updated and
docs/parrot_assembly.pod would be retired. Jürgen Bömmels said that the
empty docs/ops was because during the Great Move, the Makefile that
generated those POD files didn't get updated to cope with the new
location of the .ops files. Nick wondered which other POD files might be
going away so he'd not have to go through the process of translating
obsolete docs into Russian.
http://xrl.us/3pz
http://www.parrotcode.ks.ua/docs -- Why can't I type in Cyrillic?
From the Interesting, but is it useful? department
Melvin Smith has been playing with an uncommitted version of invoke
which allows you to invoke a function by name not address. He outlined
the ideas behind it (and the workaround to make it play nice with the GC
system), but wondered if it was actually of any use. Dan and Leo both
agreed that it wasn't because of issues with threading and the JIT.
http://xrl.us/3p2
Freeze/thaw data format and PBC
Leo Tötsch is working on the data serialization/deserialization (aka
Freeze/Thaw) system discussed over the last few weeks. He wondered if
there were any plans for the frozen image data format. Leo's plan is to
use PBC constant format (with possible extensions) so things integrate
neatly into bytecode. Dan had a bunch of comments, but the PBC based
format idea seemed to be well received, with the caveat that it should
be a 'dense' format.
http://xrl.us/3p3
Opening files on other layers
Jürgen Bömmels asked for comments on a patch for opening files on
different layers which had a few issues that he felt needed clarifying.
He and Melvin Smith spent some time discussing things.
Apologies for not doing a better job in summarizing this thread, but I'm
hamstrung by not quite knowing what 'layer' means in this context.
http://xrl.us/3p4
Parrot Has PHP
Okay, so the subject line's not quite true (yet), but who could resist
the recursive acronyminess of it? Anyhow:
Thies C. Arntzen and Sterling Hughes, core PHP hackers, popped up to
discuss the work they're doing on porting PHP to Parrot. Specifically,
they've hit a performance snag where PHP's typeless nature meant using a
PMC where they would rather be using a native type for speed. Thies
proposed a new datatype to get 'round the issue.
The general response was Hey! Fabulous! Someone's making a serious
effort to port a real language to Parrot! But that new type suggestion
is just reinventing the PMC. Oh, and if you could change your generated
code slightly you'd get much faster execution.
It's definitely fabulous though.
http://xrl.us/3p5
