This week on Perl 6, week ending 2003-07-06

Jul 6, 2003 by Piers Cawley

Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030706

Welcome to this week’s Perl 6 Summary, coming to you live from a gatecrashed Speakers’ lounge at OSCON/TPC, surrounded by all the cool people like Dan Sugalski, Lisa Wolfisch, Graham Barr, and Geoff Young, who aren’t distracting me from writing this summary at all.

10 minutes later, after the arrival of James Duncan and Adam Turoff, I’m still not being distracted. Oh no… Leon Brocard’s just arrived, which helps with the running joke, but not with the ‘getting the summary written’.

So, we’ll start as usual with the goings on in perl6-internals.

More on Parrot’s multiple stack implementations

Dan pointed out that, although Control, User, and Pads share the same stack engine, Pads should be implemented using a simple linked list. He also confessed that all the register backing stacks should share an implementation, but that he’d been too lazy to macro things up properly.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Building IMCC as parrot

Leo Tötsch posted an initial patch to make IMCC build as the parrot executable. And there was much Makefile debugging.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Parrot IO work

Work on Parrot’s IO system was ongoing this week.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Parrot Exceptions

Discussion of possibly resumable exceptions continued, and morphed into a discussion of the workings of warnings when Benjamin Goldberg wondered if warnings were being implemented as exceptions.

They aren’t. I think Benjamin was being confused by Perl 6’s fail function which can either issue a warning and return undef to its caller’s caller, or throw an exception, depending on a pragma whose name I can’t for the life of me remember.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Parrot’s build system

Last week Dan asked for help writing a configuration and build system that would allow per-C-file compiler flag overrides and various other complexities. This week Alan Burlison worried that this approach looked “very suspect”. This sparked a discussion of the proper way to do interrupt safe queueing, reentrant code, and other scary things.

I may be misreading what’s being said in the thread, but it seems that the scariest thing about the whole issue is that there’s no portable way of doing the Right Thing, which leads to all sorts of painful platform dependencies and hoopage (From “to jump through hoops”, anything which requires you to jump through a lot of hoops has a high degree of hoopage. For the life of me I can’t remember if it was me or Leon Brocard who coined the term).

Swamps were mentioned. Monty Python skits were quoted. Uri Guttman was overtaken by (MUAHAHAHAHAHA!) megalomania.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Klaas-Jan Stol Explains Everything (part 1)

Last week I mentioned that I didn’t know what Klaas-Jan Stol was driving at when he proposed a general, language-independent “argument” PMC class and hoped that he would provide an explanation, with code fragments.

This week, Klaas-Jan came through, and I think I understand what he wants. Go read his explanation and see if you understand it too. It’s to do with when a parameter should be passed by reference or by value. Parrot currently assumes that Strings and PMCs are passed by reference, and that integers and floats are passed by value.

There was some discussion of whether support for optionally passing PMCs by value should be added at the parrot level or whether individual language compilers should be responsible for calling the appropriate PMC methods.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Moving ParrotIO to PMCs

Jürgen Bömmels is working hard on moving Parrot’s IO-system to a fully garbage collected PMC based system. He posted an initial patch transforming ParrotIO structures into PMCs using a simple wrapping approach.

The patch had problems because the new ParrotIO PMCs were marked as needing active destruction, which could lead to problems with files being closed twice and memory structures getting cleaned up twice, which tends to make memory leak detecting tools a little unhappy. This bug proved to be easy to fix. But then another one reared its head and has so far proved rather harder to fix.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Jako gets modules (sort of)>

Gregor N Purdy announced that he’s added rudimentary module support to his Jako “little” (?) language. A little later he announced that he’d added rather less rudimentary module support.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Stupid Parrot Tricks

Clinton Pierce, shooting for his “mad genius” badge announced that he’d implemented a simple CGI script in Parrot BASIC. Everyone gasped. Robert Spier decided that the time may have come to start playing with mod_parrot (embedding Parrot in Apache) again.

http://groups.google.com/groups

http://www.camfriends.org/testform.html – that BASIC CGI URL

Lazy Arrays

Luke Palmer is thinking about implementing LazyArray and LazySequence PMCs and outlined his design approach for the list. Benjamin Goldberg and Leo Tötsch both contributed answers to some of the questions Luke raised.

http://groups.google.com/groups

wxWindows Support

David Cuny asked if there was any interest in supporting wxWindows (an open source, cross platform, native UI framework for a pile of operating systems).

Leo thought that one could use wxWindows from Parrot via the NCI (Native Call Interface), but that it wouldn’t be at all easy. He thought that the best way would be a custom dynamically loaded PMC, tied to good object support in Parrot. Neither of which we have (yet).

Leo also thought that using Parrot as a GCC backend would be a reasonably sensible idea, but that it “would need some extensions at both sides”. He wondered if there were any GCC people listening.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Hash Iterators

Leo checked in his “buggy initial try” at implementing a hash iterator for Parrot, but he wasn’t entirely happy with his implementation. Sean O’Rourke suggested a Better Way, which Leo immediately took advantage of.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

Almost nothing happened.

printf like formatting in interpolated strings

Jonadab the Unsightly One made another proposal in this longrunning thread.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Perl 6 Daydreams

The directed daydreaming continued. Jonadab is looking forward to Perl 6’s new improved object model (him and many, many others I believe). This morphed into a discussion of porting Inform to run on Parrot, which spawned thoughts of when Parrot achieves its final goal of being able to load and run z-code based interactive fiction. (The theory is that getting z-code working on Parrot will be the final goal because once that happens the dev team will stop working on Parrot and spend all their time playing Zork).

http://groups.google.com/groups

Aliasing an array slice

Dan Brook wondered if it would be either possible or sane to bind a variable to an array slice:

my @array_slice := @array[1,3,5]

Luke Palmer thought it would have to be, because if it weren’t

my *@fibs := (1, 1, map { $^a  + $^b} zip(@fibs, @fibs[1...]));

wouldn’t work (and that would be a bad thing because?).

Damian pointed out that it sort of worked already in Perl 5. This started people discussing what the Right Thing would finally be in Perl 6.

http://groups.google.com/groups

Acknowledgements, Announcements and Apologies

Look, I’m sorry the Summary’s late, okay? OSCON is an incredibly distracting thing to be present at; every time I settled down to write I got drawn into another fascinating conversation and before I knew it it was time to go back to my hotel, which is, of course, where I managed to knuckle down and write this.

Thanks to Curtis Poe for putting us up for the first couple of nights in Portland, and to Tom Phoenix for being a top notch Native Guide. No thanks to Powell’s City of Books http://www.powells.com/ for having far too much good stuff in stock. Thankfully, they ship.

As ever, if you’ve appreciated this summary, please consider one or more of the following options:

Tags

perl-6
perl-6-internals-parrot

Feedback

Something wrong with this article? Help us out by opening an issue or pull request on GitHub