This Week on Perl 6, Week Ending 2004-07-31

Aug 6, 2004 by Piers Cawley

As I threatened last week, I’m moving the rollover point for these summaries from midnight on Sunday/Monday to midnight on Friday/Saturday, but rather than do it in one swell foop, I’m doing a couple of six-day weeks. The theory is that once I become a student teacher, I’ll be rather busy during the week, but I should still be able to make time to write the summaries on the weekend.

That’s the theory, at least; you’ll note that this didn’t get posted to the mailing lists on a Sunday. Blame my cousin for getting married. It won’t happen again.

Pie-thon

Good news! Guido is a gentleman and declined to throw a pie at Dan.

Bad news! The Perl community is a bunch of savages, and they paid $520 to be able to throw pie at Dan.

Good news! There are photos.

http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000372.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/oscon2004/friday/

Notes to Self

1. American’s pronounce “maths” as “math.”
2. Don’t make silly cracks about American rectitude.
3. Oops.

Leo’s Proposed Calling Conventions

It’s been apparent for a while now that Leo Tötsch isn’t happy with Parrot’s current calling conventions. This week, he posted a proof-of-concept patch implementing a proposed new scheme. Luke Palmer agreed that it was probably worth consideration. We’ll see what Dan has to say when he gets back from OSCON.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=41063ACB.2040208%40toetsch.at

Stack-Based Language

RaghavendraK asked about the difference between stack- and register- based virtual machines. Brent Royal-Gordon gave good advice.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=13d2515bd8.15bd813d25%40huawei.com

ICU Outdated

Joshua Gatcomb noted that the ICU that comes with Parrot is, not to put too fine a point on it, old and buggy. The ICU developers have suggested that Parrot move to version 3.0. Josh proposed various ways of doing this. Leo wants ICU out of the Parrot CVS, but Dan’s argued in the past that it should be in there because he doesn’t want to force people to chase around fetching a raft of required libraries before they can build Parrot.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040730183121.54027.qmail%40web60804.mail.yahoo.com

Jarkko Proposed for CVS Check-In Rights

Following a raft of high-quality patches from Jarkko Hietaniemi, Leo proposed him for membership of the cvs ci club.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=410BE8B4.7030103%40toetsch.at

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

What’s Core?

Larry and Dan Hursh discussed what would be going into the standard Perl 6 distribution. Dan argued that we should be concentrating on producing a distribution akin to the current Perl 5 distribution, but with a few fewer kitchen sinks. Larry argued that we should concentrate on two distributions:

1. Bare bones: just able to build itself and with enough capability to bootstrap everything else.
2. Extended: The barebones system plus a set of libraries fetchable from CP6AN that constitute the Perl 6 “supported” library; modules that are maintained by the Perl 6 equivalent of perl5-porters, and which will be supported over a long timeframe.

I don’t think Dan’s been convinced yet. Elsewhere in the thread, Luke Palmer coined the delightful acronym EYEWTIBWATA – Everything You Ever Wanted To Install But Were Afraid To Ask – or “eye-witty-bwattle.” I’m unsure about whether it’s going to rank up there with “tim-toe-tidy,” though.

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20040725063231.33578.qmail%40onion.perl.org

Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements

I’m getting bored of typing “Palmer” and “Tötsch” once a week, so I’m considering treating Luke and Leo like Larry, Dan, Damian, and, if you insist, chromatic.

So, if you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl. You might also like to send feedback or contributions to a “getting Piers to OSCON 2005” fund to

http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ : The Perl Foundation

http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ : Perl 6 development site