This Week in Perl 6, Jan. 11-18, 2005
Welcome to yet another Perl Summary brought to you by music and pizza (although the pizza is late in arriving). Like many summaries before it, we start with an attempt at non sequitur and Perl 6 Language.
Perl 6 Language
Idiomatic Perl 6
Stéphane Payrard expressed a desire for more Perl 6 sample code. Luke Palmer issued the following, possibly foolish, response: “Post some ‘how do I’s…?’ to the list, and I’ll reply with code.” Austin Hastings posed a couple, but there’s no response yet …
Generalized Tainting
Yuval Kogman posted an interesting musing about contagious properties (if you pull a value from someone with a contagious property, the property comes along, too). There were no responses, but it sounds interesting.
Stick/Pick
Richard H. suggested a new pair of functions, stick/pick, which would have modifiers such that push, pop, shift, unshift, and splice could all be calls to stick or pick with appropriate modifiers. Unfortunately, I think he posted it to the Google Groups interface, as it is there but not on the list. :-(
Perl 6 IDE, Again
Matisse Enzer re-raised the question of the feasibility of an IDE for Perl 6. Unfortunately, I think he re-raised it on Google Groups.
1x6 vs. 6
The dimension slice issues continue to grind with new suggestions from David Green and Craig DeForest.
Lifespan of Loop Counters
Joe Gottman wants an easy way to restrict the lifespan of his loop counter to his loop. Some folks (myself included) did not like the answer of wrapping it in a scope. Others (myself excluded) thought the answer “don’t use loop, use for” was a bit of a cop-out.
Forany & Forall
Jonathan Lang wondered how to check if a condition is true for any element of an array or for all elements. The answer is to use the aptly named junction creators of any() and all().
Perl 6 Compiler
I’ve already reached p6c with no pizza. :-( Ah well, it was a light week.
Parrot Internals
I’ve already reached p6i and still no pizza :-(. Although it was close, after I wrote the =head2 my door buzzed. It was just a locked-out neighbor, but that would have been impressive timing.
Blib in 25 Seconds
Peter Christopher asked for a 25-second summary of the ./blib directory. Apparently this is harder than Hamlet in 30 seconds, which already exists.
Searching Archives
Peter Christopher wanted to know if there was a way he could search the mailing list archives. Steve Fink pointed him to groups.google.com and the ever-popular discussion topic “aardvarks.”
Dynclasses with External Dependencies
Bernhard Schmalhofer wondered if there was a reasonable way to check for external dependencies for dynamic PMCs that does not involve the core Parrot configure step. Later he supplied a patch with his GDBMHash pmc, which motivated the question. Leo applied it and hinted at a mythical multi-stage configure.
s/Interpreter/INTERP/g
Bernhard Schmalhofer provided a patch, making the above cleanup all over. Leo and Sam applied different parts of it.
Black-ops Parrot
Robert Spier posted a link to the new listing for Parrot on CIA. Nicholas Clark dove for cover.
PDD Problems on the Website
Dave Brondsema noticed that PDDs 4-6 had not found their way to the website properly. Will Coleda fired off a patch.
Cleaning Old Tickets
Will Coleda, in his never-ending role as RT janitor, closed out a few obsolete tickets. Thanks, Will.
Scope and Timely Destruction
Leopold Toetsch raised the recurring issue of timely destruction. It turns out that timely destruction is hard. Various people made various suggestions. Let me state one thing clearly as if I don’t, Dan doubtless will: Parrot will not use reference counting of any kind. There are a great many reasons for this some of which Luke Palmer explained.
ParrotIO* Should Have Been PMC*
Peter Christopher provided a patch fixing a pointer declaration bug. Leo applied it.
Questions for the Compiler FAQ
Some time ago, a compiler FAQ started to contain answers to questions that people posted to the list. Will Coleda posted two such questions, but there has been no response.
Languages/Perl6
Will Coleda wondered what would come of the languages/perl6 stuff as PGE now has its own SVN repository. No one answered.
Parakeet with Broken Wings
Will added an RT ticket for Parakeet, which broke in a recent shuffle.
Crashing Parrot
Will found out that he could crash Parrot by doing stuff with GCed memory. Leo admitted that he could.
Collecting Academic Garbage
Shevek asked for a good place to read about garbage collection techniques. Garrett Goebel pointed him to just such a page.
Argv[0]
Will wants to fetch the moral equivalent of argv[0].
Proposed VTABLE Changes for Method Lookup
Leo suggested a VTABLE change to facilitate MMD and method lookup. The thread had several suggestions and questions.
Food
Matt Fowles’s pizza arrived. The reader then speculated that either (he writes slowly or it arrived quickly) or (he writes quickly or it arrived slowly), depending on various readers’ estimates of pizza-delivery time and expected word-per-minute summarization.
Bring Hither the Fatted Parrot
Dan has returned to us. Hopefully he will be able to advance the quest for meta-objects and interoperability.
The Usual Footer
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 to ubermatt@gmail.com.
Tags
Feedback
Something wrong with this article? Help us out by opening an issue or pull request on GitHub
