This Fortnight in Perl 6, December 21 - 31 2004
All~
Welcome to a New Year of Perl 6 Summaries. I have been doing biweekly summaries over the holiday season, but I plan on returning to weekly ones now. Hopefully “World of Warcraft” won’t prevent me, we shall see. But if anyone starts a Perl guild, drop me a line. ;-)
Perl 6 Language
Perl IDE
Matisse wondered if an IDE for Perl would be possible given its dynamic nature. The consensus arrived at last time was that an IDE that worked for “nice” code would be possible, but a fully general one would be extremely difficult and quite possibly impossible.
Premature Optimization
Jona… has a rant about low-level data types and premature optimizations. So Google tells me, but I can’t find it in my Gmail account… Perhaps he posted directly to Google continuation enhanced arcs. I wish people would not do that….
Strictness of fully qualified globals
Alexey Trofimenko wanted to know if Perl 6 would have a way to catch mistakes like $OtherPackage::NmaeWithTypo when using strict. The thread seemed to wander off without answering his question, although it did note that perhaps OtherPackage::$NmaeWithTypo would make more sense.
Perl 6 Compiler
Using ASCII 0 as a terminating character
Nicholas Clark pointed out that Perl 5 allows the use of \0 as a quoting character for q{}. He felt that this was useful and should remain in Perl 6. Patrick agreed.
Parrot
P5 was the new P2
Last time, I reported that Sam and Leo wanted to pass P5 in P2 as well. Sam reported later that he was no longer confident in this idea. I guess I should de-nudge Dan….
Warning in pybuiltin.pmc
Simon Glover submitted a patch to fix it, but Warnock applies.
POD cleanup
Chromatic applied his previously threatened patch with a polite thanks to himself.
Reading past EOF in PIR
Matt Diephouse noted that the error from reading past the EOF in PIR was not really informative. Patches welcome.
Missing examples in PDD16
Simon Glover noticed a section in PDD16 that just stops mid-sentence. He suggested that it be either finished or removed. No answer…
MMD and VTABLE_find
Leo and Sam continued their discussion of how to implement MMD. The conversations stopped, but I am not sure that it progressed. Perhaps some guidance would be helpful…
PyCon discussions
A.M. Kuchling noted that PyCon will take place on March 23-25 in Washington, D.C. Many folk will be there including the authors of IronPython and Jython. The deadline for submissions was Dec. 31, 2004, but that does not mean that people cannot attend, learn a whole bunch, and take over the world.
Dynclasses broke the build
Will noted that dynclasses/*py* broke the build. Sam fixed it with alacrity.
Mod_parrot
Adrian Lambeck provided a patch to make mod_parrot work with parrot-0.1.1. Nicholas Clark applied it.
Missing make test dependencies
Will Coleda noted some problems with running make test with first running make. Sam fixed them, but could not close the RT tickets.
Split on RegExp
Will Colleda gave Patrick a friend nudge about split. Patrick noted the nudge.
--no-lines and --help for ops2*.pl
Bernhard Schmalhofer added support for the above mentioned flags to ops2c.pl and ops2pm.pl. Leo applied it.
StringArray–
Prompted by a question from Simon Glover, Leo deprecated StringArray.
Ponie on x86 Solaris
Andy Bach noticed some problems with Ponie on x86 Solaris. Leo and Nicholas Clark helped him push the failing Ponie slightly farther before failing.
Win32 dynclass issues
Jonathan Worthington bravely set out to fix dynclass pains in Win32. With the help of Leo and Nicholas Clark, he is making progress.
Undef != Undef
Simon Glover noted that this oddity caused unexpected results. This led to some scrutiny of the Fixed vs Resizable arrays. The consensus is that the core PMCs need their exact semantics specified and then implemented, as oposed to the current approach of letting the implementation be the specification.
- Undef != Undef
- Hash PMC needs it, too
- More ResizablePMCArray problems
- Garbage values in Fixed*Arrays
Deleting keys from an OrderedHash
Simon Glover noticed that it hurt when he did this. Leo told him not to do that.
Native structures for Parrot
Graciliano M. P. explained that he wanted native datatypes in Parrot so he could make optimizations where appropriate. Leo, Luke, and Bernhard all explained that it could be done. Bernhard Schmalhofer even went on to ponder Piddles in Parrot.
Parrot bench’s working directory
Matt Diephouse wondered if he should make Parrot bench run from the root directory instead of its subdirectory. Joshua Gatcomb indicated that he should.
VTABLE_call_method
Sam Ruby solicited input on adding a new VTABLE_call_method slot.
Pop_pad
Peter Christopher wondered why pop_pad had no implementation yet.
The Usual Footer
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