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"'Course, if someone goes ahead and adds the Y combinator, one must naturally begin to wonder what the YY combinator would be... :-) "
-- Larry Wall
"Obviously it generates a function so anonymous that it can't even refer to itself. I call it the depressed existentialist solipsist operator."
-- chromatic, in 'Y not'
Larry Wall announced the demise of ¥, which was not much lamented.
Thomas Wittek suggested calling it zip and there was some discussion
of whether it is better to use terms like minmax and zip, or to use
symbols like MM and ZZ. Several jokes were made along the way.
A commit by Larry Wall replaced ¥ is replaced by Z.
There was also a change with the XX operator, which became X.
Steve Lukas remarked that Larry Wall had asked for ideas about good
names for various states of write access. He offered a proposal which
involves indicating that the writeability can be described as variable,
constant, or final. Dr. Ruud added a brief comment about the length of
the term variable, which he didn't find to be too long.
A commit from Larry Wall clarified that a named argument may name either a label or a variable.
Blair Sutton asked if the synopsis repository is publicly available, and if it is part of the Parrot or Pugs repository. The URL of the repository was posted.
Some time ago, in ticket [perl #29994], Jens Rieks reported an error
in imcc/parser_util.c. Klaas-Jan Stol updated the ticket and noted that
the loadlib op works on windows. However, another error was found: when
loading a non-existent library, no exception is raised.
Earlier, chromatic created a patch for get_name, which Jerry Gay
forwarded to RT to create ticket [perl #41235]. Jerry wanted to
apply the patch before 0.4.8, but chromatic said that he had been waiting
because Allison Randal wanted a deprecation cycle for the rename of
name() to get_name(). Allison replied that she had made a note
that it was deprecated (r17030) and said that the patch could be applied
after the release.
Klaas-Jan Stol reminded people that an issue had not been decided.
Earlier, Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41237] to address an item in DEPRECATED.pod about PMC Class name IDs. He felt that either it should use one syntax or the other, but not both.
Allison Randal preferred eliminating the dot in classname IDs. Matt Diephouse, on the other hand, liked the dot. Klaas-Jan Stol added that the dot indicates that it is PIR not pure PASM.
Allison thought that if Matt used it to disambiguate between types and local variables, it was a matter of sigils. She asked why put sigils on types instead of putting them in variables, and if a dot was the ideal sigil for types.
In ticket [perl #41529], James Keenan reported that there was a new
failure in Parrot_Distribution.t. Jerry Gay explained that the test
exposes a bug in Parrot::Distribution, which classifies files as Perl
even when they are not. He noted that failing tests had been used as
a reminder of things which needed to be fixed, and this was still used
to some extent, although there was a movement towards RT.
The problem was resolved in r17069.
There was some discussion about the difficulty of identifying the problem. Jerry Gay mentioned that he was working on refactoring Parrot::Distribution.
Eric Hanchrow reported a problem in r16999. Patrick R. Michaud offered some suggestions for correcting the code in question.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which adds the description of get_outer()
to PDD20.
Klaas-Jan Stol made some updates to faq.pod which related to ticket
[perl #41312].
Klaas-Jan Stol had a question relating to a fix for [perl #39196]. An anonymous subroutine was unexpectedly being found, and he wondered if that was a bug.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch to replace his earlier one.
A patch by Klaas-Jan Stol made some corrections to languages/PIR.
In ticket [perl #41538], Joshua Isom described a problem which could be replicated by creating a small file without a newline at the end. chromatic applied it in r17103.
Klaas-Jan Stol responded to ticket [perl #37542] which he claimed
stated that the behavior of multiple subroutines marked with the :load
subpragma in the same compilation unit is undefined. However, Klaas-Jan
pointed out that it is defined and wondered if the ticket could be closed.
Patrick R. Michaud agreed with closing the ticket. Will Coleda explained how Klaas-Jan could update the ticket directly.
Nicholas Clark suggested that release versions of Parrot should have debugging flags off so that it will benchmark nicely. This came from a public discussion of the speed of the Ruby implementation.
Tewk noted that the numbers generated by Cardinal are probably incorrect because the current implementation is very minimal.
Joshua Isom wondered if it was best for the default core to be the slow core. Although this makes testing easier, it gives misleading benchmarks.
Earlier, in ticket [perl #40544], Paul Cochrane submitted a test which checks for DOS line endings in the Parrot distribution.
Will Coleda recently noted that some of the problems are related to [perl #41485] and that when he sets the properties in his working copy, the tests succeed. Paul provided an update: he will be do a few commits which update the svn eol property. Because a large number of files will be affected, the update will done in a small time slot.
As of r17102, it was fixed.
Will Coleda reported a failing test in [perl #41548].
In ticket [perl #41549], Alek Storm submitted a patch in response to [perl #40626] and [perl #41364]. Jonathan Worthington planned to commit it.
Klaas-Jan Stol noted that there are some operations which have been
deprecated but which have not been listed in DEPRECATED.pod. He
suggested adding a check which will emit a warning if an operator is
deprecated.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch for the Lua grammar file.
Aldo Calpini resurrected comments from Dan Sugalski in 2004 which dealt with cross-compiling. In order to submit patches which do not break the existing code, he asked some questions about how people are using cross-compilation at the moment.
Jerry Gay wanted to see some development in this field, and suggested an approach based upon test-driven development for configuration system changes. Joshua Isom remarked that Perl 5's configure is somewhat limited, and Perl 5 may not always be available. While Aldo agreed that Perl 5's configure is a bad way to go, he didn't see anything wrong with using Perl 5 as the tool to build. Allison Randal also indicated that reliance on Perl 5's configure would be a problem. She proposed that Aldo start with a proposal and patches.
chromatic remarked that it would be nice to be able to put data files somewhere and have configure read those instead of probing the system.
Sam Vilain reported problems with inheritance which can result in the exception 'object has no parent'. Tests were added in r17031 to demonstrate the issue. This problem was explained in ticket [perl #41557].
In ticket [perl #41558], Shawn M Moore submitted a patch which adds a new utility script to create a summary of all the operators.
In ticket [perl #39196], Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which adds
a test for addmethod.
In ticket [perl #41569], Jerry Gay indicated a problem with a test which fails on Win32.
In preparation for the 0.4.9 release, Patrick R. Michaud asked some questions of people who have previously worked on release management. Allison Randal, chromatic and Nuno Carvalho replied.
In ticket [perl #41576], Patrick R . Michaud reported a failure
with t/pmc/pmethod_test.t.
Patrick R. Michaud reported in ticket [perl #38983] that he had changed the roadmap to refer to PDD01 instead of the 'PLATFORMS' file which doesn't exist. However, PDD01 is still in draft status, so Patrick asked if it can be approved.
Patrick R . Michaud reported in ticket [perl #41577] that there are some points in the roadmap which may no longer be relevant. Allison Randal fixed them in r17210.
In ticket [perl #41579], Patrick R . Michaud reported two failing tests. chromatic confirmed that this was not restricted to x86_64.
Bram Geron reported that tail calls within v-table methods are broken. Ticket [perl #41583] tracks this bug.
In ticket [perl #41584], Patrick R . Michaud noted that the release instructions should include a reminder to update the website.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which contains a simple example which can be added to PDD16. chromatic applied it in r17164.
Earlier, James Keenan noted that he had some new patches for tests. They were added in r17061. The patches can be seen in [perl #41455].
Aldo Calpini submitted a patch to ticket [perl #41597]. This patch adds an 'osname' key to Parrot's configuration data, which is used in the configure process.
Patrick R. Michaud announced the release of Parrot 0.4.9, "Socorro".
chromatic objected to a patch which removed access to a null pointer in
stm/backend.c. He thought that the best solution would be to have the
PMC init() throw an exception.
Allison Randal thought that it made sense to return with no action.
reply_extracted already has the same check, and mark_extracted
should have the check added. Jerry Gay added it in r17159.
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The Beauty of Perl 6 Parameter Passing, a new article on perl.com by philcrow++, is an excellent intro into some of the wonders of the Subroutines spec (S06). We absolutely need more articles like this. :-)
After 3 months of delay, it was quite amusing that the initial MO bridge took only 3 hours to land:
pugs> vv('hello, world').HOW
^Str
pugs> vv('hello, world').HOW.HOW
^Class
(The vv() above is a makeshift call that casts 6.2.0-land values into 6.28.0-land objects; it will go away once all existing built-in types are wrapped into MO.)
To understand what the ^Class notation means, let's take a brief look at Perl 6's object model, as implemented by Pugs 6.28.0's MO (Meta Object) subsystem.
In a traditional class-based object system such as Ruby's, the String class would be an instance of the Class class:
irb(main)> String.instance_of?(Class) => true irb(main)> String.instance_of?(String) => false
Because of this, you can't call .new on a String instance, and you can't call .length on the String class:
irb(main)> String.new.new NoMethodError: undefined method `new' for "":String irb(main)> String.new.length => 0 irb(main)> String.length NoMethodError: undefined method `length' for String:Class
Perl 5, on the other hand, takes an unique approach: When we say IO::String->new, the IO::String is not a Class object -- rather, it is a prototypical IO::String object that has no attributes!
IO::String->isa('Class');
#=> false (perl5 doesn't have a built-in Class)
IO::String->isa('IO::String');
#=> true
IO::String->new->new;
#=> IO::String=GLOB(0x18ab160)
IO::String->new->getpos;
#=> 0
IO::String->getpos;
Error: Can't use string ("IO::String") as a symbol ref...
The advantage of this arrangement is that several object systems -- prototype-based, closure-based, et cetera -- can exist simultaneously in the same program, without having to inherit from an universal Class class.
However, a bare literal "IO::String" is a terrible way to represent a prototypical object: it makes reflection needlessly difficult, and the error message for accessing the non-existing attribute slot ("Can't use string as a symbol ref...") seems to obey the principle of most surprise.
Perl 6's solution to this is simple: The prototypical string object, spelled ::Str or simply Str (if it's in scope), is a genuine Str instance. However, any attempt to access its attributes raises a sensible exception. Just as in Perl 5, so-called class methods such as .new are simply those methods that does not access instance attributes, and you can call them on both ::Str and regular Str instances.
Calling an object's WHAT method returns the prototypical object. This replaces Perl 5's ugly ref($x) || $x idiom:
pugs> 'hello'.WHAT ::Str pugs> Str.WHAT ::Str
On the other hand, because Perl 6's builtin objects are backed by a normal class-based dispatch system, you can reliably obtain a list of all Str's supported methods, by querying the Class instance that implements ::Str:
pugs> vv('hello').HOW
^Str
pugs> vv('hello').HOW.methods
["HOW","WHICH","bless","reverse"]
So there we have it: the Perl5ish prototypical object Str.WHAT is also spelled ::Str, and the Rubyish class object Str.HOW is also spelled ^Str.
The next step is to expose all MO's meta-objects (Role/Method/Class/Object) into Perl 6 land, and adapt our Perl 5 bridge to use Moose.pm, such that a class Foo {...} declaration in Pugs can generate both Haskell-side and Perl5-side representations, and work seamlessly with libraries on either side. Stay tuned!
Remember that the European Perl Hackathon will be held next weekend, from 2-4 March, 2007 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Registration is open until Thursday, 1 March. For more information, please look at the hackathon website.
Allison Randal and Jonathan Worthington will be coordinating the Parrot/Perl 6 portion of the hackathon.
Larry Wall made a commit to S02, S04 and S06. This change renamed
leave to give and modified give to always give the final value
of the innermost block. $context.give() will always give the final
value of the context. Instead of repeating the context selector interface,
the object is now used. Loop labels are considered sufficiently OO to
allow LABEL.give within the lexical scope of the labeled statement.
Additionally, feed operators were clarified; their intent is to allow
parallelism with minimal sharing, along the lines of the UNIX pipe model.
Smylers thought that most people would probably want to filter an array
without retaining the original array, something that Larry had labeled
as 'probably impossible'. Larry replied that people probably would want
the form, but that mutable data is coupled to realtime but lazy data is
decoupled. He thought it might be able to make the syntax
@data <== grep { $_ % 2 } <== eager @data; work, but that care would
have to be taken with the identity of the container and its data.
In a later commit ('[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13583 - doc/trunk/design/syn'),
Larry decided to change give back to leave, on the grounds that give
can be confused with given. Some of Smyler's comments were taken into
consideration in '[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13584 - doc/trunk/design/syn'.
A commit by Larry Wall removed the quote declarator.
Larry Wall's commit changed :to to be the short form for :heredoc.
Another commit by Larry Wall made a series of changes to S02, S04, and
S12. The statement_modifier category was split in two. List comprehensions
can be done with statement modifiers. Multiple dispatch is explained in
terms of topological sort, and has been clarified where single semicolons
are concerned. Multis with a single semicolon may be reserved in 6.0.0.
Steve Lukas proposed a ro (read-only) declaration for variables
which would prevent modification after an initial value was set at
runtime. As an example of a use, he gave data fetched from from a
database which is used to create reports. He also explained why he
felt that the readonly trait and the VAR macro were not suitable.
TSa thought that constant did what Steve wanted. Larry Wall clarified
that constant $temperature = getValue() would evaluate getValue()
at compile time. Larry noted that the specified my $temperature is
readonly = getValue(); would probably suit Steve's need. Smylers
agreed with Larry and asked Steve some questions about Steve's
proposal for readonly $-temperature. Steve replied that he had
overlooked the specification Larry mentioned, and that he was willing
to drop his proposal.
Larry Wall remarked that he was getting tired of writing rw
context variables and that there might be forthcoming syntactic
relief for rw/ro which is orthogonal to everything else. Bob
Rogers suggested := or something similar to indicate that the
assignment is really a definition.
Sam Vilain created ticket [perl #41478] to add skip to Test::More.
Allison Randal wondered why Sam had chosen to reverse the order of arguments
from Test::Builder.skip Nicholas Clark remarked that Sam had used the
same order as Perl 5's Test::Builder. However, he agreed with Allison
that it is more legible to have the number of tests to skip first, followed
by the reason.
Sam proposed to solve it with a multi-sub, which would take either a string or an int followed by a string. chromatic thought that was an appropriate way to handle the issue. Allison committed the patch, with this change, as r17010.
Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #41485]. chromatic had
asked in '[svn:parrot] r16940 - in trunk/languages/lua: Lua t'
if there is a subversion property for line endings to keep text
files consistent within the repository. The property is svn:eol-style,
which should be set to 'LF' to ensure UNIX-style end-of-line characters.
Paul created a test for it in t/condingstd/line_endings.t but wanted
to check if all text files have the property set before committing the
test.
Jerry Gay remarked that the correct setting is 'native', so that files will be saved with the line endings the platform expects. The exceptions are examples using file IO, which require 'LF'. Jerry offered to test the patch on Windows if Paul posted it.
Paul wondered if Windows users have problems editing files because of the UNIX line endings. Jonathan Worthington answered affirmatively. He thought that 'native' was also the best solution.
James E Keenan wondered if new files committed to a branch should have these subversion properties set. Jerry Gay replied that the metadata requirements are poorly documented, and that perhaps this information belonged in the coding standard PDD. This led Paul to create ticket [perl #41505] to track the cleanup of the documents.
Eventually the property patch was added to t/distro/file_metadata.t and
committed in r16981.
Klaas-Jan Stol created several patches this week as well, namely:
Allison Randal updated PDD15 to reflect core conceptual changes to objects.
In response to Paul Cochrane's ticket [perl #40722], which requested
that the stub routine dirname in languages/tcl/runtime/builtin/file.pir
be implemented, Nuno Carvalho remarked that it had been implemented in
r16967. Nuno felt that some Windows testing was needed.
In ticket [perl #41496], Paul Cochrane noted that the profiling
options in config/init/defaults.pm should get their own step in the
configuration process.
Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #41497] to request that the
profiling options in config/init/defaults.pm be marked as being specific
to gcc.
In ticket [perl #41498], Jerry Gay noted that CPAN does not like
Parrot's Configure.pl because it expects a Makefile.PL. He suggested
adding a makefile which will convert arguments to the form expected by
Configure.pl and then run Configure.pl. The ticket was resolved in
r17032.
Paul Cochrane would like the architecture-settings compiler options in
config/init/defaults.pm to be made generic rather than gcc-specific.
The request was made in ticket [perl #41499].
Ticket [perl #41500] contained a request by Paul Cochrane. He
wanted the lib install path in config/init/defaults.pm to be
set correctly for 32- and 64-bit architectures.
Aldo Calpini reported success at building parrot for the
PocketPC. Some additional fixes are still needed, but the biggest
problem is that Parrot should be used to generate .pbc files but
the directory structure isn't available. Aldo asked how to proceed.
Joshua Isom replied that it should be possible to run most PIR files and pbc files, although it would be best to generate them on a platform with the same endian.
Patrick R. Michaud and Jesse Vincent congratulated Aldo on the progress to date.
The thread 'Parrot on PDA - work in progress' was a duplicate and contained one of the responses.
Aldo Calpini created ticket [perl #41502]. It contains a patch
to add a final \n to a few files. The changes are needed to port
Parrot to the PocketPC, because the cegcc compiler won't output the
last line unless there is a terminating newline.
Klaas-Jan Stol asked what the result was of the previous discussion
on the topic of whether PAST-pm will be able to handle PIR's requirements
for a top-level construction with an include statement. Patrick R. Michaud
replied that he expected either a PAST::CompUnit node type or the
blocktype attribute on PAST::Block to get a compunit setting.
Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41508]. He found an error when trying to build with GMP on OSX Intel. Later he was able to supply more information, which showed that the problem was due to his expectations.
Ticket [perl #41511] was started by chromatic. He described a problem involving the difference in layout between a Sub PMC and a MultiSub PMC. Matt Diephouse requested a sample of the code so that he could take a look at the problem. chromatic added a todo test in r17034.
Nicholas Clark reminded people that it is time to begin thinking of good Google Summer of Code projects. Applications will be accepted in March. More information is available.
A commit by Allison Randal gave the HLLCompiler the ability to add new compilation stages.
Nicholas Clark asked what would happen if someone were to add a stage with the same name as an existing stage. Allison replied that it would be added twice, as it was possible that someone might wish to repeat stages such as 'optimizetree' or 'displaybenchmarks' after each transformation.
Nicholas realized, after studying the PIR, that there is no ambiguity as to which stage is meant, as "all of them" are added. He thought that there should be a test for it. Allison added tests in r17027.
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Thank you to everyone who has pointed out mistakes and offered suggestions for improving this series. Comments on this summary can be sent to Ann Barcomb, kudra@domaintje.com.
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"> Errrr ... I'm the one who needs the tutorial, not the one to write it.
"That makes you a prime person to capture the questions it needs to answer! You can't evade the Responsibility Ponies that easily."
-- chromatic, responding to James E Keenan in 'What Skills Do We Need to Finish Parrot?'
A commit by Larry Wall changed categories to allow multiple dispatch via the longest-token rule.
A commit by Larry Wall added Q// as a quoting form and removed qn//.
This commit by Larry Wall affected S04, S05, S06 and S12. It unified proto processing to implicitly allow re-declarations within a scope. It works on most declarators, including regex, token, rule and variables.
Multiple my declarations now issue a warning, which may be
suppressed with a proto declaration of the variable. The multi
keyword is optional in a proto scope, and the unique keyword
"undoes" an outer proto.
Larry Wall decided to explain what was driving the recent synopsis changes. For some time, he has been working on a Perl 6 grammar written in Perl 6; a snaphot is available. Audrey Tang noted that Pugs can parse it, but it still needs to be made to run, and run fast.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch with an updated version of pirgrammar.pod
and pirgrammar.html which contains examples for most constructs. The
documents are still being worked on.
Later, in '[PATCH] update pirgrammar.pod (replaces patch 2/4/2007)', he submitted an updated version.
These triggered some discussion in the thread '[PATCH] Updates for languages/PIR/docs/pirgrammar.pod'.
Klaas-Jan Stol remarked that some Parrot calling conventions are unclear. He made a list of the order in which checks are done, as far as he can tell, and asked if it was correct and if cases were missing.
Last week, James E Keenan asked what code remains to be written in Parrot. Allison Randal replied that IO, Events, Threads, Compiler tools interface, Object support and Exceptions need the most work. James then asked about resources for learning PIR. chromatic offered suggestions.
This week, Allison Randal replied that to date, she hadn't been able to get
the relevant sections of "Parrot Essentials" released, and proposed
that James create a PIR tutorial. She suggested docs/imcc/syntax.pod
as an introduction. Klaas-Jan Stol mentioned that he'd been working on
languages/PIR/docs/pirgrammar.pod.
James said that he needed a tutorial, and therefore wasn't suited to
write one. chromatic disagreed, stating that inexperience left James
in the perfect position to know what questions needed to be answered.
Joshua Isom seconded, suggesting that James could start a FAQ by creating
at least the questions. Bernhard Schmalhofer suggested adding questions
to docs/imcc/imcfaq.pod.
It turned out that Dzema Dmitriy is working on a PIR tutorial to accompany a PIR bundle for Texmate.
In ticket [perl #41453], James Keenan reported a failure with a
text in t/pmc/object-meths.t. Allison Randal identified it as stemming
from r16783, and thought that o = new 'MyClass', $P0 should call
init_pmc rather than init, even if $P0 is null. She asked
Leopold Toetsch if the choice between init and init_pmc should be
based upon the content of the argument. Leopold replied that that was
not his intention; there should be just one init :vtable which is called,
according to PDD03 calling conventions.
Allison summarized the situation as a feature request which had been submitted as a failing test. She changed the test to reflect the current situation (r17026) and submitted the feature request in ticket [perl #41528].
Allison Randal worked with Sam Vilain on a prototype object model
written in PIR. She checked it in to compilers/smop. The next
step is to implement the prototype at the PMC level, and incorporate
much of the functionality of src/objects.c.
Kevin Te replied that he had just started to port Class::MOP to
PMCs, and would be glad to help with this port as well.
Sam Vilain noted, in ticket [perl #41454], that inherited method dispatch was only tested with a simple parent/child class. In his attached patch, there are tests for three classes in a straight line, as well as a 4-class diamond inheritance.
James Keenan submitted ticket [perl #41455]. It contained several patches, for test files and related libraries. They were added to the trunk as r17061 after passing on Darwin and Win32. Later they were confirmed to also work on Linux.
In ticket [perl #41456], Sam Vilain submitted a test which checks
that if an inheritance tree is created with addparent, it performs
just like one made with subclass.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch for pirgrammar.pod and
pirgrammar.html in '[PATCH] Update pirgrammar.pod'.
chromatic remarked that he did not like keeping HTML in the repository,
and wondered if it could be automatically generated because, unlike
other generated files, it does not require flex and bison to
produce it.
Klaas-Jan wondered if pod2html was available for all platforms where
Perl can run. He thought it could be incorporated in the make procedure
if that were the case. chromatic replied that it had been core since at
least 5.8.0.
Hakim Cassimally replied to [Aldo Calpini's post]{http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.perl.perl6.internals/10966) and expressed an interest in porting to the Nokia N800.
Jerry Gay replied that he'd love to see Parrot ported to the N800 and suggested a way to start on it.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a number of patches for languages/PIR and
docs/imcc/syntax.pod:
One patch, '[PATCH] Update pirgrammar.pod', also sparked some discussion.
Earlier, Paul Cochrane submitted ticket [perl #40706] where he
noted that languages/tcl/src/builtin/close.pir is only a stub..
Nuno Carvalho reported that a first implementation had been committed
in r16933. There is still some discussion on how to best implement it
for Tcl.
Gabor Szabo reported a 404 error when attempting to download a Win32 binary of Pugs and Parrot. Audrey Tang suggested a different URL. David Vergin noted that the page Audrey offered linked to a build from November 2006 and asked if there was a newer build available.
Gilbert R. Röhrbein
wanted to reorder an array so that the elements are randomly ordered.
He noted a problem with delete which he wasn't able to describe, except
for stating that it was linked to gather. The code was included.
Moritz Lenz reported that the current (r15185) revision of Pugs
fails to compile on Debian when dpkg-buildpackage is used because
the '10smoke' patch cannot be applied.
This summary was prepared using Mail::Summary::Tools, available on CPAN.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
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": This mornings up date proposed
"Now the da rn spam fi1ters are chang.ng my spelling to look like sp*m. Yeah, that's the 4icket... :)"
-- Larry Wall, in 'Enhancing array indices'
A commit from Larry Wall reorganized S03. This led Nicholas Clark to
comment that the sequencing operator is not defined. He had a few other
notes about the commit. John Macdonald responded to Nicholas's question "Is
it defined that $a + $b evaluates the arguments in any particular order?"
by stating that in C, it is deliberately left undefined to allow the code
generator more flexibility. Aaron Crane also spoke up, further explaining
how C functions.
In this commit, Larry Wall clarified gather and take. Gaal Yahas
wanted to know what it means for take to be evaluated in void context.
He included some example code and asked what the result would be.
Larry Wall applied some clarifications which were suggested by Gaal Yahas.
Gaal, however, had some more questions. This concerned gather in S04.
These were addressed in Larry's next commit.
Larry Wall replied to a comment by TSa in another thread, wherein
TSa wondered if ++ and -- coerce Nums to Ints. Larry stated that
since a Str remains a Str in a similar situation, the Num should also
retain its type. One exception that he could see would be that incrementing
an Undef would create an Int.
In thread 'Int-to-Num autocoercion', Larry expanded on how coercions are handled in functions. He said that Num to Int autocoercion is an explicit exception which is expected by Perl 5 programmers, and Str to Num (and the inverse) are also done automatically at times. Larry further explained that there had been numerous discussions on the subject, and the general feeling is that exotic types should not autocoerce unless a multi has been declared to handle the situation.
TSa made a reference to the long-running
'Numeric Semantics'
to discuss how auto-coercion would work with floor. Darren Duncan
replied that a floor would return an Int by definition, so that it
would in fact be a way of explicitly converting.
Larry Wall made a commit which disabled negative subscript 'dwimmery' for
shaped arrays, which can now take + and - operators. He then wondered
if a multidimensional Whatever (**) would mean the same thing in "whatever"
dimensions.
David Green noted that the subject of ordinals had come up some time ago, and quoted a message from Larry dating back to 2004. He added his thoughts to the subject as well.
Blair Sutton felt that Perl 6 should stick with 0 as the first element of a list to avoid alienating programmers from most other languages. He thought that it could be adjusted by a user-defined Parrot grammar for those who didn't like the traditional starting value, although he had personally never required that feature.
Smylers was of
the opinion that a pragma is overkill, and a global variable would be
sufficient. Jonathan Scott Duff responded that a pragma would be useful
to Pascal or Fortran programmers, and therefore it would be handy to have
a pragma. Rafael Garcia-Suarez added that $[ is a pragma in Perl 5.
Larry Wall made a commit concerning *+ versus *- in subscripts.
TSa replied that the distinction between the cases would be that they
dispatch to different functions: * to postcircumfix, *+ to
infix:<+> and *- to infix:<->. TSa asked some questions based
upon this observation.
Larry responded that he did not want Whatever to package the array.
He felt that in TSa's example, it would be necessary to dispatch to
Whatever and let the Whatever code extract relevant information relating
to *. TSa requested further information.
Jonathan Lang wondered if it would be possible to get a single-character
symbol which could be used in an array index to refer to its shape, for
example something like @x[*.head]. Larry Wall replied that a recent
suggestion was to use a syntax like @x[*+0]. There was further
discussion on syntax possibilities, with Jonathan, Darren Duncan and
TSa joining the thread. Darren proposed getting rid of negative
subscripts and using only terms like @foo[*.head], which he felt
had the advantage of being more consistent (for shaped and unshaped
arrays), and easier to learn.
Although he admitted that the month of Nob is cute, Larry Wall nevertheless changed S01's last modified date to Nov. In a followup commit, Larry changed the date to Jan.
Larry Wall made a commit to allow colon pair syntax for a method-like
sort of filetest. Smylers liked the changes, but was concerned about
filename.TEST because there are only so many permutations of the word
available for testing frameworks. Larry listed a host of other possible
names, and was leaning toward STATUS.
Alek Storm submitted a patch as ticket [perl #41364]. The
patch allows object vtable method overrides for a number routines,
such as find_method and get_attr. He also wondered if the
double-underscore method of overriding could be deprecated now
that there is the :vtable flag. Patrick R. Michaud responded
that the deprecation cannot take place until ticket
[perl #40626] is resolved.
Jerry Gay mentioned that he had written tests for the ParrotIO object, which he included as a patch. He also had some questions about PDD 22. Allison Randal answered the questions.
Aldo Calpini wrote of an interest in porting Parrot to the PocketPC. CeGCC is a Windows port of gcc which produces ARM executable code. The first attempt at porting went well. A report of the procedure was included in the post.
In ticket [perl #41371], Jerry Gay noted that in r16834 he had
committed docs/roles_responsibilities.pod. He asked project members
to review it before the 0.4.9 release.
Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41373] to request a test to replace the ones marked 'todo' which relied on Perl 5 PMCs.
Ticket [perl #41374], initiated by Will Coleda, requested tests for MMD which don't rely on Perl PMCs.
Klaas-Jan Stol remarked that he was trying to set up a test harness for
PIR. It appeared that the module PIR.pm was not used, and he was
unable to find documents on how to set it up. He offered to patch the
compiler FAQ once someone explains it to him.
Will Coleda explained that the problem was with the name of the language,
with 'PIR' being reserved for internal testing. Therefore either
lib/Parrot/Test.pm would require modification, or the language should
be renamed, for instance to 'PIR_PGE'. With Will's advice Klaas-Jan
was able to get it working.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch to improve PIR. It includes a test suite, and corrections to several other files. Later, in '[PATCH] languages/PIR tests', and '[PATCH] languages/PIR more testing and fixing', he posted additional tests and corrections. Later there was also '[PATCH] PIR updates', which was applied as r16892.
James E Keenan asked some questions with the intention of determining what part of Parrot he should focus on and try to encourage others to look at. He asked what code remains to be written before an alpha release can be made, and what skills are needed to produce that code.
Allison Randal replied that the systems needing the most work are: IO, Events, Threads, Compiler tools interface, Object support, and Exceptions. She felt people with C skills are useful, as are people with general experience in dynamic languages.
James then asked what the learning curve is for PIR. chromatic answered that the 'Parrot Essentials' book is still useful, although it is missing some of the more advanced features. He thought that it might be worth asking O'Reilly if the tutorial section could be expanded into public documentation, as there's currently no tutorial on PIR.
James Keenan submitted a patch to the roles and responsibilities file. It corrected punctuation errors and was applied as r16850. The patch was ticket [perl #41380].
Klaas-Jan Stol wondered if PASM registers are still needed, except for backwards compatibility, now that there are PIR registers. Leopold Toetsch replied that PASM registers are physically allocated in the Parrot virtual machine, whereas PIR registers are virtual registers. Both types are needed.
Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41386] to express his opinion
that MANIFEST should not be part of the repository. He pointed
out that the purpose of this file is to make sure that the general
release isn't missing any files, something you already know to be
true when you are working with a repository. He suggested creating
it when the release is generated.
Allison Randal disagreed. She believes that the purpose of a MANIFEST
is to tell you which files should be included in a distribution. She
thought MANIFEST.skip, on the other hand, could be generated from
the svn:ignore keyword before the distribution is created.
In ticket [perl #41387], Paul Cochrane reported that the new
Parrot::Distribution module was finding some files which weren't
actually Perl language files. This was later resolved by chromatic
in r17069.
In ticket [perl #41388], Paul Cochrane reported that the new
Parrot::Distribution module is not exempting external Perl modules
such as Pod::Simple from its coding standards check.
chromatic included a quick Perl program which writes a C program which makes a self-contained executable for a Parrot program. He thought that it was fairly cross-platform compatible, although there could be an issue with big-endian processors.
chromatic reported a failure with the buildtools tests following a make
realclean and a Configure. James E Keenan responded that he's experienced
it infrequently and thinks that it is a poorly-designed test rather than
a real failure. There was a brief discussion on how to improve the
test, with James suggesting that perhaps someone who was involved
with the original development of pmc2c.pl could explain what is
happening in the DO_A_DUMP loop.
Klaas-Jan Stol gave a brief history of how IMCC started, noting that it was eventually merged with Parrot as its parser, and since that time there have been several additions. He wondered if it is still the case that every PIR construct also has a PASM form, and if every PIR construct can be directly translated to PASM. Allison Randal replied that that was the ideal situation, but in practice many tests are written in PIR, so there may not be complete coverage for the PASM syntax versions.
A patch by Klaas-Jan Stol contains a correction to make parrot --version
give a copyright range of '2001-2007' instead of '2001-2006'.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a script which checks all files for the last changed date and updates the copyright notice in the file. The second is a test which finds files which have out-of-date copyright notices. chromatic replied that he had a couple of ideas for the script and would take a look at them soon.
Gabriele Renzi wanted to know why take inside of a gather structure
returns undef instead of a return value. Carl Mäsak
had been wondering the same thing. Larry Wall couldn't remember
why it hadn't been added to the specification, and put it in S04.
This summary was prepared using Mail::Summary::Tools, available on CPAN.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
Thank you to everyone who has pointed out mistakes and offered suggestions for improving this series. Comments on this summary can be sent to Ann Barcomb, kudra@domaintje.com.
This summary can be found in the following places:
As seen on #perl6:
<audreyt> re MO hacking, will do that as soon as disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED). goes away.
<audreyt> need to spend ~2hr running ddrescue
<putter> re disk, eep
<audreyt> since it's creeped into ~/.svk/ area and hence interfere with hacking
<putter> lol
<putter> (image of audreyt watching disk progressively die, but thinking "no, it hasn't hit /svk yet, so it's not important", and goes back to hacking...;)
I would like to simply remark that putter++'s imagination was... entirely correct. ;-)
"Take the longest token, lie down and if the unease persists, write some code..."
-- Brad Bowman, in 'DFA/NFA context is non-local'
Previously on this thread, Blair Sutton asked if Perl 6 would be able to do RAII. He cited some articles which expressed the view that it was not possible in Python due to the fact that garbage collection does not offer deterministic finalization. This led to the question of whether Perl 6 would suffer from the same problem due to Parrot's style of garbage collection.
Larry Wall replied that deterministic reference counting was only one way to provide transactional security and timely destruction. He assured Blair that Perl 6 has ways to let you not care about some dependencies, while paying attention to others.
Blair appreciated Larry's explanation, and admitted to relying on the deterministic nature of C++, and using RAII to manage locks between threads and tear apart sockets cleanly. He asked for an example of Perl 6 offering the capability to execute code once every reference to an object has been removed. Luke Palmer replied that the LEAVE closure trait was a general method for addressing this.
This week, Blair posted a script in Perl 5 with a multi-threaded RAII idiom. Blair asked if the LEAVE closure trait takes the previous role of P5's DESTROY or if it will always be executed when one falls out of scope.
Last week, the subthread was further expanded, with TSa suggesting that all rounding functions such as floor, round and trunc take an optional second argument which defines the jump size. TSa also proposed a number of division function pairs, such as fdiv and fmod for flooring division and modulus, or tdiv and tmod for truncating division and modulus. Smylers felt that this would introduce far too many functions in to the Perl core, given that few people would use them. Smylers felt that it was more appropriate to have them as modules. Jonathan Lang added that it was unlikely anyone would need multiple definitions of division and modulus at any given time, so modules made sense. The only question he saw was which definition was default, the mathematically elegant one or the industry standard one.
The main thread was revived when TSa replied to Luke Palmer's question of whether 1 is different from 1.0. TSa wanted 1 to be an Int and 1.0 to be a Num. There was some discussion with Jonathan Lang over the relationship between Int and Num, specifically which one does the other.
This week, Larry Wall put his foot down and stated that the default / operator
is not going to do integer division and that this is not negotiable. Later in
the thread, Larry said that for various practical reasons, he didn't think
that Int can be treated as a subset of Num. He agreed that 1.0 == 1 !===
1.0.
Larry's messages generated praise from Smylers, but TSa was not satisfied. However, he did not receive a noteworthy response this week.
This commit message by Larry Wall logged the following: "Tweak | to provide
longest-token instead of short-circuit semantics. Now use || for old
short-circuit semantics!" In a follow-up message, Larry elaborated:
This checking majorly changes the semantics of | within regex to support
required longest-token matching semantics rather than left-to-right matching.
It will enable us to write parsers more consistently, and it also opens up
normal regexes to better optimization via tries and such. You can now use ||
for the old | semantics, which is majorly consistent with how | and ||
work outside of regexen.
Patrick Michaud asked if a similar situation would arise for & versus &&.
Larry answered that, for reasons of consistency, that would indeed be the
case.
After reading that binary operators may be declared as commutative, Dave Whipp asked if this is restricted to only binary operators, or if he could tag any function/method with the trait. After a brief discussion, Larry replied that he had decided "is commutative" must die of ill-definedness. See instead the recent S13 change to support multiple signatures on a single body.
This commit, by Larry Wall, changes how regular expressions are analyzed. They are seen as pattern/action pairs and grammars as collections of those pairs. In addition 'token' is defined more rigorously.
Steve Lukas reminded people of a proposal from September which involved a change on S04 and linked to an earlier edition of this summary to describe the conclusions which had been reached. He requested that the changes be made. Carl Mäsak added that he also considered this to be an important issue. He wanted to see a warning when a lexical is declared twice in the same scope.
Dave Mitchell and Smylers clarified how it works in Perl 5 (it's possible, but generates a warning).
Brad Bowman expressed his concern about the context dependence of DFA prefix mode. He felt this might be because he hadn't yet digested the new rules completely.
Larry Wall asked for some advice with a missing generalization that
he hadn't been able to work out yet. Given that zip
and each produce similar results, he wondered what is the use
of two functions which do almost the same thing. This led him to
believe that zip should return something different and let the
context determine whether the result should be flattened. This
led to musings on a default smooth and an optional chunky, and a
question on whether chunky should be the default when it makes more
sense. He suggested various options.
Darren Duncan thought that the Perl 5 approach of default 'smooth'
with optional 'chunking' was appropriate. As an example he offered
the smooth map { $_, $_ * 10 }, 1..3 versus map {[$_, $_ * 10]}, 1..3.
Larry replied that this was one function where the approach was possible,
but that Perl 5 has many places where it fails to scale well to a
multi-programmer team.
Ruud H.G. van Tol believed that it looked like a 'multiple faces' domain. He sees the dimensionally structured data as a living entity which should give different representations depending upon the requirements. As an example, he cited a meal, a recipe and a shopping list, adding that his preference was for the shopping list to be ordered by where things are found in the store. Brad Bowman suggested that the dimensional information should be retained, but that it might not need to be returned.
Ben Morrow proposed [[]] as a nice visual way to indicate that
a list should be built. Blair Sutton listed several possible syntax
options. Austin Frank joined in, offering the outverse of [;],
namely ];[.
Joe Gottman wanted to know if map on a multislice performs deep or shallow iteration. He wanted to know what the default iteration level was and how to override it. Dr. Ruud added that there's also the option of depth first or width first.
Earlier,
in ticket [perl #41185], James Keenan reported a problem with a
failing test in shootout.t on Mac OSX.
This week he reported that tests had passed for several weeks, but had
recently started to fail again. He included the output of make test.
As of February 6th, the test was still failing on Darwin.
Earlier,
Jerry Gay complained that the perlcritic coding standards test was using
resources, and asked in ticket [perl #41230] if someone
could look in to this problem. Paul Cochrane reported that he thought
there was a memory issue relating to critique() and that the memory
was only freed up when the tests for a given policy are complete. Paul
elaborated on what what he had attempted to address the issue.
This week Jerry Gay congratulated Jeffrey Thalhammer on version 1.01 of Perl::Critic, which solved the memory issue.
In ticket [perl #41267], Jerry Gay announced that the clip directory
had been renamed to draft.
In ticket [perl #41280], Allison Randal quoted Patrick Michaud from IRC. Patrick explained that Larry Wall's most recent change to S05 would require adding the ability to attach methods to subs.
Bram Geron included a patch in ticket [perl #32667] which adds new
syntax to docs/imcc/syntax.pod and fixes some typos. It also references
where flags are explained. It was applied as r16678.
Isaac Freeman explained that he needs an embedding interface which allows more control over the interpreter and cited some examples of control he required. He asked specifically about the ability to inspect and modify namespaces. chromatic pointed him to PDD 21, which is not completely implemented.
Jerry Gay announced that the repository was now open for commits again, following the recent Parrot release.
Allison Randal created a ticket ([perl #41287]) with a patch to fix typos in the release announcement for 0.4.8. Will Coleda applied it.
In ticket [perl #41291], Matt Diephouse included an example piece of code demonstrating the problem. Leopold Toetsch noted that a NULL PMC was never actually specced, but that he did consider it like a NULL pointer in C. He felt it was debatable whether the use Matt demonstrated should be allowed.
In ticket [perl #41292], James Bence submitted a patch to make the
test t/codingstd/trailing_space.t pass. He felt it would be best to
make a utility program which would eliminate trailing spaces.
Paul Cochrane asked which version of Parrot James was using, as the files involved should be marked as exempt because they are automatically generated. In r16702 the tests pass even without the patch.
Will Coleda announced that he had two issues with the new Tcl implementation:
speed and the implementation of trace. After noting that there is a
way to set traces for Parrot subroutines, he requested the ability to
declare hooks to call pre- and post sub invocations. Ideally these could
be declared at compile time. He offered to write more complete specifications
if the idea was interesting to others.
Allison Randal offered a few comments and requested the detailed proposal. Jerry Gay advised looking at Perl 5's Hook::LexWrap. Klaas-Jan Stol offered a suggestion which would leave the original subroutine untouched.
James Keenan reported a failing make test. This was ticket
[perl #41293].
François Perrad stated that in Lua, a metamethod __call is required.
He included some code demonstrating what he would like to do, and
noted that the code and some todo tests had been added.
Allison Randal created ticket [perl #41310]. She reported that PMC stubs
which are generated with tools/dev/gen_class.pl terminate the compilation
the first time miniparrot is run because the new stub overrides the
namespace method. She suggested ways in which this might be solved.
In ticket [perl #41312], Will Coleda pointed out several outdated facets of the FAQ and requested that they be fixed.
In ticket [perl #41317], Jerry Gay included a patch of a document classifying Parrot component and interface stability. He requested comments. Allison Randal approved of the document.
Ticket [perl #41320] contained Kay-Uwe Huell's patch with a
rename function. It was applied as r16771.
Jerry Gay made a ticket ([perl #41323]) where he noted that any
instances of theINTERP should be spelled as interp. Nuno
Carvalho submitted a patch, which was applied as r16789. Jerry
Gay was able to confirm that it worked for Win32 in addition to Linux.
Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to remove // comments, which were
giving problems with his compiler. See ticket [perl #41324] for
more information.
Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to allow Parrot to compile on his old Sun C compiler. He put it in ticket [perl #41325].
In ticket [perl #41326], Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to work around an obscure bug in Sun's WorkShop Compilers 4.2.
Jerry Gay reported some warnings when compiling src/pmc/pmethod.c
in ticket [perl #41328]. James Keenan explained the origin of
the code in question, and advised moving the code to a branch until
tests prove it suitable for trunk.
James Keenan noted, in ticket [perl #41329], that coding standards
tests break some tests in t/tools/pmc2cutils. He believed that it
happened in r16751, when code was changed to conform with the standards
but wasn't run against the tests and submitted a patch to correct
the problem. Paul Cochrane explained that he had run the tests, but
that he hadn't done enough, and apologized.
In ticket [perl #41331], Will Coleda referenced an earlier thread ([perl #41329] [BUG]: Imposition of coding standards breaks tests in t/tools/pmc2cutils/ ) which mentioned that some tests failed as a result of coding standards being applied. Several Tcl tests were failing. They were fixed by r16774.
Leopold Toetsch noted that some changes not too long before the
release had broken pg.t. He found the problem in the object
constructor, and mentioned that he'd made several attempts to unify
object construction but that it wasn't very successful.
Matt Diephouse explained that he had made the change with Allison Randal's approval, to eliminate differences between PMCs and objects. Leopold replied that he thought the differences were confusing but that they still were. He linked to his proposal for method calling.
Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch for PIR using PGE. Jerry Gay applied it (with minor changes) as of r16831.
Kay-Uwe Huell created ticket [perl #41353]. Included was a patch
to extend the open function.
Jerry Gay announced the release of Parrot 0.4.8, "Eponymous".
Jarkko Hietaniemi questioned whether there was in fact extended support for Tru64, as he had only reported problems for subsystems like PGE. chromatic offered Jarkko commit access, but Jarkko declined.
Matt Diephouse volunteered to work on Tru64 if someone could give him access to a system. Nicholas Clark replied that HP gave access to a number of test systems, but not Tru64. Jarkko grumbled about HP's restriction. Unfortunately he was not able to provide a developer with Tru64 access. He thought that perhaps development on any 64-bit platform would already improve Parrot.
This summary was prepared using Mail::Summary::Tools, available on CPAN.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
Thank you to everyone who has pointed out mistakes and offered suggestions for improving this series. Comments on this summary can be sent to Ann Barcomb, kudra@domaintje.com.
This summary can be found in the following places:
For a long time now, Pugs embeds a Perl 5 runtime alongside its GHC runtime, providing seamless support for CPAN modules, including XS ones like DBI:
use perl5:DBI;
my $dbh = DBI.connect('dbi:SQLite:test.db');
$dbh.disconnect;
In addition to explicit use, there are several less well-known places where Pugs implicitly delegates to the Perl 5 runtime.
For example, today jisom++ asked on #perl6 about Pugs's counterpart to Perl 5's -T operator, i.e. testing if a file looks like plain text). Syntactically, filetest operators in Perl 6 are done via smartmatches against pair literals:
say "text file" if 'README'~~:T;
given 'README' { when :T { say "text file" } }
Semantically, because the heuristics for :T is rather hard to duplicate, we simply delegate to the Perl 5 runtime:
-- Pugs.Prim.FileTest:53
evalPerl5 ("sub { -" ++ testOp ++ " $_[0] }")
Another example is named Unicode charaters in double-quoted string literals:
say "\c[BLACK SMILING FACE]"; # ☻
Again, we simply delegate to charnames.pm in the Perl 5 runtime:
-- Pugs.Parser.Charnames:17
evalPerl5 ("use utf8; use charnames ':full'; ord(qq[\\N{"++name++"}])")
This is certainly a win -- the alternative way involves shipping the entire UnicodeData.txt with Pugs, which would be no fun at all.
The same principle applies to the crypt built-in function, which has this one-line implementation that simply calls the Perl 5 function with the same name:
-- Pugs.Prim:1083
op2 "crypt" = \x y -> opPerl5 "crypt" [x, y]
As moritz++ remarked on #perl6, such pass-through measures is a fine example of laziness, a virtue recognized by Perl folks and Haskell folks alike. Yay for laziness!
During the past couple months, #perl6 has revamped several pugscode.org services:
darcs get --partial http://darcs.pugscode.org/ should be much faster from now on.
All services above runs on feather.perl6.nl, the Perl 6 community development server donated and tirelessly maintained by the most excellent Juerd++. Many kudos!
On a more personal note, I was finally discharged from the hospital today. There will be a follow-up check in 3 days; if all goes well, that'll be the end of this rather unfortunate episode. Yay!
Initially, I thought it was typical burn-out. Between the intense Brazil hackathon (with fglock++, incrementally-built bootstrapping compilers; with cmarcelo++, metaobjects in Haskell for 6.28.0) and moving to a new residence, a few weeks of rest seemed natural.
As the sudden drowsiness and strange non-motivation worsened, I thought it's some kind of mental block, and focused on Jifty instead.
But when external emergencies demanded my attention, all focus was suddenly lost, replaced by massive panic and self-doubt, leading to e.g., the cancellation of my POPL trip just before boarding.
At last, nine days ago, I was hospitalized at the brink of liver failure. Months of intellectualization and analysis was proved immaterial, as there is one very simple explanation: Acute Hepatitis B. The symptoms quickly ceased, thanks to lamivudine, and I expect to be discharged tomorrow, with 95%+ chance of full (immune, non-carrier) recovery.
With the nearest $job/conference safely booked at one month away, I've put various unpleasantries behind me, started populating the new dev.pugscode.org workspace, and resumed Pugs hacking (aiming for a March release of the much-delayed 6.28.0).
So... Stay tuned for backblogs on the progress happened during my absence. Viva la vie! ☺
