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I heard a rumour on the London.pm mailing list week. Apparently the Perl 6 Summaries are no longer being published. As I'm sure you can imagine, it came as something of a surprise to me.
This week has been all about Parrot, Leo's got the new lexical scheme, calling conventions and exception handlers working and made Parrot stricter about arguments. The end of the week saw the release of 'Luthor', version 0.4.0 of Parrot. Read on for more details...
Um... one post in perl6-compiler this week. And that was crossposted to perl6-language. And because it got posted at the end of the week, none of the actual discussion occurred this week.
Moving swiftly on...
Much more going on here as everyone rushed towards the release of Parrot 0.4.0 "Luthor" at the end of the week.
As I predicted last week, Leo's brain dump about exception handling got discussed this week. It was well liked, and after a small bit of sugar was sprinkled on to make ParTCL's life a little easier (and possibly unsprinkled later) all manner of things were well.
Chip posted a clarification of his comments on what data could and couldn't be hung off a Sub object at runtime. Let's be reentrant people.
Will Coleda announced that ParTCL is now working with the new lexically lovely Parrot calling conventions. There was much rejoicing.
Leo showed the love for chromatic's shiny pure parrot implementation of Test::More. So the patch was applied.
Leo announced the scratchpad's impending doom and outlined the planned change for comment. Nobody commented, and the changes went in.
Quick quiz: where would you expect to find tests in the parrot distribution? How about generated source files?
Jerry Gay proposed a reorganization to make things a little more lovely.
The consensus seemed to be that a reorg along Jerry's lines wouldn't be a bad idea, but Chip pointed out that, whatever gets done it should be done 'cautiously so as to minimize unpleasantness'. So Jerry is proceeding cautiously, starting with a host of new TODO tickets in RT.
= confusion: ':=' for aliasingThere are those of us who are wondering why this one took so long...
Chip proposed that people start to spell aliasing as := and assignment as
=. I think it's a really good idea, but then I don't have a large amount of
PIR code to maintain so what do I know. Some other folks weren't so sure, but
Chip is not to be denied. Discussion then span off into what language to write
the automagical translator in.
I believe this may involve writing it in PIR then converting it to PIL, which would be converted to Perl 5 using pugs and then Larry's Perl 5 to Perl 5 project could be used to convert it to XML, which could then be modified using XSLT and converted back into PIR using some scary voodoo magic.
Or they could just write it in Perl 5. Prosaic, but possible right now.
Chip announced that he'd put up another revision of PDD03 on Parrot calling
conventions. Most of the changes are simple clarifications and flag renaming,
but he's also proposing a new READONLY flag for get_params to make it
easy to support the default Perl 6 argument mode. Response was muted, but
favourable.
It's been mandated for ages that Parrot should throw an exception when functions get called with the wrong number of arguments. It's always been one of those things that will be implemented 'some day'. Well this week had a someday in it as Leo made parrot do what it's supposed to do. And broke PGE for a while...
Jonathan Sillito is a class act. He didn't just ask a bunch of questions about the new PDD20 on lexical variables, he promised to take the answers he received and use them to patch PDD20 to make things clearer. Spurred on by this promise, Chip was unstinting in his answers and clarifications of them. Which is nice.
Allison Randal used Snarks, Boojums and Thingies to demonstrate a possible problem with the way Parrots local variable and method namespaces overlap. Leo pointed out that this can sometimes be useful. So, for the time being, Parrot continues as is in this area. If you go getting the bowsprit and the rudder mixed up, it's your own silly fault.
After "many months and lots of work," Matt Diephouse returned from the mountain top bearing a couple of stone tablets. One was labelled 'Namespace Spec' and the other '[Draft]'. Muttering dark incantations about giving a discussion eyes, he laid out their contents and asked for comments. And low, there were comments in abundance. I would attempt to summarize both the spec and the ensuing discussion but, alas, the margin here is narrow and my time is short. Suffice it to say that if namespaces are your bag, you should read this thread.
Okay, who else has an image of two of those transformer robot things from the Renault Megane advert punching each others' lights out?
Ahem.
I'm afraid I didn't quite understand Fran\xE7ois Perrad's question about maps and autoboxing. Luckily Roger Browne and Leo did.
Jerry Gay worried that Punie is using way too much memory, running out of the stuff on his 512Mb machine. He wondered if it was a bug or to be expected. Luke thought it might be an issue with the algorithm used in the attribute grammar implementation which is somewhat less than abstemious with memory. Nick Glencross noted that, after he'd done a nuke of the distribution and rechecked it out, the problem seemed to go away. So, it's either fixed, or there was something odd going on somewhere.
Leo announced the usual freezes and parrot proceeded smoothly down the road to release. After the release he discussed goals for the next release and asked for comments.
A quiet week here too.
Rob Kinyon has read slides on CAPerl and had some thoughts about how to build the idea into Perl 6. Larry and Yuval Kogman commented on it.
It's not exactly Monday today is it? Well, I could lie and claim that I was waiting for the Perl Foundation blog to be announced before I posted the summary, but that would be Wrong. Instead I shall claim (with some justification) that there's an awful lot of things that need sorting out when you're moving house, and they take far longer than you expect.
My ankle and shin are progressing nicely, thanks for asking, and there has been a good deal less random swearing in the Cawley household this week.
blog.perlfoundation.org -- The Perl Foundation blog
geeksunite.org -- Chip still needs help.
If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
donate.perlfoundation.org -- The Perl Foundation
dev.perl.org -- Perl 6 Development site
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