kudra's Journal

Research subjects wanted

kudra — 2009-07-28T10:48:58+00:00

As I mentioned in my last post (about a year ago!), I have gone back to school where I am studying for an MSc in International Business. I am now working on my thesis, which looks at free/libre and open source businesses. I am looking for people who are willing to participate in the research. Please refer to http://ann.barcomb.org for more details about the research. Feel free to pass this on/repost this--the more people that know about it the better chance I have of finding people to interview.

I am still alive

kudra — 2008-06-26T02:34:16+00:00

About a year ago, burned out from programming, I decided to go to grad school for an MBA. One very busy year into the programme, I decided it wasn't for me and dropped out. Right now I'm enjoying the weather, reading a lot, and trying to write some articles with one of the teachers at the school. In the autumn, I'm going to start a new master's programme (MSc in International Business with a focus on tech). After that I'll either look for work or pursue a PhD. I hope that the burnout will wear off soon, and I'll at least start pursuing personal coding projects. I'm going to try to stay off IRC though; it's time-consuming crack.

Perl 6 summary, 08-14 Apr, 2007

kudra — 2007-04-22T07:15:54+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"The current pugs implementation is just translating to the old form underneath, so it's not surprising it's a bit off. That's the sort of thing that happens when the language designer gives the language implementor whiplash. However, I rather suspect the interpersonal metaphorical meaning was lost on the physicist/comic who decided that the 3rd derivative of position should be called 'jerk'. :)"

-- Larry Wall, in 'What should file test operators return?'

Language

Re: Synopsis 26

Earlier, Thom Boyer responded to Damian Conway's post from November which thanked people for offering feedback on the first draft. Thom said that he had been unable to find the XHTML version of S26 and wondered if it was available.

Jerry Gay replied that there wasn't a pod parser available yet. Damian responded with the requested file, and said he still hoped to finish the Pod6 parser but he wasn't sure when he would have time.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason asked if Damian could post the code he currently has, so that others could work on it.

This week, Damian responded by uploading Perl6::Perldoc to CPAN. Ævar and Damian worked to improve the test suite.

Does =$*ARGS work?

brian d foy is working on 'Learning Perl 6' and had some questions about for the I/O chapter. He saw that while(<>){...} became for=$*ARGS{...} but noted this didn't work in Pugs. He wondered if it was a documentation error or an implementation error.

Moritz Lenz mused about why it wasn't =@*ARGS but couldn't answer brian's question. brian replied that $*ARGS is a filehandle, not a list of files. David Vergin remarked that there was a typo in S28 and corrected it.

using <sp> space in character classes

Brad Bowman noted that S05 lists sp under named assertions but doesn't explicitly mention it in the character class section. He wondered if it could be used in that way. Larry Wall replied that it could be, but it needs to be generalized.

What should file test operators return?

brian d foy noted that file test operators return false or the filename, when he would have expected a true. He wanted to update S16 to clarify the situation. Later Larry Wall said he would attempt to clarify S03.

Moritz Lenz and Damian Conway had some suggestions for the syntax in brian's code. Juerd Waalboer and Larry Wall also joined the conversation on the subject of giving printf a boolean output template. They found it too specific.

Brandon S. Allbery noted that Pugs does not implemented the specification as it is documented. He thought junction types aren't completely ready.

John Macdonald and Mark J. Reed also contributed to the thread.

Parrot Porters

remove_method vtable?

Jonathan Worthington noted that PDD 15 describes both add and remove vtable methods for attributes, parents and roles, but only add_method exists for methods. He wondered if remove_method should also exist.

Allison Randal went ahead and added it, after a bit of internal debate.

[perl #42332] [TODO]: Eliminate t/tools/ops2pmutils/testlib/Capture.pm

Ticket [perl #42332], by James Keenan, asked for some subroutines to be moved into lib/Parrot. This was fixed in r18040.

[perl #42334] PGE compiler faults out "set_integer_keyed() not implemented in class 'Undef'"

In ticket [perl #42334], Jim McKim reported a fault when compiling an example grammar. Patrick R. Michaud replied that there was a problem with the cut operator not being applied to a particular term. He saw it as a request to improve the error message when a cut token is applied to a null term.

inspect and inspect_str from PIR

Jonathan Worthington reported that he had implemented the inspect_str and inspect vtable methods for the Class PMC. He had a question about the implementation. Allison Randal replied that she had added an opcode inspect and a method inspect on roles and classes to the PDD.

[perl #42336] segfault happens with 'parrot --pre-process-only'

Jim McKim reported a segmentation fault when Parrot is invoked with -E. This was ticket [perl #42336].

[perl #42337] [PATCH]: Configure.pl: Refactor list of steps into Parrot::Configure::Step::List

James Keenan created ticket [perl #42337] to paste a patch which moved some of Configure.pl's functionality (listing steps in the configuration process) to a module. This was applied as r18157 and r18158.

[perl #42339] [CAGE] Test Valid and Invalid Parrot Flags

chromatic reported that there are no tests for Parrot's response to invalid command-line arguments. He suggested adding some in ticket [perl #42339]. James Keenan said that he had recently added a test of this sort. chromatic clarified: he meant command-line arguments to the Parrot executable, not to Configure.pl.

[perl #42349] [TODO] dotnet - fix various ops for 64 bit architectures

Paul Cochrane made a note that some ops need to be fixed for 64-bit architectures in ticket [perl #42349].

[perl #42352] [TODO] fix or remove strange TODO item in hash() op

In ticket [perl #42352], Paul Cochrane noted that src/ops/pmc.ops has a todo item marked 'XXX' which lacks an explanation of what the problem is.

[perl #42359] [PATCH] Assorted cleanups - part III (Intel C++)

Steve Peters submitted a patch in ticket [perl #42359]. This cleans up some warnings when compiling Parrot with Intel C++. chromatic got some warnings when running the patch. He made some changes to the patch and sent it in. Steve said he would need to look into it further.

[perl #42360] [TODO]: Unit tests for Parrot::Revision

In ticket [perl #42360], James Keenan reported that lib/Parrot/Revision.pm has no unit tests.

[perl #42362] [TODO]: Unit tests for modules used during configuration

James Keenan indicated that there is a considerable amount of code in the config/ tree which isn't covered by tests. He requested some unit tests in ticket [perl #42362].

[perl #42371] [TODO] check if object.can(method) in callmethodcc() op

Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #42371] for a todo item in src/ops/objects.ops. Jonathan Worthington thought that it was unnecessary and suggested removing the comment. Allison Randal agreed.

JSON won't make test

Klaas-Jan Stol submited a patch which alters json.in to make it pass nmake test. It was committed as r18063.

[perl #42383] [TODO] imcc - if frame->s.file was allocated free it

Paul Cochrane created a number of RT tickets based upon 'todo' messages in the code source:

compilers/imcc/imcc.l - [perl #42382], [perl #42383], [perl #42384]
compilers/imcc/imcc.y - [perl #42385]
languages/regex/lib/Regex/Grammar.y - [perl #42393]
src/opts/pics.ops - [perl #42353], [perl #42354], [perl #42355], [perl #42356]
src/ops/pmc.ops - [perl #42350]
src/ops/stack.ops - [perl #42369]
src/ops/object.ops - [perl #2372]
src/ops/io.ops - [perl #42373], [perl #42374]
src/ops/experimental.ops - [perl #42375], [perl #42376]
src/ops/debug.ops - [perl #42377], [perl #42378], [perl #42379]
src/ops/core.ops - [perl #42381]

Parrot Bug Summary

Jerry Gay remarked that the Parrot ticket queue is growing every week; there are currently more than 500 tickets, many of them unclassified by type. He asked for volunteers to help make the queue more manageable.

In another thread, which was part of ticket [perl #41858], Mark Glines said he had taken on the task of making a reasonable set of rules for splint. He ran into several problems. Paul Cochrane tried to answer the questions as best as he could.

The great "class" variable renaming

Steve Peters has had problems with the use of 'class' as a variable name in struct_vtable. This needs to change for his compatibility work to progress further. He suggested pmc_class as an alternative. Klaas-Jan Stol remarked that he thought the word namespace should also be used carefully.

Class/Role namespace links

Jonathan Worthington began working on the association between classes and namespaces specified in PDD15. He had some questions, which Allison Randal answered.

[perl #42406] [PATCH] improper null testing in Parrot_instantiate_object

Alek Storm reported in ticket [perl #42406] that he had a patch to fix a bug in which the init vtable method override is called instead of init_pmc. After one week he wondered why no action had been taken.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r18096 - trunk/docs/pdds

A commit by Allison Randal added opcodes and methods for 'inspect' to Objects PDD.

[perl #42407] [PATCH] refactor vtable overriding, delegate.c generation

In ticket [perl #42407], Alek Storm submitted a patch which refactors and optimizes methods involved in vtable overriding.

[perl #42411] [PARTIALPATCH] Building a 32bit parrot on freebsd under amd64 fails.

Joshua Isom created ticket [perl #42411] to submit a patch which allows Parrot to be configured for 32-bits on a 64-bit machine. This does not completely fix the problem.

[perl #42412] Configure.pl things =no is true

Joshua Isom thought that configure should treat --foo=no is false instead of true. He reported this in ticket [perl #42412].

Severe error

Christian Aperghis-Tramoni reported an error he saw when compiling Parrot on Linux.

call for help: pdd15 implementation

Jerry Gay highlighted the implementation of PDD 15 as a key goal for the 0.4.11 release (which has since taken place). He suggested that people could help by reviewing docs/code/tests.

modifying classes after they're instantiated

Allison Randal began by remarking that Jonathan Worthington had raised the question of the strategy for safely changing classes which already have instantiated objects. She offered a few alternatives. Both Leopold Toetsch and Allison thought her fourth suggestion was the best one. Alek Storm liked it too, but had another option.

There was some further discussion about the best implementation, with Bob Rogers also joining in.

[perl #42427] [CAGE] cleanup perlcritic errors

Jerry Gay noted that many tests fail in t/codingstd/perlcritic.t. In ticket [perl #42427] he expressed his hope that these things could be addressed before the next release.

[perl #42429] [BUG]: docs/submission.pod: Confusing use of term 'test'

James Keenan reported that he found instances of the word 'test' confusing in docs/submission.pod. He asked for clarification in ticket [perl #42429].

[perl #42430] [PATCH] make :vtable imply :method

Alek Storm created ticket [perl #42430]. This contained a patch which makes the :vtable sub pragma imply the :method pragma. What followed was a long discussion on why someone might want to set :vtable without setting :method. Alek, chromatic, and Allison Randal contributed to this deeply nested thread.

[ANNOUNCE] Hackathon Toronto, Saturday April 28

James Keenan announced a spur-of-the moment hackathon in Toronto. It was held on Saturday, April 28th.

[Proposed PATCH] Change libparrot Names and Locations

Ron Blaschke proposed a patch to change the libparrot names and locations for Windows, which he included in his message. Jerry Gay added his comments, and noted that it is nice if tests are included. There was some further discussion on how to improve the patch.

Limiting Exported Symbols on GCC

Ron Blaschke kicked off this thread by wondering if there was a feature to limit exported symbols with GCC. Steve Peters was concerned about adding GCC features to Parrot, as this could break compatibility with other compilers.

Nicholas Clark remarked that Perl 5 has been successful with using flag data in embed.fnc and generating annotated headers automatically. Jerry Gay agreed with Nicholas and suggested that if a function isn't meant for public consumption, it shouldn't be available. Joshua Isom suggested that people can use whatever functions they want, but if they aren't documented, they are likely to be broken in future releases.

Joshua Isom was concerned that it had been a long time since there had been failure-free smokes, and people were becoming accustomed to test failures.

Joshua Hoblitt and nahoo82 also contributed to the thread.

[perl #42474] [PATCH] Remove dangling enum commas

Steve Peters submitted a patch in ticket [perl #42474] which removes dangling commas in enum lists. It was applied as r18175.

[perl #42475] [PATCH] Change asm() to __asm__()

In ticket [perl #42475], Steve Peters supplied a patch to help Parrot compile with -ansi -pedantic. It was applied as r18176.

Bug Day: Saturday, 14 April 2007

Matt Diephouse announced that Saturday 14 April was a bug day to prepare for the 0.4.11 release. This release was made on 17 April.

[perl #41894] segfault happens when invoking poll op

Earlier, Jim McKim created ticket [perl #41894] to report a segmentation fault.

Will Coleda offered a patch, which Nuno Carvalho applied. Jonathan Worthington reported that the patch broke the build for Win32. He committed a correction in r18187. Joshua Isom suggested an alternative way of addressing the problem.

Compiler

request for a few Pugs parser updates

Darren Duncan asked for a few features to be added to the Pugs parser. There were three requests in total, which Darren hoped could be easily implemented by the right people.

pugs: aborting smoke tests

Moritz Lenz reported being unable to do a make smoke for the last few weeks. Larry Wall thought that the problem looked like a resource exhaustion or lockup, possibly related to embedded/tunneled Perl 5. He asked for more output, which Moritz supplied. Agent Zhang pointed to a post by chromatic which he thought might relate to the solution.

interactive pugs fails in safe mode

Wim Vanderbauwhede reported failures with interactive Pugs when PUGS_SAFEMODE is true.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 01-07 Apr, 2007

kudra — 2007-04-21T07:44:32+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"developers shouldn't live in fear of $^O"

-- Jerry Gay, in 'Use of English pragma'

Language

Second Perl 6 Microgrant - Phil Crow on Java to Perl 6 declaration converter

Leon Brocard announced that the second Perl 6 microgrant had been awarded to Phil Crow for his proposal to convert Java declarations to Perl 6. More information about his proposal can be found in the grant application text.

Details about the microgrant application procedure are available for those interested in submitting a proposal.

[S03] typo

Jonathan Lang submitted a patch which corrects a typo in S03.

[S03] Range Semantics

Jonathan Lang suggested a change to S03 which was inspired by the new array indexing syntax from S09. This would make Ranges in an array index a natural outgrowth of the standard Range semantics.

[S03] Negation metaoperator

Jonathan Lang had a proposal to generalize the negated relational operators to apply to any infix operator which returns a boolean. Larry Wall rejected the suggestion because the relationals Jonathan named are typed to return Any, not Bool.

Parrot Porters

[perl #39934] [PATCH] Make disassemble useful.

Kevin Tew created ticket [perl #39934] with a patch and requested feedback...back in July of 2006. Paul Cochrane applied it as r17922 on April 1st.

[perl #41774] [BUG]: Failures in 5 tests during 'make test'; partially patched

James Keenan created ticket [perl #41774] to report errors on 5 different tests. Later he closed the ticket because the failing tests were identified as part of ongoing work and the tests were no longer failing.

[perl #41860] [CAGE] Run Parrot under Coverity Prevent

Paul Cochrane wanted to get Coverity to run Prevent on Parrot. This was ticket [perl #41860].

More recently, Paul reported that he'd received a reply stating that Parrot could certainly be added, but that no date estimate was available at the moment.

Syntax for Constructing new Objects (and classes?)

This thread began with Klaas-Jan Stol asking about the syntax for constructing new objects because he thought that it was going to be changed. Allison Randal replied with examples of the two proposals for the new syntax.

This led Alek Storm to ask if new() would be a vtable method or a PCCMETHOD. Jonathan Worthington confirmed that it is a PCCMETHOD. Allison elaborated that it is a class method.

More recently, Alek replied that he thought that new should be kept an opcode, and new() should be a vtable method which is called from inside the new opcode. Jonathan Worthington was confused by Alek's proposal. He suggested making BaseClass implement all the vtable variants of a method, and Class can inherit from it and provide a sane interface. Alek thought that Jonathan's suggestion was similar to one he had made in [perl #41619] but that Jonathan's explanation was superior. Allison also added her thoughts to this subthread.

In the main thread, Jonathan proposed deprecating the old syntax in the next release and removing support for it in the following release. Allison agreed to marking it as deprecated now. Joshua Isom wanted the dot syntax to still work so that tests wouldn't need to be rewritten. Allison explained that there were several reasons to remove constants for types and the class registry.

compilers/pirc continued...

Klaas-Jan Stol added a vtable to the parser in compilers/pirc. He proposed looking at the bcg project to see if it would fit in with compilers/pirc. Allison Randal thought it was worth exploring.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r17907 - trunk/docs/pdds/draft

A commit by Allison Randal integrated some questions and comments into the Objects PDD. Jonathan Worthington had a few comments, such as noting that resolve is sugar rather than something new, and that comments about offsets should go away. Allison noted that resolve is the preferred way of dealing with conflict resolution, and removed references to offsets.

[perl #42261] Extensive failures in t/compilers/imcc/imcpasm/*.t and t/pmc/sub.t

James Keenan posted some failures in make test in ticket [perl #42261]. Paul Cochrane reported that he was unable to replicate the failures with r17914 and asked James to check his revision. James looked into it further and concluded that the name of the sandbox was affecting the test results. He wondered if anyone could explain why that was happening.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r17921 - trunk/docs/pdds

A commit by Paul Cochrane noted that Perl code with __END__ or __DATA__ blocks should not get an emacs or vim coda. Shawn M Moore suggested putting the coda at the top of the file, but Paul explained that this had been attempted but proved to be a poor solution for several reasons.

[perl #42267] [CAGE] Work out how to encourage good editor-independent formatting habits

Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #42267] with the mission "Figure out how to encourage good formatting habits, without assuming that everyone uses emacs or vim, and with minimal clutter in our source code. Also write a coding standards test to codify this."

[perl #39878] [CAGE] generated files with timezoneless times

In ticket [perl #39878], Will Coleda wanted tools which insert messages into generated files to include a timezone (which should always be UTC). Paul Cochrane said that generated files are checked for timestamps in codingstd/gmt_utc.t and that config/init/defaults.pm was updated in r17923 to pass the test.

[perl #40861] [CAGE] - add a Perl::Critic policy to look for FIXME|TODO|XXX

In ticket [perl #40861], Paul Cochrane suggested adding a check for 'FIXME'/'TODO'/etc for the Perl source files, as there is currently only a check for the C files. This was done in r17925.

Chris Dolan suggested using an existing Perl::Critic policy. Will Coleda asked if Andy Lester would accept a patch which would optionally permit 'TODO' comments which included ticket numbers and reject those which don't include ticket numbers? Andy replied that he didn't want to build exceptions, and proposed that people just write 'RT #12345' instead of 'TODO (#12345)'. Paul Cochrane agreed with this suggestion.

Link'n'Load on Windows

Ron Blaschke reported that he was looking into errors in linking and loading on Windows. With linking, there were some symbols which weren't exported. He planned to provide a patch to export them.

To solve the loading issue, he wanted to change several files to include the full path.

Current State of Building Parrot on Cygwin

Ron Blaschke reminded the list that it is necessary to include the absolute path to blib/lib in the PATH environment variable to build on Cygwin. He also explained that some problems could be due to a file having Windows line endings.

Eric Hanchrow wondered if it was possible to make Parrot less fussy about the line endings. Ron wanted to see that happen, but explained that his suggestions were workarounds until the problem was resolved. Steve Peters said he would be looking at how to improve the process.

Ron described his thoughts in more detail in 'Link'n'Load on Windows.' chromatic asked if it was possible to pass flags to the linker to hint at the path, which is how the Linux version works. Ron thought that was handy, but hadn't seen something similar for Windows.

[perl #42270] [PATCH]: Configure.pl: refactor options processing functionality

In ticket [perl #42270], James Keenan posted a patch which removes command-line option processing from Configure.pl and puts it in a library. This was done to make testing easier. The patch was applied as r17983 and 17984.

[perl #42271] [PATCH] Borland C++ cleanups

In ticket [perl #42271], Steve Peters submitted a patch which cleans up Parrot for Borland C++ on Windows. This patch does not completely solve compilation issues because it seems to create new issues on Linux. chromatic applied it as r18134.

Hash iteration question

Jonathan Worthington showed two examples of iterating through a hash, and noted that in his first example you will only get the first key in the hash. He believes that the hash and iterator code are closely tied and isn't thread safe.

Allison Randal replied that the significant differences are down to the iterator's shift_pmc throwing an exception if the key is -1, while shift_string doesn't check. She agreed that the code was excessively mixed and needed review. Leopold Toetsch added a further explanation on the implementation.

PDD15: newclass

Jonathan Worthington had a comment on PDD 15 and how it described the creation of a new class. He wondered about the implementation. Allison Randal replied that the newclass opcode will be a simple opcode. Jonathan implemented what Allison described and created a test for it as well.

[perl #42072] [BUG]: pmc2c.pl: Does anyone (know how to) use the 'no-body' option?

In ticket [perl #42072], James Keenan noted that nobody had spoken up in favor of retaining the no-body option. He said that he would take the ticket and assign the revisions to participants of the Perl Seminar Phalanx Phoneix project in NY.

[perl #42279] [PATCH] Parrot cleanups - part 2

Steve Peters submitted a patch in ticket [perl #42279] which had some cleanups to make Parrot work better with different C compilers. It was applied as r17952.

Paper on Software Patterns in Parrot

Klaas-Jan Stol mentioned that he had recently taken a course on software patterns and co-authored a paper on patterns in Parrot, which he put on the wiki.

[perl #42286] [CAGE]: Parrot::Pmc2c::PCCMETHOD constants should be autogenerated

Jerry Gay noted that lib/Parrot/Pmc2c/PCCMETHOD.pm contains a number of constants, which should be generated during the configure process and included. Ticket [perl #42286] discusses this request.

[perl #42287] [TODO] MMD needs to be in a PDD

Jonathan Worthington wanted multi-method dispatch to be documented in one of the PDDs or get its own PDD. The request was made in ticket [perl #42287].

[perl #42292] [TODO] modify PCCMETHOD syntax to more closely match PDD03

In ticket [perl #42292], Jerry Gay requested that the PCCMETHOD syntax be modified to put it in line with PDD 03. chromatic offered a patch.

[svn ci] NCI methods now name-mangled

Jonathan Worthington explained that he was starting to move class functionality into vtable methods, but ran into the issue that you cannot have a METHOD or PCCMETHOD with the same name as a vtable method. This is, however, required to implement the interface specified in PDD 15. He made some changes to get Parrot working again, which affected the Complex PMC.

François PERRAD reported that this change breaks Lua. Allison Randal observed the same thing, and asked Jonathan to either fix the problem for Lua or revert the change from the trunk. Jonathan apologized for breaking things and said that it was fixed in r17982.

Leopold Toetsch suggested that perhaps language maintainers who are using "features" of Parrot could submit core tests for these features, so that this type of problem won't occur in the future. Joshua Isom thought this could be expanded to anyone using Parrot where a "feature" isn't tested. He proposed an open repository for tests. chromatic wondered if it was that difficult to mail in patches. Joshua offered some arguments in favor of it. chromatic

parrotcode updates.

Will Coleda solicited for suggestions concerning parrotcode.org because the current system requires that he do quite a bit of work every time that directories are moved or files are added. He proposed having a directory on the site which is a checked in version of the docs/html directory after a make html. He also suggested having docs for the latest release as well as for the 'svn head'.

[perl #42293] t/doc/pod.t vs. tools/doc/pod_errors.pl

In ticket [perl #42293], Will Coleda suggested removing the script tools/doc/pod_errors.pl because the functionality is already replicated in t/doc/pod.t. Also, the script finds errors which the test does not, which requires investigation.

Joshua Isom reported that he got a segmentation fault when he tried to run the script. When he persisted with running it, he found that it appeared to have a stricter POD checker. Jerry Gay thought that perhaps the script and the test were checking different files.

Paul Cochrane found that on Gentoo the t/codingstd/c_indent.t test caused Perl to segfault, but with a new Perl compilation it worked. He was curious because he wondered if the error was due to Gentoo Perl. Joshua replied that he was using Darwin.

Paul also remarked that the script reported where the errors were in the file, which the test didn't do. Jerry Gay and Nicholas Clark commented on this.

[Fwd: YAPC::Europe Call for Hackathons]

James E Keenan reposted a call for hackathons which was published for YAPC::Europe 2007. He felt that the Chicago Hackathon had been good for Parrot, and hoped that someone would lead a related Hackathon at Y::E. More information about the offer can be found on the Y::E website.

Re: [perl #42299] AutoReply: $P symbolic register allocation bug

Yehoshua Sapir remarked that the code in [perl #42299] worked on OS X.

[perl #42300] [PATCH] t/pmc/sub.t: test for creation of lex by clone op

Yehoshua Sapir submitted ticket [perl #42300] which contains a patch to test the creation of lex by the clone op.

[perl #42305] [PATCH]: Configure.pl: Move STDOUT messages to Parrot::Configure::Messages

James Keenan created ticket [perl #42305] to submit a patch which makes lib/Parrot/Configure/Messages.pm output messages to STDOUT (previously this was done by Configure.pl). This will make testing easier. It was applied as r18027.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r17987 - in trunk: . docs/pdds docs/pdds/draft

Allison Randal made a commit which moved PDD 15 (objects) out of the draft directory.

Use of English pragma

James E Keenan noted that Configure.pl uses one of the English variables, namely $OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH. He wondered if there was a policy regarding the use of the named variables instead of their short versions. Jerry Gay felt that it was wrong to use the English variables.

James said he would convert the variable while refactoring. He created ticket [perl #42333] to remind him of this task. Later this was done and applied as r18033.

[svn ci] PMC documentation guidelines draft

Jerry Gay remarked that he had committed a draft of PMC documentation guidelines in r17998. The document is meant to explain the style of documentation which should be used for core PMCs. Klaas-Jan Stol had some additions, borrowed from 'Perl Best Practices'. Joshua Isom questioned Klaas-Jan on some of the points, and Klaas-Jan elaborated.

[perl #42312] src/pmc/os.pmc: bad use of stat(2) and lstat(2)

In ticket [perl #42312], the output of t/pmc/os.t which fails on Solaris 10 was attached.

[perl #42313] improper casting to void * in src/dynext.c

Ticket [perl #42313] contained a small patch to change load_func from a void pointer to NULL. Leopold Toetsch explained that the cast was being used. Nicholas Clark answered that the casting isn't allowed under strict ANSI C, but that he preferred assigning a plain 0 rather than a NULL.

[perl #42320] [BUG] Memory leak with String pmc

Mehmet Yavuz Selim Soyturk reported a memory leak in some example code. This was mentioned in ticket [perl #42320].

vtable cleanup and questions

Jonathan Worthington reported that he is adding the new vtable entries required for PDD 15. He wanted to know if become_parent could be removed, or if it needed a standard deprecation cycle. He also noted that the subclass vtable method needed to be removed, but that it was in use by ParrotClass and ParrotObject.

Jonathan also noticed PMC* new_singleton() and PMC* get_anonymous_subclass(), which don't appear to be used. He wondered if they should be removed. Finally, he wanted to know if get_attr and set_attr should be deprecated.

Nicholas Clark confirmed that become_parent isn't used anywhere. Will Coleda voted for a standard deprecation cycle. Allison Randal confirmed this.

She also agreed that the subclass vtable method won't be needed in the future, and that get_attr and set_attr could be deprecated when the full change to PDD 15 is complete. new_singleton() and get_anonymous_subclass() were described as "a case of being overly prepared for possible future needs."

Minor notes/suggestions on PDD15

Klaas-Jan Stol had some suggestions for PDD 15. He had some suggestions for improving consistency. Additional comments were on opportunities for syntactic sugar and a proposal that operators such as find_method have the option of throwing an exception rather than returning a NULL PMC on failure. Allison Randal remarked that the exception question was under consideration in I/O as well, and that the consistency issue would be considered when she looked at the Opcodes PDD. Joshua Isom had a few suggestions as well.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 25-31 Mar, 2007

kudra — 2007-04-19T09:32:36+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"I don't think that it's possible to make this non-conformity a fatal heresy :-(
(gcc --spanish-inquisition)"

-- Nicholas Clark in '[perl #42110] [PATCH] Returning values from void functions'

Language

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14359 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall introduced user-definable array indexing. Darren Duncan wondered how one could declare an anonymous multidimensional array value which is compatible with the system Larry introduced. Larry explained that the semicolon notation is intended for slicing subscripts, which are two-dimensional, and it is therefore convenient to represent one dimension with a semicolon. There was further discussion on the syntax.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14354 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall made all punctuation potentially meta.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41837] [PATCH] integer overflow in include/parrot/sub.h

Ticket [perl #41837] contained a patch which was required for 32-bit Solaris compilers. It was applied as r17853.

[perl #42045] [PATCH] add return statement to clone in iterator.pmc

Ticket [perl #42045] includes a patch from Klaas-Jan Stol which adds a return statement which had been forgotten. The patch was applied as r17794.

[perl #42082] [BUG]: Configure.pl: Misspecified option; 2 non-valid options documented

James Keenan explained that refactoring in Configure.pl had exposed two bugs in the file. He submitted a patch in ticket [perl #42082] which corrects the problems in the trunk. Joshua Isom had some questions about the supposed bugs; James explained why he considered them problems. Eventually the patch was applied as r17899.

Syntax for Constructing new Objects (and classes?)

This led Alek Storm to ask if new() would be a vtable method or a PCCMETHOD. Jonathan Worthington confirmed that it is a PCCMETHOD. Allison elaborated that it is a class method.

[perl #37997] r10604 build failure on Cygwin

In ticket [perl #37997], Ron Blaschke reported that make test fails on Cygwin for r10604, whereas r17772 builds without a problem. Joshua Gatcomb expressed his surprise, as he had not heard of anyone getting Parrot to work on Cygwin for several months.

Eric Hanchrow offered to occasionally do a test build on his Cygwin system. Bernhard Schmalhofer suggested that Eric use the smoke system as documented in docs/tests.pod. Eric later reported that he could not get r17772 working. Paul Cochrane seconded Eric's report. Ron suggested using the absolute path for PATH, rather than just blib/lib. Eric got a bit further using this approach, but then he had another failure.

Ron also noted that a few of the stm tests hang, which prevents smoking on Cygwin. chromatic asked if this was t/pmc/stmlog.t, but Ron thought it was t/stm/queue.t and t/stm/runtime.t.

[perl #42110] [PATCH] Returning values from void functions

Steve Peters reported that a couple of functions are trying to return values from void functions. He included a patch in ticket [perl #42110]. Andrew Dougherty remarked that he had submitted the same patch the previous week, but not in RT. The patch was applied as r17793.

Steve hoped there was a GCC warning flag which would catch this situation, but Nicholas Clark replied that he didn't think it was possible to look for this. He wondered if some other compilers could be coaxed into protesting. There was some discussion between Leopold Toetsch, Nicholas, Steve and chromatic over the value of -ansi -pedantic.

[perl #42151] [PATCH] Assorted casting cleanups - part I

In ticket [perl #42151], Steve Peters submitted a patch to clean up some casting instances. Kevin had a related request. Andy Dougherty also had a suggestion. Steve said that he intended to look at some of these ideas more closely as he worked on the project. chromatic and Leopold Toetsch also joined the thread.

IRC discussion of smoking and branching

Allison Randal posted a discussion of the draft document 'Parallel development requirements,' which was announced in thread 'ParrotCode meeting this week'.

There were some suggestions on how to improve the smoking system. For instance, Nicholas Clark noted that the Perl 5 system reports failures to perl5-porters, but the Parrot smoke failures aren't reported in a similar way. Another discussion involved commits which violate the coding standards.

Many people contributed to this thread, and also to the IRC conversation which Allison posted.

Re: [perl #42155] [PATCH] move members from Parrot_Interp to Parrot_Context

Alek Storm created ticket [perl #42155] to offer a patch which moved variables from Parrot_Interp to Parrot_Context. He noted that it broke some tests, and anyone who could figure out what the problem is will get a hug.

Leopold Toetsch replied that it was deliberate that these variables were not in the Context structure. Alek replied that some of them already are in Parrot_Context and this patch simply moves the rest of them. Leopold and Alek had some further discussion on the matter. chromatic added his thoughts as well. Some benchmarking was done in an attempt to calculate the performance of Parrot before and after the patch. Joshua Isom also tested it.

[perl #42156] [PATCH] Make invoke() return opcode_t*

Ticket [perl #42156] contained a patch by Steve Peters. This addressed some of the points raised in '[perl #42151] [PATCH] Assorted casting cleanups - part I '. Paul Cochrane reported that the patch generated a warning for him. Steve made some additional changes to resolve the issue, and the new patch was applied as r17859.

[perl #42161] [BUG] Parrot::Test throws "Can't spawn" warning on windows if a system call returns a negative value

Jerry Gay reported in ticket [perl #42161] that Parrot::Test throws a warning on Windows if a system call returns a negative value. He planned to commit a patch.

[perl #42073] [BUG]: compilers/pirc/Makefile not cleaned up by 'make realclean'

James Keenan reported in ticket [perl #42073] that he expects make realclean to return his Parrot sandbox to its initial checkout status. He noted that this was not always happening.

Klaas-Jan Stol was responsible for the file in question, but could not replicate the problem. James offered a patch and applied it as r17821. There were still some issues, which led James to ask if there were any Makefile experts who could help.

[perl #42169] [CAGE] Create a sample subversion/config

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #42169] in response to a recent IRC discussion. Paul Cochrane offered a possible patch. Allison Randal pointed out that this was a global configuration which would affect all subversion repositories, not just Parrot. It was added to editor/ in r17916.

[perl #42170] [PATCH] Report line numbers on trailing_space.t

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #42170] for a patch which was mentioned on IRC. He thought it was rather verbose, but didn't object to someone applying it. Jerry Gay and Eric Hanchrow offered comments. Paul Cochrane reported that the options had been added to docs/project/cage_cleaners_guide.pod.

[perl #42215] [WEB]: Exporter PMC (and possibly others) missing from pmc docs page

In ticket [perl #42215], Jerry Gay reported that the website parrotcode.org was missing some newly created PMCs.

[perl #42218] [PATCH][Cygwin] Use bc on Cygwin

Ron Blaschke submitted a patch which enables bc on Cygwin if it is available. This was in ticket [perl #42218].

[perl #42074] [PATCH] add RECURSION_LIMIT macro

Ticket [perl #42074] contains a patch by Alek Storm which defines a RECURSION_LIMIT macro which had been hardcoded. It was applied in r17863.

chromatic noted that it would be easy to make it a gettable/settable interpreter property and wondered if it would be of any use. Paul Cochrane replied that it already is that type of property, and that it would probably be valuable to be able to set the value at runtime. Leopold Toetsch reported that the interpreter already has it.

Alek noted that the ParrotInterpreter PMC doesn't implement set_pmc_keyed and wondered if he could implement it. Allison Randal decided against it. There was a brief discussion on this.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r17711 - trunk/docs/pdds/draft

Jonathan Worthington made a commit to PDD15 which added a proposal for role conflict resolution.

[perl #42072] [BUG]: pmc2c.pl: Does anyone (know how to) use the 'no-body' option?

In ticket [perl #42072], James Keenan reported that he had experienced problems writing a test for the 'no-body' option in November/December, but hadn't gotten around to it. Because this option is not completely covered by the test suite, it is affecting other code. Therefore James is trying to figure out how it ought to work and had some questions about the warnings he saw.

First Perl 6 Microgrant - Steve Peters on Parrot Portability

Jesse Vincent announced that Steve Peters was the first recipient of the Perl 6 microgrant. Steve will be working on Parrot portability, and has already made several patches this week. More information about his proposal can be found in the grant application text.

Details about the microgrant application procedure are available for those interested in submitting a proposal.

A challenge... about Parrot

Alberto Simões mentioned a conference on languages, compilers and interpreters in Portugal. He thought it might be a good occasion to make a scientific publication about Parrot. Alberto felt that bringing Parrot to the attention of the scientific community would be a gain for both universities and Parrot. He offered to help with accommodation but not with writing the talk.

Jonathan Worthington thought it was a good idea although he wouldn't be able to attend the conference. He noted that he had previously spoken to an academic audience and that it was challenging. He wanted to see the gap bridged, but noted that his own experience had involved some negative responses from a theory-oriented group.

[perl #42105] memory leak in PCCMETHOD together with Parrot_runops_fromc

Richard Hundt reported a memory leak, using ticket [perl #42105] to draw attention to it.

[perl #42106] t/pmc/iterator.t t/src/io.t failed on Linux

In ticket [perl #42106], James Keenan reported some errors that he had encountered with make test on Linux. Eric Hanchrow replied that he thought it was his code, and that he was looking into the problem.

[perl #42107] [PATCH] Intel C++ is not gcc

Steve Peters submitted a patch to help identify GCC compilers correctly. It was attached to ticket [perl #42107] and applied as r17789.

ParrotCode meeting this week

Will Coleda wanted to discuss branching and the repository in general at the weekly Parrot meeting. Jerry Gay started a wiki page to keep track of ideas.

[perl #42135] [PATCH] Fix overzealous flag removal in t/examples/shootout.t

In ticket [perl #42135], Andy Dougherty tried to address the problem of examples in examples/shootout specifying flags which aren't described anywhere. It was applied as r17792.

Leopold Toetsch apologized for the lack of documentation and explained what the flags did.

Testing PIRC

Klaas-Jan Stol wanted to create a test suite for compliers/pirc but wanted suggestions on how he could do this.

perl5-porters

Working on punie + rindolf (the implementation) Reloaded

Shlomi Fish discussed the idea of writing a Perl 5 front-end which will compile Perl 5 code to Parrot. He wanted to name it 'rindolf' and wondered if Punie would be a good basis for the effort. He also wanted to know if he could have commit access to the repository.

Allison Randal replied that it was an unusual approach and that she had doubts about the implementation plan, but that she would be interested in knowing what obstacles and successes came out of the effort. She thought that Punie would not be useful to Shlomi, given his plan. Her suggestion with regard to the repository was that he develop outside the tree and distribute it as a separate loadable module.

Shlomi argued for being liberal with commit bits, and expressed his concern that the name Punie suggests that it is a toy. There was some continued discussion on these points, and also on Shlomi's proposal.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 18-24 Mar, 2007

kudra — 2007-04-18T17:10:16+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

This week saw the introduction of the Perl 6 Microgrants. Read more about them in 'Perl 6 Microgrants. Now accepting proposals.'

Language

Re: Synopsis 26

Thom Boyer responded to Damian Conway's post from November which thanked people for offering feedback on the first draft. Thom said that he had been unable to find the XHTML version of S26 and wondered if it was available.

Jerry Gay replied that there wasn't a pod parser available yet. Damian responded with the requested file, and said he still hoped to finish the Pod6 parser but he wasn't sure when he would have time.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason asked if Damian could post the code he currently has, so that others could work on it.

Enhanced enumerations

Jonathan Lang proposed a module which would let you set a cycle for enumerations. For instance, a 'seasons' enumeration might be defined as 'spring, summer, autumn, winter' and incrementing summer would result in winter. Andy Armstrong described enumeration as a simple state machine.

Parrot 0.4.10 released

Will Coleda announced the release of Parrot 0.4.10 and highlighted some of the improvements made with this version. This release is named "The Release Formerly Known as "Prince"."

Parrot Porters

[perl #41870] [TODO] create config file processing library for use in pir

In ticket [perl #41870], Jerry Gay requested a configuration file processing library to use in PIR code. Will Coleda did this.

[perl #41871] [BUG]: t/pmc/metaclass.t fails on Darwin

In ticket [perl #41871], James Keenan reported a failure he'd encountered with make test. Later he reported that he had heard that this test was supposed to fail, and suggested making it a TODO. chromatic said that expected failures need to be marked as TODO, because volunteer time is being wasted. Jonathan Worthington agreed.

[perl #41878] [TODO] create exporter pmc

Jerry Gay noted in ticket [perl #41878] that Allison Randal had replaced the .IMPORT macro with the export_to namespace which was defined in PDD21. However, the code was lacking safety checks and he suggested creating an Exporter PMC.

Allison elaborated by suggesting an interface. Patrick R. Michaud added his comments. A discussion on importing followed, with Will Coleda also contributing.

[perl #41881] [CAGE] Redo CONTEXT(interp->ctx)->foo

Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #41881] from the cage/todo.pod. Jonathan Worthington was not sure that eliminating the macro there would be the correct thing to do.

[perl #41886] [CAGE] Use lcov to show code coverage

In ticket [perl #41886], Paul Cochrane noted that the Icov tool can be used to produce HTML output of code coverage information. He thought a make cover target could be added to the Makefile.

Paul Johnson mentioned the option of using Devel::Cover to generate the reports. Paul Cochrane also noted that there was a script in tools/dev/parrot_coverage.pl.

[perl #38988] [PDD] review pdd07_codingstd.pod

Will Coleda reopened ticket [perl #38988] because PDD07 contained a marker indicating that Chip had edited part of it, and everything below needed review.

[perl #41505] [CAGE] Cleanup and reorganize documentation related to svn properties

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41505] to suggest that documentation of all svn properties needs to be cleaned up and reorganized. Paul Cochrane attempted to do this with r17591.

rpm package

Steven Pritchard remarked that he had been working on getting a package built for Fedora, and shared his current package. Allison Randal asked if he had kept track of the things which caused problems, so that the packaging process could be improved.

chromatic speculated that installation paths which are not present or are incorrect is a common problem. Allison agreed, and wondered if some tests could be created to check for installation paths. Mike Mattle explained some of the difficulties in doing this. Joshua Isom thought that it would not too difficult.

Steven made a list of his three major problems: hardcoded 'lib', LD_LIBRARY_PATH had to be set to blib/lib in the top directory, and the languages/ files aren't automatically installed.

Re: [perl #39823] [CAGE] tools/dev/run_indent.pl -- this should be a test

Jerry Gay felt that there should be a coding standards test to ensure that C source files have the correct indentation. Some time ago he created ticket [perl #39823] on this subject.

Recently, Paul Cochrane asked if t/codingstd/c_indent.t met the requirement. Jerry replied that there were still some further checks which should be implemented as tests.

[perl #41884] [PATCH] gcc/mingw32-make compilation failure under MSWin32

In ticket [perl #41884], Alexandr Ciornii submitted a patch to fix a compilation error on Win32.

[perl #41885] [BUG] All the dynoplibs/dynpmcs fail on freebsd

Joshua Isom created ticket [perl #41885] to report failures for dynpmc and dynoplib tests on FreeBSD 6.0. Paul Cochrane noted that it also happens on FreeBSD 6.1.

[perl #41168] graceful "no compiler" error message?

Earlier, in ticket [perl #41168], Will Coleda added a request for a 'no compiler found' error message in configure.pl.

A patch was supplied by chromatic, and applied by Paul Cochrane in r17614. Paul asked for someone to check if it also worked on Windows, because he had only been able to test it on Linux. Jerry Gay confirmed that it worked.

[perl #41889] [PATCH] hoist cut and paste duplication into a function in src/library.c, also possible win32 bug found ?

Mike Mattie created ticket [perl #41889]. He thought he had seen some duplication in src/library.c and so he attached a patch which corrected it. He wasn't able to test it on Win32, however.

Jonathan Worthington noted that some of the code Mike thought was broken worked. He also planned to apply the patch. Eventually this was done as r17626.

Nicholas Clark had some comments on the algorithm involved, and some questions about 2-letter drive names. There was some further discussion on the temporary solution and the proposed final resolution of the issue. Joshua Juran was also involved in the discussion.

Later, Mike posted another patch to src/library.c, meant to be applied after the previous patch. This was ticket [perl #41900]. It was applied as r17628.

After this, Mike supplied a third and a fourth patch in [perl #41902] and [perl #41903]. These were later replaced with [perl #41905]. Ticket [perl #41906] was also part of this series. Jerry Gay was able to confirm that it works on Win32 and it was applied as r17630.

Finally, ticket [perl #41918] addressed some spelling errors noted by Jerry Gay. It was applied as r17680.

[perl #38764] Test results of parrot on Freebsd

Paul Cochrane submitted the output of make test on FreeBSD 6.1. chromatic had also seen a failure with t/stm/llqueue.t but considered the other errors unexpected. He asked if Paul had GDBM installed. Paul answered in the affirmative. This was covered in ticket [perl #38764].

parrot-0.4.9 ebuild for the gentoo distribution (WIP)

Mike Mattie has been working on a Gentoo ebuild for the 0.4.9 release. He noted that some paths are mistakenly installed by Parrot and that rpm had the same problem. He included a copy of the build.

the value of maintaining a working install target to the parrot project

Mike Mattie described himself as a programmer interested in the Parrot virtual machine. He found that one of his biggest obstacles to working with Parrot is that it doesn't have a working install target. He explained his reasoning and needs in depth.

Allison Randal replied that it was well-known that the install process needs improvement, and patches and suggestions are welcome. She addressed many of Mike's points, and welcomed proposals which may come from the careful analysis Mike offered.

[perl #41892] t/stm/llqueue segment violation on test #2

In ticket [perl #41892], Erik Johansen reported an error on SuSe Linux 10.2.

[perl #41893] [BUG] 0.4.9 leaks various .c files into install image, creates PREFIX/config, PREFIX/compiler

Mike Mattie reported some files installed by 'reallyinstall' which don't belong in the install image. He reported this in ticket [perl #41893].

[perl #41894] segfault happens when invoking poll op

Jim McKim created ticket [perl #41894] to report a segmentation fault.

[perl #41895] [TODO] Use Getopt for argument parsing in perlcritic.t

Paul Cochrane wanted to improve t/codingstd/perlcritic.t by using Getopt::Long instead of a non-standard argument parser. He stated this in ticket [perl #41895].

[perl #41896] [BUG] p5rx tests consuming infinite resources on win32

In ticket [perl #41896], Jerry Gay reported that in r17619 he cannot run make test due to failures in the p5rx tests. He suspected a string GC problem. chromatic thought this might explain the STM test failure as well. Jerry replied that STM tests are disabled on Windows so he cannot see if the problem is related. He committed a fix in r17649.

[perl #41897] [BUG]: Parrot::Pmc2c::STMRef gets 'subroutine prederef redefined' warning

James Keenan found that Devel::Cover sometimes reveals issues which don't appear with prove or make test. He reported a warning which he saw with Devel::Cover in ticket [perl #41897].

[perl #41898] Build error with icc

In ticket [perl #41898], Paul Cochrane reported a build error when trying to use icc.

[perl #41908] [PATCH] 5 feature enhancement of src/library.c (extension guessing), and solutions for the install target problems

Mike Mattie launched ticket [perl #41908] to offer a patch to enhance Parrot_locate_runtime_str. It introduced two new static functions. Mike went into some detail on his reasons behind the patch. It was applied as r17632.

There was some discussion of it in '[perl #41908] merging extension guessing feature for library.c'.

[RFC] solutions for maintaining the install target, will affect developers work-flow

Mike Mattie described some of the patches he has been writing (see [perl #41908] [PATCH] 5 feature enhancement of src/library.c (extension guessing), and solutions for the install target problems and [perl #41889] [PATCH] hoist cut and paste duplication into a function in src/library.c, also possible win32 bug found ? ). He asked for feedback before he moves further with the proposals he outlined in ticket [perl #41908].

Re: [PATCH] Quiet a few alignment warnings

Earlier, In ticket [perl #37178], Will Coleda applied a patch which quieted some alignment warnings. Andy Dougherty had created it some time ago. He hoped someone else would take up the task of trying to document and check Parrot's alignment assumptions.
Later, the patch had to be removed because it had introduced some problems. One problem was that it incorrectly assumed that all compilers accept a -h, --help or /? switch. He and chromatic tried to find a solution but were not successful; chromatic promised to work on a better patch.

More recently, Andy Dougherty figured out part of the problem. Nicholas Clark and chromatic also discussed the issue further.

[perl #38969] [CAGE] parrot source does not conform to standards

In ticket [perl #38969], Paul Cochrane suggested removing tools/dev/check_source_standards.pl because the tests which were previously in the file had been moved to t/codingstd. Jerry Gay directed Paul to [perl #39824].

[perl #41912] [CAGE] survey tools/ dir for unused, old, or broken code, and remove or fix as necessary

Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41912]. He proposed that scripts and utilities in tools/ be checked to see if they are still in use. James Keenan took a stab at this.

[perl #41915] [TODO] remove unused manifest-generating scripts

Jerry Gay named some broken and possibly unused scripts in tools/dev, many related to manifest generation. He wondered if one script could replace them. Paul Cochrane linked this ticket ([perl #41915]) to another ticket, [perl #40911].

Re: [perl #41201] [TODO] Remove temporary conf hack in Configure.pl

Earlier, In ticket [perl #41201], Paul Cochrane noted that there is a temporary
hack in Configure.pl which should be implemented properly.

Recently, James Keenan submitted a patch which attempts to address this.

[perl #41926] [PATCH] partial update of NEWS for 0.4.10

Jerry Gay submitted a partial update for NEWS for update 0.4.10 and asked someone to finish it. This was ticket [perl #41926].

[perl #41927] [PATCH] getting gen_manifest_skip() to return correct results quickly

Paul Cochrane submitted a patch in ticket [perl #41927] which he attributed to Jerry Gay, Will Coleda and himself. It makes gen_manifest_skip return a list of the ignore files.

Countdown to 0.4.11

Matt Diephouse created a list of tickets that he wanted to see resolved for release 0.4.11. As it just so happens, 0.4.11 was released the day this summary was completed, so this message is not worth summarizing.

[perl #41955] [PATCH] Yet Another PIR -- in C

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch of an implementation of PIR in C in ticket [perl #41955]. His goal was to clean up PIR and to see if a rewrite would reduce the size.

Joshua Isom wondered what Klaas-Jan considered 'hackish' and how much more work he thought it would take to get the bytecode working. Klaas-Jan replied that he referred to the 'TODO', 'FIXME' and other comment scattered throughout the code and that he couldn't make an estimate on the bytecode although it probably wasn't trivial.

Allison Randal said that she was happy to see it in compilers/pir as an experiment in progress.

[perl #41956] [TODO] Rename PMETHOD and PMINVOKE

Jonathan Worthington reported in ticket [perl #41956] that it had been decided (in a discussion with Allison Randal) to rename PMETHOD and PMINVOKE to PCCMETHOD and PCCINVOKE. Kevin Tew wondered if PRETURN should become PCCRETURN. Jonathan Worthington said he'd already created a ticket for that, [perl #42001].

lang/pir tests fail

Klaas-Jan Stol reported this test failure, as well as some in languages/Pynie.

[PATCH] void functions can't return values.

Andy Dougherty submitted a patch because the documentation for Parrot_set_attrib_by_num suggests it returns a PMC pointer, but the source code doesn't actually return anything.

[PATCH] Avoid //-style comments.

Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to remove // style comments because some compilers don't understand them. Also, he thought it was a bad idea to comment out sections of code without explaining why they were commented out. H.Merijn Brand also expressed his distaste for this type of comment.

Matt Diephouse applied the patch in r17692. He said that there was a test for C++ style comments, but that it doesn't appear to check all generated code.

[PATCH] Hints must come early in Configure.pl

Andy Dougherty explained that hints need to come before inter/progs. He submitted a patch to correct this. James E Keenan reported that Will Coleda made the change Andy advised in r17671, which was basically reverting to r16268 from a change made in r16416. He linked to information about these previous commits.

chromatic wondered if there was some way that the problems James referenced (which were on his system) could be fixed in some other way. James and chromatic tried to resolve the issue. Andy added his two cents.

[PATCH] Suppress optimization on core_ops_cgp.c

Andy Dougherty reported that core_ops_cgp.c overwhelms his system and that he couldn't figure out a better way to solve it other than to turn off optimization. He supplied a patch for it.

[perl #41975] Makefile is missing dependencies on lib/Parrot/Pmc2c/PMETHODs.pm

In ticket [perl #41975], Andy Dougherty reported that he had to fix lib/Parrot/Pmc2c/PMETHODS.pm to get Parrot to compile, but that make didn't generate the required files after his fix.

make test hangs in t/examples/shootout_1.pir

Andy Dougherty reported that t/examples/shootout_1.pir was hanging when he tried to make test. It ran for 15 hours before he killed it.

[perl #42040] tools/dev/mk_manifest_and_skip.pl doesn't pick up files that are marked svn deleted but not yet committed

Kevin Tew noted that tools/dev/mk_manifest_and_skip.pl should remove files from the MANIFEST if they are scheduled for subversion deletion. This was ticket [perl #42040].

Compiler

Perl 6 Microgrants. Now accepting proposals.

Jesse Vincent announced the Perl 6 Microgrants program. Leon Brocard, representing the Perl Foundation's grants committee, will work with Jesse to select proposals for projects. Grants are for 500 USD. Proposals should be for projects which can be completed in 4-6 calendar weeks.

Tim Bunce suggested that someone could create a tool which could parse that Java files which define the JDBC API and generate Perl 6. He did not want to submit the proposal himself, but hoped someone would take it up. There were a few comments on this suggestion. Phil Crow had some interest in the idea.

cvs-parrot

[svn:parrot] r17623 - trunk

Paul Cochrane removed some code for MacOS Classic after few people showed interest in targeting this operating system. chromatic rightly noted that the code could be taken from subversion if it was needed at some point in the future.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 11-17 Mar, 2007

kudra — 2007-04-03T21:39:00+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

Due to a lack of free time, I will be unable to continue creating the Perl 6 summaries after April. We are looking for a volunteer or group of volunteers to take over the task.

Please contact me if you would like more information about what the job entails (contact information can be found at the end of this post).

Language

Some questions about multislices and other things

Ryan Richter translated the Perl 5 Markov chain to Perl 6. He wondered if he has the correct syntax; he cannot test it because Pugs doesn't have full multislice support yet.

Larry Wall noted that <== had become <<== recently, and gave a few other comments.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14325 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall included a specification for the version sharing and emulation model for libraries. Zev Benjamin wondered if there could be an API version attribute. Larry thought that this was covered by 'emulation', but that maybe an API naming convention was needed. John Macdonald added his thoughts on the terminology employed.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14339 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall clarified S02, S03, S04, and S06. The explicit pipe target became @(*) or @@(*). Pushy pipes were modified. $?BLOCK returns a list of labels.

DFA rules and p5's $/

Brad Bowman wanted to know if the form of per-filehandle input record separators had been added to the Synopses.

Larry Wall replied that it hasn't been, although it was discussed. He added a remark to Functions.pod about .split on filehandles.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41364] [PATCH] Fixed object vtable method overrides in PIR

Earlier, in ticket [perl #41364], Patrick R. Michaud noted that the double-underscore method of overriding vtable methods cannot be deprecated until ticket [perl #40626] is resolved. Allison approved of the patch by Alek Storm and requested a regression test. She included a rough version.

Alek wondered if it could be committed now that 0.4.9 has been released. Jonathan Worthington noted some problems he had had with applying it. Alek discovered that this was due to a change in r41549, and updated the patch. Jonathan applied the patch manually in r17514 so that it could be included in the release.

[perl #40544] [NEW] Test for DOS line endings in Parrot text files

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.

However, on March 15th, Will Coleda asked Paul and Jerry Gay to insure that the test doesn't encourage people to update files which would break the Windows build, because the tests were failing again.

[perl #41579] [BUG] t/pmc/ref.t, t/pmc/threads.t file with -C runcore

Previously, in ticket [perl #41579], Patrick R . Michaud reported two failing tests. chromatic confirmed that this was not restricted to x86_64.

This week chromatic supplied a patch but he wasn't sure that it was correct with regard to the Ref PMC.

[perl #41764] [PATCH] teach differentiation of C<exit 1> in exception handling in docs/compiler_faq.pod

In ticket [perl #41764], Julian Fondren submitted a patch because exception severity wasn't documented. It was applied in r17431.

[perl #41771] Uncaught Parse Error Leads to Segfault

chromatic reported a segmentation fault in ticket [perl #41771]. He included some code which demonstrated the problem. Bob Rogers claimed that this was the same issue as [perl #41097].

[Parrot::Embed] Use ExtUtils::MakeMaker for In-Tree Parrot::Embed Builds

chromatic supplied a patch which tells ExtUtils::MakeMaker how to build Parrot::Embed from a compiled but uninstalled Parrot. He requested tests from non-Linux platforms. Jonathan Worthington found some problems, but thought that they might be due to his installation, not chromatic's patch.

[PDD15 PROPOSAL] Pluggable MRO

Jonathan Worthington outlined one of the things he'd like to see in PDD15: method resolution order. Larry Wall offered his thoughts on children and parents having different method resolution orders.

Nicholas Clark said that Brandon Black has been working on making pluggable method resolution order for Perl 5, and suggested that Jonathan talk to him about it.

[perl #41776] [RFE] ParrotIO objects that work on strings

In ticket [perl #41776], Will Coleda noted that it should be possible to redirect input from and output to ParriotIO objects which don't perform IO. This was documented in docs/BROKEN.pod.

[perl #41777] [RFE] Submethods

Ticket [perl #417777] contains an entry from docs/BROKEN.pod which needs to be fixed.

[perl #41779] [RFE] Anonymous Classes

Will Coleda copied this item from docs/BROKEN.pod to the ticketing system, creating ticket [perl #41779].

[perl #41778] [RFE] Lexical Classes

Ticket [perl #41778] documents another item from docs/BROKEN.pod.

[perl #41780] [BUG] Nested *Struct PMCs Share State

Another ticket ([perl #41780]) was created for an item in docs/BROKEN.pod. chromatic was working on a test case to demonstrate the problem.

[perl #41781] [RFE] Store HLL information in invokable PMCs

Ticket [perl #41781] tracks an entry from docs/BROKEN.pod which explains that invokable PMCs need a canonical way to store their associated HLL source and argument information.

[perl #41782] [RFE] Allow Runtime Compiler Registration

Will Coleda copied yet another item from docs/BROKEN.pod to the ticketing system: [perl #41782]. Leopold Toesch's proposed startup sequence is described in the ticket.

[perl #41783] [BUG?] main isn't in src/parrot.c

In ticket [perl #41783], Will Coleda documented the docs/BROKEN.pod item from compilers/imcc/main.c.

[perl #41784] [parrotcode] Link to IMCC FAQ is broken

Bernhard Schmalhofer reported in ticket [perl #41784] that the link to IMCC FAQ is broken in the main (parrotcode) FAQ.

[perl #41786] [PATCH]: tools/build/ops2c.pl refactored

James Keenan resubmitted patches previously submitted in [perl #41608], this time using ticket [perl #41786]. He had some problems with the original submissions.

[perl #41788] [BUG] Real registers are limited to 2 digits

Klaas-Jan Stol created ticket [perl #41788] to report that the several registers are limited to 2 digits. Because Parrot is no longer limited to 32 registers per type, this can be considered a bug.

Nuno Carvalho submitted a patch to change the lexer to accept additional digits. chromatic wondered what the effect would be on the register allocator and memory usage. Leopold Toetsch didn't see this as a problem. Jonathan Worthington also thought that it would be more usual for the programmer to ask Parrot to make the allocation. Nuno reminded the list that the field is a type of INTVAL, and therefore will already be limited. There was a bit of further discussion on this. Allison Randal saw no reason not to limit the lexer to a 32-bit integer.

[perl #41790] [PATCH] Change sub's get_string to return short name

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41790]. He is working on Tcl and needs to know the name of a .Sub at runtime and included a patch which he'd like to see in 0.4.10. The patch did make some tests fail.

Jonathan Worthington was mostly in favour of the plan, but wanted to know more about how the tests were failing. Matt Diephouse liked it too; he had nearly changed it himself the previous week. Allison Randal approved the change, and it was applied in r17484.

stuck with tge transformation for pynie using PAST::VarList

Klaas-Jan Stol expressed some difficulties he was having with tree transformation for Pynie, and asked for help from anyone with knowledge in this area.

[perl #41230] [BUG] t/codingstd/perlcritic.t uses too many resources

Earlier, Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41230]. Recently, Will Coleda reported that it had been updated to run all the policies at once, but to report by policy. This way, each file is only processed once.

[perl #41802] [BUG] GC errors with PGE (may have failing tests!)

In ticket [perl #41802], Jerry Gay noted that in r17470 he's disabled the -G flag on three test files. The change addressed some garbage collector bugs, and the ticket prevents the (known) issue from being reported.

[perl #41812] [PATCH 6/6] [lib] Test::More - add isa_ok()

In tickets [perl #41809], [perl #41810], [perl #41811], [perl #41812], and [perl #41813], Sam Vilain submitted several patches for Test::More.

The patches do the following: * factor out the comparison and test function * clean up test_skip() output * add the isa_ok() method * refactor is() :multi for integers * changed is() to expect a different order of arguments * modify symbol exports in the example

Allison Randal looked at two of the patches and requested some refactoring. She explained in some detail what she is looking for. In addition, she suggested removing the .IMPORT macros which she had introduced.

[perl #41818] [PATCH */4]: [t/op] add tests for string memory layout

Sam Vilain created ticket [perl #41818] to provide a patch.

Bug Day for 0.4.10 on 3/17

Will Coleda announced a Bug Day for 0.4.10 on March 17th. Although this Bug Day has passed, there will be others...

[perl #41819] [PATCH */2]: [t/pmc] minor object-meths.t clean-ups

Sam Vilain submitted a patch in ticket [perl #41819].

[PATCH] Free Thread Interpreter Pool During Shutdown

chromatic supplied a patch which fixed some unneeded output in a Valgrind report.

[PATCH] Free Context After Copy

chromatic had another Valgrind report, and submitted a patch.

[perl #41825] morph vtable method not working in PIR

Richard used ticket [perl #41825] to report the problem described in the subject, and supplied a code example.

[perl #41826] vtable method 'find_method' not working in PIR

Richard included some example code in ticket [perl #41826] to demonstrate the problem described in the subject.

[perl #39908] [BUG] IMCC treats $S as a non-register instead of throwing an error

Nuno Carvalho replied to ticket [perl #39908]. In the ticket, Matt Diephouse had included an example of the error. Nuno noted that this was related to '[perl #41788] [BUG] Real registers are limited to 2 digits ' and attached a patch to correct the test. Jerry Gay wanted to see the examples in the ticket converted to tests.

[perl #41827] ICU endian issues causing test failures.

In ticket [perl #41827], Joshua Isom reported a failure with t/op/stringu.t, which was probably due to an assumption of small endianness.

[perl #41829] languages/Zcode is broken

Bernhard Schmalhofer created ticket [perl #41829] to discuss some errors in languages/Zcode.

[perl #37178] [PATCH] Quiet a few alignment warnings

In ticket [perl #37178], Will Coleda applied a patch which quieted some alignment warnings. Andy Dougherty had created it some time ago. He hoped someone else would take up the task of trying to document and check Parrot's alignment assumptions.

Later, the patch had to be removed because it had introduced some problems. One problem was that it incorrectly assumed that all compilers accept a -h, --help or /? switch. He and chromatic tried to find a solution but were not successful; chromatic promised to work on a better patch.

[perl #41833] [TODO] test conv_i2 opcode

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41833]. In it, he said that the conv_i2 opcode had been resurrected, and that there may already be some tests for it.

[perl #41837] [PATCH] integer overflow in include/parrot/sub.h

Ticket [perl #41837] demonstrates an integer overflow in include/parrot/sub.h. chromatic applied the patch in r17853.

Re: [perl #38764] Test results of parrot on Freebsd

Pankaj kaushal, chromatic, and Paul Cochrane discussed ticket [perl #38764]. Will Coleda had asked for tests to run against parrot-0.4.9.

[perl #40087] [BUG] Segfault in key.pmc

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #40087] several months ago. Jonathan Worthington tried to reproduce the error and requested updated instructions on how to produce the problem.

[perl #41857] [CAGE] Make a "make valgrind" target

Paul Cochrane wanted a makefile target so that the valgrind tool suite could be used. He noted this in ticket [perl #41857].

[perl #41858] [CAGE] Make a reasonable set of rules for splint

In ticket [perl #41858], Paul Cochrane reported that splint creates a number of errors by default, and suggested that a set of rules be created for it.

[perl #41859] [TODO] Replace cage/todo.pod files by RT tickets

Paul Cochrane created a ticket to make tickets of cage todo items, and then resolved his own ticket ([perl #41859]).

[perl #41860] [CAGE] Run Parrot under Coverity Prevent

In ticket [perl #41860], Paul Cochrane noted that he wanted to see Parrot running under Coverity Prevent.

[perl #41861] [TODO] Create (and start the basics of) a cage cleaner guide

Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #41861] to create the TODO item 'create a cage cleaner guide'. It was resolved in r17556.

[perl #41862] [CAGE] Make a reasonable set of rules for lint

In ticket [perl #41862], Paul Cochrane requested a reasonable set of rules for lint and provided a suggested starting point.

Compiler

Parrot, Perl 5 and performance

Ozgun wondered if compiling Perl 5 to Parrot byte code would provide any performance benefit, and how difficult it would be to do this.

chromatic explained that it would take quite a bit of effort to completely translate Perl 5 syntax. He did expect that it would improve performance, but pointed out that Parrot isn't as mature as Perl 5. Nicholas Clark said he didn't expect it would create an enormous increase in speed. He suggested profiling the Perl interpreter rather than profiling the code itself.

Isaac Gouy noted that PIR is included in the Debian performance comparison page which Ozgun had cited.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 4-10 Mar, 2007

kudra — 2007-03-31T14:02:40+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"Q: Can February March? A: No, but April May..."

-- Larry Wall's r14313 log message for a date correction

Language

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14308 - doc/trunk/design/syn

David Green asked if the reason behind Larry Wall's decision not to have ranges automatically go in either direction is to prevent subtle bugs from creeping in. Nevertheless, he thought it would be useful to have a way to travel in the 'natural' direction, whichever direction that might be.

for ... else

Thomas Wittek recently encountered the Perl 5 module For::Else, which allows if (@lar) { foreach my $moose (@lar) { ... } } else { ...} to be written as foreach my $moose (@lar) { ... } else { ... }. He wondered if something similar could be added to Perl 6. Rick Delaney found the current syntax awkward, but wasn't certain that Thomas' solution was ideal, and Paul Seamons was of the same mind. Jonathan Lang liked the idea.

Steve Lukas was against the suggestion because he felt that idea contradicted the common meaning of else and would discourage people who are used to other languages.

Luke Palmer noted that it would confuse Python programmers, as the Python construct assumes that you are looping in order to find something. Larry Wall suggested using a gather to achieve this effect.

The discussion continued, for a total of 29 messages.

statement modifiers

Jonathan Lang noted that S02, S03, and S04 contain references to the deprecated concept statement_modifier. Larry Wall was aware of the problem, but was waiting for a few things to settle down before he corrected them.

Jonathan also asked why statement modifiers are explicitly forbidden to 'do' blocks, and if given is considered conditional or looping when it is used as a statement modifier. Larry replied that the ruling discourages people from violating the endweight principle. In answer to the second question, he said that given is considered to be a loop, and when is a conditional.

Compound grammar

Jonathan Lang wondered how to define a statement or operator with syntax like if ... else ... or ... ?? ... :: .... Larry Wall suggested reading the grammar POD.

resumable exceptions and LEAVE/KEEP/UNDO blocks

Daniel Hulme wanted to know what happens if a resumable exception is propagated through a block with a LEAVE, KEEP or UNDO block. Larry Wall thought that perhaps Daniel had missed part of the documentation which describes how a CATCH block works, and quoted the relevant section. Daniel agreed that he had overlooked it.

Coercion of non-numerics to numbers

Dave Whipp was curious about the semantics of coercion of non-numbers. In his experiments, he wondered if it was correct for a x42 to become 0.0 instead of NaN. Larry Wall felt that it should create a warning.

new Parrot project manager

Allison Randal announced that the Parrot project manager role will now be distinct from the Perl 6 project manager role. Will Coleda will be responsible for Parrot, and Jesse Vincent will continue as the project manager for Perl 6. Meanwhile, Chip Salzenberg is officially on sabbatical for a while.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14317 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit from Larry Wall made module longnames specified in terms of identification plus adverbs.

Smylers questioned the decision to put a range operator in parenthesis to match more than one version number. He thought it would be better to specify a minimum version and assume that later versions will also have the feature or bug fix, because otherwise systems may break due from new library installations. Larry explained that this would not be a problem because Perl 6 would keep old versions of modules in the library unless the new versions claim to emulate the old version.

David Green asked how this emulation would be expressed. He also wanted to know what would happen if you were installing for the first time: would you get all versions of the module? Larry replied that the emulation syntax was not yet specified.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14319 - doc/trunk/design/syn

In this revision, Larry Wall defined the library version sorting order. Geoffrey Broadwell suggested using the versioning system of Debian to test, because it has an unusual design.

Parrot Porters

Re: [perl #41195] [BUG]: Change to Configure.pl causing 'make' to fail on Darwin

Some time ago, in ticket [perl #41195], James Keenan produced a bug report. Will Coleda reported that he was unable to see the bug, and asked if reverting Configure.pl fixed the problem. James reported that with r17419, there were still some problems. Will remarked that he had reverted the order of the steps in Configure.pl to fix the problem.

[perl #41364] [PATCH] Fixed object vtable method overrides in PIR

Alek wondered if it could be committed now that 0.4.9 has been released. Jonathan Worthington noted some problems he had had with applying it.

This week, Jonathan Worthington made a few changes and committed it as r17514.

[perl #41455] [NEW] and [PATCH]: tools/build/ops2pm.pl refactored

In ticket [perl #41455], in February, James Keenan attached some new patches and files. Recently he decided to pull the patch from submission because some other changes have broken them.

[perl #41548] [Tcl] - internals tests failings

Earlier, Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41548] to report failing tests. Nuno Carvalho tested with r17365 and marked the ticket as closed because the issue appeared to be solved.

[perl #41583] Tail calls from within vtable methods broken

In ticket [perl #41583], Bram Geron reported a problem with tail calls in v-table methods. Recently, Alek Storm remarked that he had nearly completed a patch to fix it. Jonathan Worthington described the issue in more detail.

[perl #41602] [TODO] MS VS 2005 deprecates strdup

In ticket [perl #41602], Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which fixes the problem of strdup being deprecated in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It was applied as of r17281.

Klaas-Jan also wondered if strdup should be used because of possible memory issues. Jonathan Worthington clarified that it was not a problem.

There was some further discussion about the best solution for the original problem, with Kevin Tew, Philip Taylor and Jerry Gay adding their thoughts.

[PATCH]: tools for using Subversion branches; ops2c.pl refactored

James Keenan submitted a patch which includes a refactoring of tools/build/ops2c.pl and files which argue for using more subversion branches. Sam Vilain wondered why the two changes were linked together and felt that the tracking method for branches didn't follow the best practices which have emerged through use.

James said that he had submitted the patches as one because he has been ill recently and wanted to complete the task quickly. He went into more detail about his reasons behind the subversion suggestions. Sam agreed with the goal of trying to get people to develop more in branches, but still disagreed with James. chromatic felt that experiments--such as James' ideas--are okay, because if they fail people will still learn something from it.

Later the patches were pulled from submission because some other changes in code meant that they were no longer passing tests.

AIX 5.3

Theodore Katseres reported success with building Parrot on AIX with GCC 4.0.0. Jerry Gay wanted to know if the test could be run more frequently, and reported in the smoke results.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r17322 - trunk/docs/pdds/draft

A commit from Jonathan Worthington described the new class and object layout for objects. Subsequent commits from Allison Randal modified the document.

Parrot won't build on cygwin

Klaas-Jan Stol reported a problem with compiling Parrot on Cygwin.

[perl #41693] [PATCH] STM article reference corrected

Elizabeth Mattijsen pointed out a broken link and submitted a patch to correct it in [perl #41693]. It was committed.

Re: [perl #41695] [CAGE]: Refactor Parrot::Distribution

James Keenan created ticket [perl #41695] to log efforts to re-factor Parrot::Distribution. He included his notes from previous discussions on the topic.

[perl #41704] [BUG]: Test failures: t/pmc/object-mro.t t/pmc/timer.t

In ticket [perl #41704], James Keenan reported test failures with make test.

[perl #41707] [TODO] Tcl - relocate stub files

In ticket [perl #41707], Will Coleda described a task of moving some Tcl code to a new location. Nuno Carvalho made the changes in r17354.

[perl #41712] [TODO] deprecate CSub

Jerry Gay wanted CSub deprecated before the 0.4.10 release. Allison Randal agreed. This was handled in ticket [perl #41712].

[perl #41713] [PATCH] Updates for lang/PIR

In ticket [perl #41713], Klaas-Jan Stol attached a patch for lang/PIR which cleaned up the layout, changed some rules to tokens, added tests, and added rules.

[perl #41724] [BUG] miniparrot fails to build on strawberry perl

Jerry Gay reported a platform-specific issue with miniparrot in ticket [perl #41724]. Aldo Calpini tried it but got different warnings. chromatic replied that the configuration process assumes a tight connection between the operating system and compiler.

[perl #41726] [PATCH] make lua fail more gracefully with an exception handler

Julian Fondren submitted a patch in ticket [perl #41726]. The patch makes Lua generate .pir files which push an exception handler before evaluating code.

[perl #41732] [BUG] parrot objects segfault on improper invoke override

In ticket [perl #41732], Will Coleda reported a segmentation fault when invoke is improperly overridden.

Re: [perl #41733] invoke :vtable - execution stops

Richard reported a problem with the latest Parrot. He included some code demonstrating the issue in ticket [perl #41733]. Alek Storm pointed out that the invoke vtable method is meant to take one argument. He showed some example text.

Matt Diephouse saw a problem with Alek's approach and suggested an alternative. chromatic agreed with Matt, but then Matt came up with another solution, which was applied in r17385.

[perl #41738] languages/APL is broken

Bernhard Schmalhofer used ticket [perl #41738] to report that languages/APL fails smoke tests on all platforms. He suspected it hadn't been updated to the HLL refactoring in r16974.

[perl #41739] [PATCH]: add "clone" method for iterators

Eric Hanchrow submitted a patch in [perl #41739] which added a clone method for iterators. It was applied in r17411.

Parrot 0.4.10 (Coming Soon)

Will Coleda created a placeholder ticket [perl #41581] to mark the upcoming release of Parrot 0.4.10, expected in less than two weeks.

[perl #41743] [PATCH] Make all but (perl5|pugs|t) have a MAINTAINER

In ticket [perl #41743], Julian Fondren submitted a patch which added MAINTAINER files for parts of the languages tree which didn't have them.

PIR Tutorial

Klaas-Jan Stol remarked that he had started a PIR tutorial on the wiki, and invited people to help. Julian Fondren suggested several topics which hadn't yet been addressed. James E Keenan also offered a suggestion.

[perl #41746] [BUG] pdump doesn't build.

Will Coleda reported a bug with pdump in ticket [perl #41746].

C pmclass - parrot object inheritance, interaction vtables/methods/object identities

Mehmet Yavuz Selim Soyturk is implementing ECMAscript and ran into problems. The question was if get_pmc is an appropriate solution for the problem, or if there is a better way to handle it.

[perl #41749] [TODO] deprecate substr_r op

In ticket [perl #41749], Jerry Gay suggested deprecating substr_r. Leopold Toetsch asked if it could remain an experimental operator until the string issues are resolved. Allison Randal said to move it to experimental.ops and note it in DEPRECATED.pod.

[perl #41569] t/distro/file_metadata.t fails on win32

Ron Blaschke asked what result he could expect from t/distro/file_metadata.pl as of r17389. In ticket [perl #41569] he showed what he was seeing on a Windows system. Will Coleda thought that the second test should be passing as of r17398, and that the first two ought to pass. Ron submitted a patch to make the test work on Windows, which was applied in r17406.

chromatic wondered if it would be better to use File::Spec, as the problem involved / versus \. Ron elaborated that the problem is that the MANIFEST doesn't match the output from svn.

[perl #25253] [PATCH] Remove Parrot_INTERP

In ticket [perl #25253], Jerry Gay asked chromatic to look at removing Parrot_INTERP.

[perl #41750] [PATCH] Pynie updates

In ticket [perl #41750], Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch for Pynie, which was applied. This patch fixed the rule for floating points, among other things.

[perl #41753] [CAGE] better document and test PMETHOD and PMINVOKE

Jerry Gay wanted documentation for the C-level support for Parrot calling conventions which was recently added. He made this remark in ticket [perl #41753].

Glossary is missing from parrotcode.org

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41768] to store Klaas-Jan Stol's comment that the glossary page should output to the website.

Q: Should Op names be allowed to be identifiers.

Klaas-Jan Stol noted that it is permitted to use ops as names for variables in PIR, but if you tried to increment the resulting variable, it will not compile. He suggested disallowing using opnames in this way.

[perl #41760] [PATCH] lang/pynie some bin.ops

In ticket [perl #41760], Klaas-Jan Stol submitted another Pynie patch. It was applied as r17407.

[perl #41762] [PATCH] Languages/Pynie functions!

The patch in ticket [perl #41762], by Klaas-Jan Stol, implements basic function calling in Pynie.

[perl #41763] [PATCH]: fix "clone" method for iterators

In ticket [perl #41763], Eric Hanchrow submitted a patch for iterator cloning. It was applied, with minor changes, in r17691.

[PATCH 0/6] A round of updates to Test::More

Sam Vilain submitted a patch to extend the Test/More.pir library.

perl5-porters

lexical subs

H.Merijn Brand kicked off a very large thread (53 messages in total) by requesting lexical subroutines. Although the message was posted to the Perl 5 porter's list, it involved Perl 6 and appears to have been cross-posted.

Dr. Ruud was in favour of the idea, as was Paul Johnson. Tels didn't like having two subroutines of the same name, and suggested an anonymous subroutine with a variable referencing it. The concern was that it would be hard for a human to know which subroutine was called without checking the lexical scope. David Nicol also considered it unnecessary. Johan Vromans found it no more confusing than a lexical variable. Abigail agreed with Johan. Michael Schwern felt that it was in fact less confusing, as in his experience, Perl trainers are often faced with the question "how do I declare a lexical subroutine?"

Demerphq noted that it is difficult to do a recursive subroutine with lexically scoped references to anonymous subroutines and avoid memory leaks. Aaron Crane pointed out that a subroutine with a fully-lexical name wouldn't be mistaken for a method.

Mark Jason Dominus didn't care one way or the other about lexical subroutines, but wanted to add a number of test cases to define the feature if it is added. His example test case generated some discussion. Larry Wall invited anyone to translate the test cases to Perl 6 and install them in the Pugs test repository, as Pugs should already handle lexically scoped subroutines.

There was some question of whether lexical subroutines exist in Perl 5 bleed. Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Abigail, and Jan Dubois contributed information. It appears that they were in to the 'todo' list for 5.6.1, but haven't been implemented. Juerd Waalboer wanted Perl 6 to conform to Perl 5's implementation, or vice versa.

Meanwhile, Wolfgang Laun wondered if Perl would incorporate any sort of information hiding, which Rafael summed up as "a whole can of worms."

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 25 Feb - 3 Mar, 2007

kudra — 2007-03-21T19:57:35+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"It seems you are presuming a Waterfall model of development here. We're not doing the Waterfall, we're doing the Whirlpool, where the strange attractor whirls around with feedback at many levels but eventually converges on something in the middle. In other words, a whirlpool sucks, but the trick is to position your whirlpool over your intended destination, and you'll eventually get there, though perhaps a bit dizzier than you'd like."

-- Larry Wall, in 'What criteria mark the closure of perl6 specification'

Language

[S09] "Whatever" indices and shaped arrays

Jonathan Lang suggested dropping some specification from S09 which described how * works in conjunction with + and -. He suggested using [0] for the first index instead of *+0. Larry Wall added his thoughts, noting that it was 'shiny', but that nested []s might not be visually appealing.

Luke Palmer decided to mention Ruby's boolean truth model which he admires. With it, 'nil' and 'false' are false, and everything else--including an empty string and '0'--are true. In summary he stated that simple rules are a blessing if you find the right ones, and that he's a fan of boolean predictability.

The shaped arrays thread continued, and eventually Larry was satisfied and requested a patch to S09.

What criteria mark the closure of perl6 specification

Richard Hainsworth asked when the Perl 6 specification will be complete. He is eager to begin using Perl 6, but wants to see it stabilize. Geoffrey Broadwell was perfectly willing to work with a moving specification, so long as the current version of the specification was mostly implemented. chromatic noted that this is what everyone wants.

Geoffrey offered to write some tests which would demonstrate missing features, if someone could implement the features. Gabor Szabo said that he wished there were many people writing tests for unimplemented features, as someone would surely implement the feature to make tests pass.

There was a discussion on how out-of-date the Exegesis files are. Masak suggested porting the code examples in the Exegesis to current Perl 6, and storing them in the Pugs repository. Herbert Breunung thought a disclaimer that they are outdated would be adequate.

Patrick Michaud noted that the changes to the specification have not had a negative impact on the development of the Perl 6 on Parrot implementation; to the contrary, they have made the work easier.

Smylers added that there is no point in freezing the specification if it turns out it can't be implemented. Smylers felt that most of the current work is clarifying, rather than adding new features.

Larry Wall explained that Perl 6 development doesn't follow the Waterfall model. He cannot design something without feedback from implementors. The development model was described as a 'whirlpool'.

Packed array status?

Geoffrey Broadwell wanted to know what backends support packed native arrays. He also added a comment on 'What criteria mark the closure of perl6 specification'.

chromatic replied that Parrot has ManagedStruct and UnManagedStruct PMCs for mapping complex C structures. Patrick Michaud replied that the PIR libraries aren't working yet, but that implementing them should not be too difficult. Audrey Tang also described the situation in Pugs. Geoffrey wondered if he could follow the development status. He offered to write some tests.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13704 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall's commit made the one-pass parsing rule explicit so that tests can reference it.

request new Mapping|Hash operators

Darren Duncan believes that there is room for some additional convenience operators or functions which are used with mapping and hash values. In particular, he would like the relational data model concept of a tuple. He feels that this could be satisfied with the data types Mapping and Hash with the addition of some common relational operators such as join(), semijoin(), semidifference(), rename(), project(), remove(), compose(), wrap(), and unwrap().

Nicholas Clark noted that rename is a Perl 5 builtin, which he doesn't believe has been dropped for Perl 6. Smylers added that Perl already has a join function for renaming strings. Darren reiterated that he isn't concerned with the names so much as the concepts they express.

Aaron Crane wondered why Darren was specifically against putting this functionality into a third-party module. Darren supplied an argument for the usefulness of relational operators in response. Smylers pointed out that it would be odd to include core support for database operations when most people would opt to use DBI (a module) instead. David Green wasn't concerned about whether the features were core or in a module, but thought it would be nice to have them.

There was some discussion on whether certain features, such as renaming hash keys, are implemented in Perl 5, with David Green, Darren Duncan, Aaron Crane and Uri Guttman taking part.

request: num16

Geoffrey Broadwell requested that num16 and complex16 be added to S09 and made optional. These half-sized floating point types are commonly used in graphics.

Bit shifts on low-level types

Geoffrey Broadwell asked how bitwise shifts are defined on low-level types. Smylers remarked that it is rare to deal with anything as low-level as bits in Perl 5 programming. He feared that introducing more operators into the core language, especially if they would be rarely used, raises the entry barrier.

Nicholas Clark added that it's something you don't want to do in Perl 5, because it is so bad at it.

Rotation ops?

Geoffrey Broadwell asked if Perl 6 has bit/string rotation operators.

Low-level types and over/underflow

Geoffrey Broadwell wanted to know what would happen if a low-level type underflows or overflows. For example, if you incremented a uint8 past 255, what would be the result?

Darren Duncan thought that it depended upon what the underlying hardware does. He suspected it would be a wraparound or an overflow, not a type upgrade.

Casting and low-level types

In this thread, Geoffrey Broadwell asked what happens when you cast between low-level types if the source value is out of range for the destination type. Larry Wall replied that it would be an warning if the destination is an int, and a clip to infinities when the destination is a num.

Compact structs and "byte-stringification"

Geoffrey Broadwell wanted to know how you specify that you want to byte-stringify a structure, rather than normally stringifying it. Larry Wall advised coercing to a buffer type rather than using ~.

Expressions with mixed types including low-level types

Geoffrey Broadwell asked how casting and coercion are handled with expressions which involve mixing low- and high-level types. Larry Wall answered the question, and pointed to a recent update of S09.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r14308 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall made a commit to S03 which distinguished Range's intervalic .min and .max from its directed .from and .to.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41601] [BUG] parrotbug b0rken

In ticket [perl #41601], Klaas-Jan Stol reported a problem with Parrotbug on Win32. Paul Cochrane thought that the problem existed on all platforms. Because people are currently advised to send an email, Paul thought that Parrotbug is confusing and should perhaps be removed.

Jerome Quelin remarked that he has no time to work on Parrotbug, which he originally created. He said that anyone willing to work on it was welcome to take over maintenance.

[perl #41604] [BUG] pbc_output_is doesn't work?

Klaas-Jan Stol tried to add a test which runs some PIR code as PBC. He noted that a PBC file wasn't being created, and sent a patch which could fix this to ticket [perl #41604]. He also wondered if it was a good idea to store PBC files in the repository.

Leopold Toetsch explained that the files which are in the repository are generated on different machines, and the tests check that Parrot can read PBCs from different platforms.

Klaas-Jan wondered if pbc_output_is could take PIR code and compile it while running a test, or if it expects the PBC file to be present. Leopold confirmed that the PBC file must be present.

Jerry Gay noted that there are no test functions which accept PIR, compile to PBC, and run the PBC. He wasn't sure it was a good idea to add this functionality before the refactoring of Parrot::Test is complete.

[perl #41606] [TODO] Add flag to do runtime check on deprecated ops

In ticket [perl #41606], Klaas-Jan Stol proposed adding a flag which checks at runtime if any deprecated ops are used.

Later, he remarked that such a check would be rather slow, so it would be better to add some annotation in the .ops file.

[PATCH] Update DEPRECATED.pod

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch to DEPRECATED.pod which includes some of the deprecated ops. Allison Randal applied it as r17206.

[perl #41608] [NEW] and [PATCH]: tools/build/ops2c.pl refactored

James Keenan submitted two patches which replace his earlier patches by the same name. This was ticket [perl #41608].

[perl #41612] parrot on CPAN testers..

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41612] because he noticed that Parrot hadn't passed on Windows since 0.4.6. chromatic thought that 0.4.9 would help resolve some of the recent failures. Patrick R. Michaud had seen a report of 0.4.9, and said there were still failures with positive and negative numbers very close to zero.

[perl #41614] Can't set non-core object attribs yet

In ticket [perl #41614], Will Coleda reported some problems with adding an attribute to a TclProc PMC. Alek Storm remarked that a Sub is not a ParrotObject, so it has nowhere to store attributes. He submitted a patch which implements a basic storage system for TclProc. Will commented that it was annoying that attributes aren't just available everywhere, and that ParrotClass and PMC don't have much in common.

[PATCH] welcome message and prompt for HLLCompiler

Klaas-Jan Stol noted that most languages which can be run interactively print a welcome message. He submitted a patch to give a message when interactive mode is entered, before printing a prompt.

Patrick R. Michaud thought the effort was useful, but that it shouldn't mention help which isn't available. Also, there was a bit of a problem with multi-line input.

There was a bit of further discussion on the topic.

[perl #41619] [PATCH] add add_attr, rem_attr, and rem_attr_str vtable methods

In ticket [perl #41619], Alek Storm submitted a patch which adds several vtable methods which can be used by Ruby and Smalltalk. James E Keenan reported that the patch, when applied to the branch, did not cause any problems with tests.

Allison Randal thought this raised a design issue. She wanted to know why add_attr, rem_attr and rem_attr_str were vtable methods instead of methods on the Class class. Alek thought that this was in line with PDD 15. Joshua Isom was concerned about interoperability, and wondered if Perl 6 and Tcl (for example) would be able to use the new class implementation.

Alek replied that the vtable provides an abstract interface everyone can use seamlessly. He thought that it would in fact encourage people to use multiple languages in a single application.

chromatic asked Alek to clarify what behavior he wanted to enable in the HLL. Alek said he would put together some code which would demonstrate his intention. As of March 12th, he was still working on the use case.

[perl #41620] [PATCH] change opcode syntax for label arguments

In ticket [perl #41620], Alek Storm included a patch which changes the label INT, labelvar INT and labelconst INT syntax to in LABEL, invar LABEL and inconst LABEL. This reduces the number of arguments and makes the code cleaner. It was applied to the buildtools branch, and all tests passed.

[PATCH] PDD6 updates

Klaas-Jan Stol made some changes to PDD 16 and posted a patch. chromatic was mostly satisfied with the patch. It was applied as r17209.

[perl #41623] [TODO] modify p6regex op naming convention to match perl 6

In ticket [perl #41623], Jerry Gay remarked that PGE's syntax for specifying ops in the precedence parser should follow the Perl 6 specification. Patrick R. Michaud noted that Larry Wall's recent work on the grammar may introduce some radical changes to the current syntax. Larry tried to explain what he hopes to do with the modifications.

Pynie Grammar

In several threads, Klaas-Jan Stol chronicled his attempts to update the grammar for Pynie. He remarked that it is mostly complete, but that he still has some difficulty with the binary operators "is not" and "not in" and asked for insight.

The following messages charted the development: * [PATCH] Pynie updates * [PATCH] languages/Pynie * [PATCH] Complete Pynie Grammar * [Pynie] Grammar mostly done, but help needed * [perl #41659] [PATCH] Updates for languages/pynie

reviewing PDD01 - Overview

Allison Randal announced that she had checked in an updated version of PDD01 for review.

[perl #41633] [CAGE] convert handrolled .IMPORT macros with library function

In ticket [perl #41633], Jerry Gay noted that some handrolled implementations of namespace import macros had crept in to the code. He wrote an import subroutine, and would like it to be used.

[perl #41634] [TODO] warn and abort make if pbc compatibility has changed

Jerry Gay felt that if PBCs need to be regenerated due to incompatibilities, make should inform the user of this. He created ticket [perl #41634] to track this development.

[perl #41636] [PATCH] Updates for PDD06

Klaas-Jan Stol attached a patch for PDD06 to ticket [perl #41636]. It was applied in r17469.

[perl #41637] [PATCH] SMOP; won't compile on MSVC due to declarations not at top of block

In ticket [perl #41637], Klaas-Jan Stol reported that SMOP won't compile with MicroSoft Visual Studio.

[perl #41642] [BUG] tailcall with slurpy gives segfault

Earlier, in ticket [perl #41642], Mehmet Yavuz Selim Soyturk reported a bug.

This week, Jonathan Worthington reported that he had fixed a bug asked someone to check with the latest code. Bob Rogers reported that Mehmet's test case works in r17298, but that it still fails for him even when the patch is applied.

Later, Bob was able to look into the issue further, and found that there are some more serious problems and that he needs to think on how to solve them.

[perl #41658] [TODO] Move all gc source files into a separate directory

Joshua Isom created ticket [perl #41658] to suggest a cleanup of the garbage collection files, which are not located where one would expect to find them. He submitted a patch for it.

Compiler

[perl #41617] "make test-pir" fails on x86 linux, r14402

Eric Hanchrow reported a failing test in ticket [perl #41617]. Audrey Tang wanted to know if the problem still existed in r15386; Eric confirmed it did.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 18-24 Feb, 2007

kudra — 2007-03-04T17:38:58+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"'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'

Language

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13699 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall replaced ¥ is replaced by Z. There was also a change with the XX operator, which became X.

Relief for rw/ro

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13703 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

Parrot Porters

[perl #29994] [BUG] "loadlib $P0, varname" not working correctly

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.

[perl #41235] [PATCH] Add get_name() Method to Namespaces

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.

[perl #41237] [TODO] PMC Class name IDs will require a dot in front

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.

[perl #41529] [BUG]: t/perl/Parrot_Distribution.t test failure

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.

in PIR, a BigInt is turning into a string against my will -- what am I doing wrong?

Eric Hanchrow reported a problem in r16999. Patrick R. Michaud offered some suggestions for correcting the code in question.

[PATCH] #39615: [TODO] get_outer op not defined in PDDs

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which adds the description of get_outer() to PDD20.

[PATCH] updates for docs/faq.pod

Klaas-Jan Stol made some updates to faq.pod which related to ticket [perl #41312].

:anon flag bug?

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.

[PATCH] retry pir/pasm updates for lang/pir

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch to replace his earlier one.

[PATCH] lang/PIR updates

A patch by Klaas-Jan Stol made some corrections to languages/PIR.

[perl #41538] readline kills parrot on files missing a final newline

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.

Q on: #37542: [TODO] core - document behavior of multiple :load subpragmas in same compilation unit

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.

Preening the parrot for show

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.

[perl #40544] [NEW] Test for DOS line endings in Parrot text files

Earlier, in ticket [perl #40544], Paul Cochrane submitted a test which checks for DOS line endings in the Parrot distribution.

As of r17102, it was fixed.

[perl #41548] [Tcl] - internals tests failings

Will Coleda reported a failing test in [perl #41548].

[perl #41549] [PATCH] fixes :vtable pragma for .pbc files

In ticket [perl #41549], Alek Storm submitted a patch in response to [perl #40626] and [perl #41364]. Jonathan Worthington planned to commit it.

Deprecated ops: emit warning?

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.

[PATCH] languages/lua lua.pg Grammar fixes

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch for the Lua grammar file.

Cross-compiling Parrot

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.

[perl #41557] [BUG] addparent established hierarchies don't work with .Super

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].

[perl #41558] [PATCH] Add ops summary doc generator

In ticket [perl #41558], Shawn M Moore submitted a patch which adds a new utility script to create a summary of all the operators.

[perl #39196] [TODO] tests - need to test addmethod

In ticket [perl #39196], Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which adds a test for addmethod.

[perl #41569] [BUG] t/distro/file_metadata.t fails on win32

In ticket [perl #41569], Jerry Gay indicated a problem with a test which fails on Win32.

Preliminary notes for 0.4.9 release

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.

[perl #41576] [BUG] t/pmc/pmethod_test.t fails on x86_64

In ticket [perl #41576], Patrick R . Michaud reported a failure with t/pmc/pmethod_test.t.

[perl #38983] [PDD] review PDD01_overview.pod

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.

[perl #41577] docs/ROADMAP.pod refers to python bytecode translator, pie-thon test suite

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.

[perl #41579] [BUG] t/pmc/ref.t, t/pmc/threads.t file with -C runcore

In ticket [perl #41579], Patrick R . Michaud reported two failing tests. chromatic confirmed that this was not restricted to x86_64.

[perl #41583] Tail calls from within vtable methods broken

Bram Geron reported that tail calls within v-table methods are broken. Ticket [perl #41583] tracks this bug.

[perl #41584] [TODO] Update RELEASE_INSTRUCTIONS with details for updating the website

In ticket [perl #41584], Patrick R . Michaud noted that the release instructions should include a reminder to update the website.

[PATCH] PDD16 NCI update with simple example

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch which contains a simple example which can be added to PDD16. chromatic applied it in r17164.

[perl #41455] [NEW] and [PATCH]: tools/build/ops2pm.pl refactored

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].

[perl #41597] [PATCH] replacing explicit access to $^O in Configure

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.

Compiler

Parrot 0.4.9 released!

Patrick R. Michaud announced the release of Parrot 0.4.9, "Socorro".

cvs-parrot

[svn:parrot] r17107 - trunk/src/stm

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 11-17 Feb, 2007

kudra — 2007-02-25T14:30:27+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

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.

Language

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13582 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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'.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13585 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall removed the quote declarator.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13586 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall's commit changed :to to be the short form for :heredoc.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13587 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

my $temperature is ro

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.

Parrot Porters

Re: [perl #41478] [PATCH] add Test::More::skip()

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.

[perl #41485] [TODO] Add a test for svn:eol-style property

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.

[PATCH] languages/PIR add command line options for output of pirc.pir (Parse/PAST/PIR)

Klaas-Jan Stol created several patches this week as well, namely:

'[PATCH] languages/PIR add command line options for output of pirc.pir (Parse/PAST/PIR)'
'[PATCH] languages/PIR more Tree Transformations'
'[PATCH] languages/PIR updates'
'[PATCH] lang/PIR macros!'
'[PATCH] languages/lua PGE grammar fix'

[svn:parrot-pdd] r16965 - trunk/docs/pdds/draft

Allison Randal updated PDD15 to reflect core conceptual changes to objects.

[perl #40722] [TODO] Tcl - implement [file dirname]

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.

[perl #41496] [TODO] config - profiling options should have their own step in config/init/defaults.pm

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.

[perl #41497] [TODO] config - profiling options are specific to gcc in config/init/defaults.pm

Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #41497] to request that the profiling options in config/init/defaults.pm be marked as being specific to gcc.

[perl #41498] [TODO] create Makefile.PL for CPAN friendliness

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.

[perl #41499] [TODO] config - 32/64 bit architecture setting gcc specific

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].

[perl #41500] [TODO] config - lib directory needs to be set appropriately for 32/64 bit archs

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.

Porting parrot on PDA -- work in progress

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.

[perl #41502] [PATCH] fix auto::sizes configure step

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.

PAST-pm: only PAST::Block allowed at root of PAST

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.

[perl #41508] [BUG] Configure losing flags...

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.

[perl #41511] Parrot_call_sub* Incompatible with Multisubs

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.

Compiler

Get your Google SoC thinking caps on...

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.

cvs-parrot

[svn:parrot] r17012 - in trunk: runtime/parrot/library/Parrot t/compilers/past-pm

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 4-10 February, 2007

kudra — 2007-02-25T09:17:45+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"> 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?'

Language

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13570 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall changed categories to allow multiple dispatch via the longest-token rule.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13575 - doc/trunk/design/syn

A commit by Larry Wall added Q// as a quoting form and removed qn//.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13577 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

recent changes

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.

Parrot Porters

[PATCH] Update pirgrammar.pod

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'.

Q on Calling conventions; parameter order

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.

What Skills Do We Need to Finish Parrot?

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.

[perl #41453] [BUG] Test failure in t/pmc/object-meths.t

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].

Prototype object model for Parrot

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.

[perl #41454] [PATCH] add 2 new tests for object method dispatch

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.

[perl #41455] [NEW] and [PATCH]: tools/build/ops2pm.pl refactored

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.

[perl #41456] [PATCH] add a Super PMC test for addparent-established inheritance trees

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.

[PATCH] Updates for languages/PIR/docs/pirgrammar.pod

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.

Re: Porting parrot on PDA

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.

[PATCH] Updates and fixes for docs/imcc/syntax.pod

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a number of patches for languages/PIR and docs/imcc/syntax.pod:

'[PATCH] update docs/imcc/calling_conventions.pod'
'[PATCH] Update ASTGrammar for lang/PIR'
'docs/imcc/syntax.pod'
'[PATCH] languages/PIR fix string encoding, hex and binary numbers'
'[PATCH] languages/PIR .globalconst '

One patch, '[PATCH] Update pirgrammar.pod', also sparked some discussion.

[perl #40706] [TODO] Tcl - implement [close]

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.

Users

Pugs on Windows

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.

"delete" and maybe a problem with gather

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.

Compiler

dpkg-buildpacke fails due to outdated 10smoke patch

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 29 Jan - 3 Feb, 2007

kudra — 2007-02-24T14:38:29+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

": 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'

Language

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13540 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13543 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13545 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

Typology of auto*crement

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13549 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13550 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

Enhancing array indices

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13555 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13564 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41364] [PATCH] Fixed object vtable method overrides in PIR

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.

[PATCH] PDD22 spec notes and ParrotIO tests

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.

Porting parrot on PDA

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.

[perl #41371] [TODO] review parrot roles & responsibilies doc before next release

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.

[perl #41373] Need test for Clone of HLL info

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #41373] to request a test to replace the ones marked 'todo' which relied on Perl 5 PMCs.

[perl #41374] test MMD with non-perl PMCs

Ticket [perl #41374], initiated by Will Coleda, requested tests for MMD which don't rely on Perl PMCs.

Language Testing

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.

[PATCH] Updates for languages/PIR

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.

What Skills Do We Need to Finish Parrot?

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.

[perl #41380] [PATCH]: docs/roles_responsibilities.pod: Minor grammatical corrections

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].

On PASM and PIR registers

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.

[perl #41386] MANIFEST must die.

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.

[perl #41387] perlcritic.t picking up non-perl files

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.

[perl #41388] Parrot::Distribution doesn't exclude all external perl modules

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.

PBC to C Converter

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.

PMC Tools Test Failure

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.

Q on PIR vs PASM

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.

[PATCH] Update copyright for Parrot --version

A patch by Klaas-Jan Stol contains a correction to make parrot --version give a copyright range of '2001-2007' instead of '2001-2006'.

Copyright chang script and test

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.

Users

take()'s return value

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Too busy for summaries at the moment

kudra — 2007-02-23T16:19:13+00:00

As has probably been observed by the fact that I'm 4 weeks (with today's posting down to 3 weeks, but soon to reach 4 weeks again) behind on Perl 6 summaries, I've been rather busy lately. The summaries have sort of fallen to the end of a long list of things I'm working on.

It started with an unexpected trip I had to make to Seattle at the end of January. Then I was sick for a week, and I recently got back from a vacation to Iceland.

Current and recent projects include:

working,
organizing a European Perl Hackathon,
a redesign of the YAPC::Europe website, and
studying for a calculus exam

Also I have some large personal questions facing me, such as whether I should attend graduate school in the autumn or not.

I expect all this to keep me busy until mid-March at least, and then it'll be time to do my taxes. This probably means that I'll be pretty unavailable until April at least. Maybe I'll see some of you at the hackathon--you can still register until Thursday.

Perl 6 summary, 21-28 January, 2007

kudra — 2007-02-23T15:43:39+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"Take the longest token, lie down and if the unease persists, write some code..."

-- Brad Bowman, in 'DFA/NFA context is non-local'

perl6-language

RAII in Perl6/Parrot

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.

Numeric Semantics

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13523 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

The S13 "is commutative" trait

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.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13529 - doc/trunk/design/syn

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.

Remember: Outlaw to declare a lexical twice in the same scope

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).

DFA/NFA context is non-local

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.

Smooth or Chunky?

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 ];[.

Map on a multislice

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.

perl6-internals

[perl #41185] [BUG]: examples/shootout/regexdna.pir.input: Persistently failing test

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.

Re: [perl #41230] [BUG] t/codingstd/perlcritic.t uses too many resources

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.

[perl #41267] [TODO] rename 'clip' pdd directory to 'draft'

In ticket [perl #41267], Jerry Gay announced that the clip directory had been renamed to draft.

[perl #41280] [PDD] adding methods to subs as objects

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.

[perl #32667] [PATCH] IMCC - documentation needs updating

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.

More embedding questions

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.

repository open for commits

Jerry Gay announced that the repository was now open for commits again, following the recent Parrot release.

[perl #41287] [PATCH] fix 0.4.8 announcement on parrotcode.org

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.

[perl #41291] [BUG} Can't use null PMC with :multi sub

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.

[perl #41292] [PATCH] make languages/cola/{lexer,parser}.c comply with coding standards

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.

Tcl, trace, profiling...

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.

[perl #41293] [BUG]: t/compilers/tge/basic.t: Failed during 'make test' but passed with 'prove'

James Keenan reported a failing make test. This was ticket [perl #41293].

How handle the next parameter of invoke method in a PMC ?

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.

[perl #41310] [CAGE] autogenerated PMC stubs kill compile

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.

[perl #41312] [TODO] - Docs - update FAQ

In ticket [perl #41312], Will Coleda pointed out several outdated facets of the FAQ and requested that they be fixed.

[perl #41317] [PATCH] parrot component/interface stability classification

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.

[perl #41320] [PATCH] Added rename() method to os.pmc

Ticket [perl #41320] contained Kay-Uwe Huell's patch with a rename function. It was applied as r16771.

[perl #41323] [CAGE] convert C<theINTERP> to C<interp>

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.

[perl #41324] [PATCH] Eliminate '//'-style comments

Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to remove // comments, which were giving problems with his compiler. See ticket [perl #41324] for more information.

[perl #41325] [PATCH] Fill in missing pointer cast in

Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to allow Parrot to compile on his old Sun C compiler. He put it in ticket [perl #41325].

[perl #41326] [PATCH] Work around an optimization bug in Sun's WorkShop Compilers 4.2

In ticket [perl #41326], Andy Dougherty submitted a patch to work around an obscure bug in Sun's WorkShop Compilers 4.2.

[perl #41328] [BUG] pmc2c generates unnecessary code for void functions

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.

[perl #41329] [BUG]: Imposition of coding standards breaks tests in t/tools/pmc2cutils/

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.

[perl #41331] Imposition of coding standards breaks tests in tcl.

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.

__init vs. __init_pmc

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.

[PATCH] PIR language using PGE (2)

Klaas-Jan Stol submitted a patch for PIR using PGE. Jerry Gay applied it (with minor changes) as of r16831.

[perl #41353] [PATCH] Extended very limited PIO_unix_pipe() function in src/io/io_unix.c

Kay-Uwe Huell created ticket [perl #41353]. Included was a patch to extend the open function.

perl6-compiler

Parrot 0.4.8 Released

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

European Hackathon News

kudra — 2007-02-07T21:20:52+00:00

European Hackathon News, volume 1

REGISTRATION
This is a reminder that the deadline for accommodations for the hackathon is fast approaching. If you want a room reservation, you must register for the hackathon and either pay online or contact Ann about paying later. The deadline is Friday, 9 February. For more information about the rooms, please refer to: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/hack2007nl/venue.html#accommodations

If you prefer to make alternate arrangements for your accommodation, but wish to attend the hackathon, you still need to register before Thursday, 22 February. There is no cost for this registration. If you have special requests, such as vegetarian food, please contact Ann at the time of registration.

To register, you first need to log in by either using an existing Act profile or creating a new user. Registration will be limited to the first 30 people.

PROJECTS
Since the initial announcement, two additional projects have joined the Parrot/Perl 6 track (hosted by Allison Randal and Jonathan Worthington):

Mark Overmeer will host a track on CPAN6.
Philippe Bruhat will coordinate Act development. This is an excellent opportunity to address any complaints you may have with the hackathon registration system ;)

CONTACT INFORMATION
Ann Barcomb, kudra -at- domaintje.com
Use the subject 'hackathon' and resend if you do not get a response within 48 hours.

European Perl Hackathon

kudra — 2007-01-31T18:46:58+00:00

You are invited to attend the European Perl Hackathon in Arnhem, the Netherlands, from 2 - 4 March, 2007. Familiarity with the featured projects is not required; you need only bring a laptop and a willingness to join in.

Although there is no fee to attend the hackathon, you are required to pay for your own accommodation and transportation. However, it is possible to book a room at the venue location when you register for the hackathon, at the price of 74 for two nights plus breakfast.

Space is limited to 30 participants, and registration is required. Reservations for accommodations made through the hackathon must be made by 9 February; reservations for the event itself must be made no later than 22 February.

For more information about the event, please refer to http://conferences.yapceurope.org/hack2007nl

Perl 6 summary, 14-20 January, 2007

kudra — 2007-01-21T20:01:18+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"For the first time in the two months I've been working on Parrot, 'make test' completely succeeded -- and with some TODO tests passing, to boot!"

-- James Keenan, sharing the good news in 'All tests passing!'

Language

Numeric Semantics

When we last looked at this thread, a subthread discussing Euclidean versus conventional definitions of modulus was underway. The original thread started when Luke Palmer asked for a clear definition of when math should use floating points and when it should be integer-based.

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.

Meanwhile, 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.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41237] [TODO] PMC Class name IDs will require a dot in front

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.

Patrick R. Michaud also spoke out in favor of the dot.

Global Variables in tools/build/ops2pm.pl: What is their rationale? Could they be refactored?

James Keenan wondered if he should look at refactoring tools/build/ops2pm.pl. Following his successful refactor of pmc2c.pl, he has had requests to look at other build tools. His primary suggestion was to eliminate global variables, but first he hoped to hear suggestions from people who had worked on the file, in case there was a reason for the global variables.

Jerry Gay felt that the global variables were a result of lax coding practices early in the project. He agreed with refactoring.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r16594 - trunk/docs/pdds

Allison Randal added specifications for the I/O object iterator API, which closed ticket [perl #33962].

[perl #41263] [PDD] should/can high-level classes be constructed at compile-time?

In ticket [perl #41263], Allison Randal split out part of the problem described in ticket [perl #40443]. The issue is that classes are only constructed at runtime, which has negative impacts. She suggested possible workarounds.

[perl #41264] [PDD] should properties get serialized?

Allison Randal created ticket [perl #41264], which was previously part of ticket [perl #40443]. She noted that properties are not serialized, so a program compiled to PBC won't run.

[perl #41265] [TODO] PGE: refactor pod_comment rule into PGE/Util.pbc

Patrick R. Michaud created ticket [perl #41265]. He would like to have a common rule in PGE::Util which can be imported in to individual grammars. The rule would describe how to use a pod_comment rule for parsing POD.

[perl #41266] [PDD] object instantiation, new method

In ticket [perl #41266], Allison Randal made a note to consider object instantiation as a method call on a class object instead of an opcode on a type ID. Kevin Tew voiced his support for the idea.

[perl #41267] [TODO] rename 'clip' pdd directory to 'draft'

In ticket [perl #41267], Jerry Gay proposed that the clip directory be renamed as draft because the directory is now being used for drafts rather than notes.

[perl #41268] [PATCH] Fix C<make world> error at src/pdb.c

Lee Duhem reported an error seen when doing a make world. A patch to fix this was attached to ticket [perl #41268].

[perl #41269] [PATCH] fix some failed test in F<t/compilers/tge/grammar.t>

Lee Duhem attached a patch to fix some failing tests to ticket [perl #41269]. Patrick R. Michaud asked Lee to verify the bug in the current revision; he thought it had been fixed in r16520.

All tests passing!

An excited James Keenan reported that he had just seen his first instance of all tests passing, with the added bonus of some TODO tests also passing.

Acknowledgements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Five Things You Didn't Know About Me...

kudra — 2007-01-16T14:01:06+00:00

It seems I was tagged by chromatic.

1) I prefer to have cavities filled without anesthetic.

2) I like to play the original version of Trival Pursuit but rarely get the opportunity to do so.

3) I know all the lyrics to Poison's 'Fallen Angel' but I couldn't say why.

4) I once worked delivering phone books. I lasted two days at that job.

5) My first word was not 'no' but 'dog'. 'No' was only my second word.

Tradition suggests I should tag five people, but I won't: Audrey, Yuval, Woolfy, and Gaal

Perl 6 summary, 7-13 January, 2007

kudra — 2007-01-14T18:29:31+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"...I think you're the path toward sanity."

-- Larry Wall, in 'Patterns'

Language

Numeric Semantics

Earlier, Luke Palmer asked for a clear definition of when math should use floating points and when it should be integer-based. This led to a great deal of discussion.

This week, a subthread started by TSa continued from Darren Duncan's previous post which proposed distinct operators for integer division/modulus and non-integer division/modulus. TSa felt that modulus should be defined by the Euclidean definition. Mark J. Reed proposed to define it in the conventional way. Several other people replied to the thread.

Patterns

Luke Palmer suggested removing two items from the smart match table in S03, namely the Hash and Array with Any on the right side. He preferred an extensible ~~ operator, which would allow him to define his own patterns. In short, with his proposal, ~~ would be singly-dispatched based upon the right argument, which would determine how the left was interpreted.

Larry Wall replied that he was concerned about the consistency between compile time and run time, but that was in fact also an argument against an anonymous Any on the right.

Jonathan Lang had some suggestions on how to implement reverse test instances. There was a brief discussion between Jonathan and Larry on this subject. Ashley Winters also offered a comment.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13515 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall committed a change to S03 which affects smartmatching. He noted that it is still subject to change. Nicholas Clark and Luke Palmer offered some suggestions, which Larry responded to. TSa also commented on the thread.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13516 - doc/trunk/design/syn

In this commit to S03, Larry Wall clarified how the Grammar pattern finds its top rule. Jerry Gay questioned the use of top as a lowercase reserved word; he suggested TOP.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13519 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Another commit to S03 by Larry Wall modified smartmatching semantics. Darren Duncan noted a few possible errors, and Luke Palmer added some thoughts. This led Larry to consider a different approach, to avoid confusion.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13522 - doc/trunk/design/syn

This commit to S03 by Larry Wall included renaming LazyCat to Cat; eliminating .exists, replacing it with .contains; and removing Subset and Superset types.

Suggestion: minmax operator

Joe Gottman proposed an infix minmax operator, which could be used as a reduction operator.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41196] [PATCH]: File misplaced in MANIFEST

In ticket [perl #41196], James Keenan reported that the README file in t/tools/README mentioned in the MANIFEST did not exist. He included a patch to remove the entry from the MANIFEST.

[perl #41197] Does change to config/gen/makefiles/dynoplibs_pl.in cause make to fail?

James Keenan created ticket [perl #41197] to report problems with a failing make. He elaborated on the problem, which happened just a couple of hours after his last successful build.

use diff for string in some test

Lee Duhem proposed a facility for string differences in Test::More which could be used to perform tasks like ignoring insignificant whitespace. This would allow tests to continue passing even if the source had been changed to remove undesired whitespace.

Nicholas Clark felt that patches should be checked against the test suite, and that there were dangers in relaxing the tests to allow a broader definition of a string. Bernhard Schmalhofer replied that he felt t/examples/past.t was one of the few examples where ignoring whitespace would be useful, and noted that it is now being handled with a regular expression.

[BUG]: io/io_win32.c

Xi Wang suggested a change in io/io_win32.c to prevent a crash.

[perl #41198] [TODO] tools/dev/mk_manifest_and_skip.pl should be aware of MANIFEST.generated

In ticket [perl #41198], Bernhard Schmalhofer pointed out that several files are in the repository and mentioned in MANIFEST.generated, but that they are added to MANIFEST by tools/dev/mk_manifest_and_skip.pl. Jerry Gay explained that the files belonged in MANIFEST, not MANIFEST.generated. Paul Cochrane fixed this in r16482.

[perl #41201] [TODO] Remove temporary conf hack in Configure.pl

In ticket [perl #41201], Paul Cochrane noted that there is a temporary hack in Configure.pl which should be implemented properly.

PIR grammar in PGE

Klaas-Jan Stol was working on implementing a PIR grammar which allows more complex expressions to be written. He submitted a patch of the grammar to date.

[perl #40905] [CAGE] coding standards hammer too big

Ticket [perl #40905] was addressed with r16498. This task called for certain files to be exempted from coding standards.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r16498 - in trunk: . docs/pdds

This commit, by Paul Cochrane, adds a section explaining which files can be excluded from coding standards tests.

[perl #41214] [CAGE]: files from 'make languages-test' survive 'make clean'

In ticket [perl #41214], Patrick R. Michaud pointed out that make languages-test generates some files which aren't removed in a subsequent make clean or make realclean. He stated that, at the minimum, make clean should remove them, but that perhaps the tests should clean them up. Nicholas Clark commented that a pitfall with the tests doing the cleanup is that the files aren't deleted if the tests crash. Patrick agreed that in either case, make clean should remove them.

[perl #39905] [TODO] TGE - line number reporting.

In ticket [perl #39905], Will Coleda requested that compiled PIR files report error lines against the original .tg file. Patrick R. Michaud wanted to know if there was an imcc pragma or other standard approach to getting the correct line number. Will Coleda referenced a document with this information, and Patrick reported the issue resolved in r16509.

[perl #41217] [BUG] warnings in refactored calling convention code (src/inter_call.c)

Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41217] to report that he had been unable to eliminate the warnings which were being generated in src/inter_call.c.

[perl #41218] [BUG] warnings in imcc lexer code

In ticket [perl #41218], Jerry Gay reported some warnings coming from the imcc lexer code.

Re: [perl #38584] [BUG] Punie test failures in set_node method on Solaris/SPARC

Andy Dougherty replied to Will Coleda about a test file which no longer exists. He stated that he did not mind closing the ticket ([perl #38584]), because the problem was probably not about Punie, but how Punie and PGE interacted. He included some information about his recent attempts to repeat the tests.

Allison Randal asked Andy if there was any way that someone could get access to the machine he was running the tests on, as they were not able to duplicate the problems.

[perl #41224] [BUG] SKIP behaves differently in Test::Builder and Test/Builder.pir

In ticket [perl #41224], Jerry Gay noted that Test::Builder and Test skip differently. He wondered which was the correct way to handle things. He felt that Perl's 'ok' was better than Parrot's 'not ok' because the Perl module had been around for a while. chromatic agreed with Jerry and changed the Parrot module in r16553.

[perl #41226] [TODO] hunt through DEPRECATED.pod and find things to deprecate

In ticket [perl #41226], Jerry Gay suggested that people could look through DEPRECATED.pod and deprecate things which have been scheduled for deprecation for some time.

[perl #41227] [TODO] update NEWS in preparation for 0.4.8 release

Ticket [perl #41227] is a reminder that the NEWS needs to be updated in preparation for release 0.4.8. Ticket [perl #41228] makes the same point about the CREDITS file.

[perl #41230] [BUG] t/codingstd/perlcritic.t uses too many resources

Jerry Gay complained that the perlcritic coding standards test was using too many 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.

[perl #41231] [TODO] exempt languages/ files from perlcritic testing

In ticket [perl #41231], Jerry Gay noted that coding standards must apply to core code, but not to languages.

[PATCH] Add get_name() Method to Namespaces

Earlier, chromatic submitted a patch to implement get_name() as specified in PDD21. Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41235] to track the status of the patch, which he would like to see added before release 0.4.8. chromatic said that he hadn't applied it because a deprecation cycle was needed for the name() to get_name() renaming.

[perl #41237] [TODO] PMC Class name IDs will require a dot in front

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.

[perl #41238] [TODO] Perl PMCs

Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41238] as a placeholder for an item in DEPRECATED.pod, namely removing unused PMCS PerlString, PerlUndef, etc.

[perl #41239] [TODO] undertested pmcs

Jerry Gay made a list of some of the core PMCs which he feels are undertested. The ticket [perl #41239] suggests that more tests be created.

[perl #41241] [BUG] Tcl doesn't compile/run on win32.

Will Coleda requested additional information on ticket [perl #41241], about Tcl not running on Win32.

[perl #41243] Link on Win32 with Borland C++

Steve Peters reported that Parrot can now be compiled with Borland C++ on Win32, but that this had linking problems. The ticket is [perl #41243].

[perl #41244] [TODO] update copyright data to 2007

Jerry Gay reminded people to update copyright notices from 2006 to 2007. This was ticket [perl #41244].

[perl #41247] [tru64] failure in tge/parser

In ticket [perl #41247], Jarkko Hietaniemi reported a failure on tru64 for tge/parser. Patrick R. Michaud reported that it had been fixed in r16570.

[perl #41248] [tru64] failure in pge_util

In ticket [perl #41248], Jarkko Hietaniemi reported a failure with pge_util on the tru64 platform. Patrick R. Michaud reported that it was fixed in r16570.

[perl #41249] [tru64] core dump in t/pmc/interp_3.pir

Jarkko Hietaniemi reported a core dump in t/pmc/io_1.pir on tru64, in ticket [perl #41249]

[perl #41250] [tru64] failures in p5regex/p5rx

In ticket [perl #41250], Jarkko Hietaniemi informed about failures in p5regex/p5rx on the tru64 platform. Patrick R. Michaud reported that he believed the failures were resolved in r16593 and asked for a confirmation.

[perl #41251] [tru64] core dump from t/pmc/resizablebooleanarray_20.pasm

Ticket [perl #41251] holds a report from Jarkko Hietaniemi about a core dump caused by t/pmc/resizeablebooleanarray_20.pasm.

[perl #41253] [tru64] core dump from t/dynoplibs/myops_3.pir

Jarkko Hietaniemi reported a core dump on tru64 from t/dynoplibs/myops_3.pir. This was done in ticket [perl #41253].

[perl #41254] [tru64] core dump from library/pg

In ticket [perl #41254], Jarkko Hietaniemi gave information about a core dump from library/pg on tru64.

[perl #41255] [tru64] core dump from t/pmc/pmc_5.pasm

In ticket [perl #41255], Jarkko Hietaniemi reported core dumps from t/pmc/pmc_5.pasm with tru64.

[perl #41256] [tru64] NaNQ failures in t/pmc/complex

In ticket [perl #41256], Jarkko Hietaniemi reported that many tests in t/pmc/complex fail because of nonportable assumptions about floating point operations.

[perl #41257] [tru64] core dump in t/pmc/io_1.pir

Jarkko Hietaniemi created ticket [perl #41257] to report a core dump from t/pmc/pmc_5.pasm on tru64.

Tcl windows make problems

Klaas-Jan Stol looked at why Tcl cannot build on windows. He was unable to fix it, but passed on what he had gleaned from his experience. Matt Diephouse appreciated the information, and committed a fix to resolve the issue. Jerry Gay confirmed that r16596 worked.

embedding

Isaac Freeman was wondering how communication between the embedding program and the scripts run by the interpreter is implemented. He offered to implement it if it was likely to be used. Jeff Horwitz pointed Isaac to some code Jeff wrote over a year ago, which could be used as a starting point.

Users

99problems: 9, 11, 13

Gabriele Renzi worked problem 13 from Ovid's list of 99 Perl 6 examples. The code was submitted, and the question of if it should be committed was asked. Ovid replied that if there's a bit, there should be a commit.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 31 Dec 2006 - 6 Jan, 2007

kudra — 2007-01-11T14:51:00+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

Remember, the next Parrot bug day is 13 January, 2007. Join the rest of the team at #parrot (irc.perl.org) to work on closing as many bugs as possible before the next Parrot release.

Language

Numeric Semantics

Earlier, Luke Palmer asked for a clear definition of when math should use floating points and when it should be integer-based. In response, Darren Duncan highlighted a recent #perl6 discussion on the topic. He proposed distinct operators to allow users to explicitly choose the math mode. Jonathan Lang mentioned that in the one other instance where there were type-specific versions of a common operator, a third 'generic' version was required. Dr. Ruud suggested giving numerics multiple faces.

More recently, Larry Wall responded to the thread, adding his thoughts and musing on whether standard Perl should include convenience operators like idiv or if there should simply be pragmatic support for them. A great deal of discussion followed.

Parrot Porters

[perl #41157] [PATCH] Fix a typo in t/op/cmp-nonbranch.t

In ticket [perl #41157], Lee Duhem supplied a patch to correct a typographical error.

[perl #41158] [BUG] Here Docs in test C<cmp> cause t/op/cmp-nonbranch.t abnormal exit

Lee Duhem reported an error in a test; this was done in ticket [perl #41158]. Jerry Gay reported that he believed the issue was resolved in r16381 and asked Lee to check it. Lee reported that he thought it was a bug, resolved in ticket [perl #41165].

Punie ported to PAST-pm

Allison Randal announced that she had modified Punie to work with PAST-pm. She also gave her thoughts on working with PAST-pm, which Patrick R. Michaud replied to.

[perl #41163] [PATCH] suppress uninitialized value warning in config/inter/yacc.pm

In ticket [perl #41163], Lee Duhem submitted a patch to suppress some uninitialized value warnings. Jonathan Worthington had a question about the patch, and Lee agreed with the suggestion.

[perl #41164] [BUG] 'make world' fails with msvc due to unresolved external

Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #41164] to report a bug, which was resolved in r16383.

[perl #41165] [PATCH] appropriate handle CRLE in Here Docs

Ticket [perl #41165] included a patch from Lee Duhem to correct a problem he reported earlier in '[perl #41158] [BUG] Here Docs in test C cause t/op/cmp-nonbranch.t abnormal exit '.

[svn:parrot-pdd] r16391 - trunk/docs/pdds/clip

With this commit, Allison Randal moved the I/O PDD out of the clip directory, making it more official. Discussion continued on 'I/O PDD - ready for implementation'.

I/O PDD - ready for implementation

After moving the I/O PDD out of the clip directory (see '[svn:parrot-pdd] r16391 - trunk/docs/pdds/clip'), Allison Randal announced that implementation can begin on the details in the document. She also welcomed comments.

Jonathan Worthington replied that he liked what he had read, but felt that more information was needed on how role composition should work. Allison replied that she was still at work on defining roles in the objects PDD. She offered a short explanation of how it would probably work.

Some discussion on how to implement error values also took place, with Jonathan, Allison and Larry Wall contributing.

[perl #41168] graceful "no compiler" error message?

In ticket [perl #41168], Will Coleda added a request for a 'no compiler found' error message in configure.pl.

[perl #41171] [PATCH] Fix to t/src/compiler.t so Parrot passes tests on Solaris

Steve Peters submitted a patch as ticket [perl #41171].

Re: [perl #41020] [PATCH] pmc2c.pl functionality extracted into separate package

Earlier James Keenan supplied some patches. After some discussion, the patches were recently applied as r16345.

However, James felt there were still some problems with the patches. He provided a new patch in the hopes that it would solve the problem.

[NEW]: README for t/tools/pmc2cutils/

James Keenan submitted a README file for t/tools/pmc2utils, which was applied as r16409.

[perl #41173] [PATCH] Intel C++ is not really gcc

Steve Peters created ticket [perl #41173] to report a problem caused by the Intel C++ compiler defining __GNUC__ although it is not compatible with gcc. He provided a patch which attempts to address the issue. It was applied in r16412.

[perl #41174] [PATCH] Silence warnings in

In ticket [perl #41174], Steve Peters contributed a patch to silence warnings in the Intel C++ compiler when 0 is used as an enum without being cast. It was applied in r16414.

[perl #41175] [PATCH] Remove unused label

In ticket [perl #41175], Steve Peters supplied a patch to remove an unused label in src/inter_call.c. It was applied in r16415.

[perl #41180] [PATCH] Determine compiler before processing hints

Steve Peters noted in ticket [perl #41180] that sometimes the compiler should be known before processing the hints. He supplied a patch to correct the issue, which was applied as r16416.

[perl #41182] [PATCH] Preliminary support for suncc on Linux

Steve Peters created a patch to add initial support for compiling with suncc on Linux. This was submitted as ticket [perl #41182]. It was committed as r16417.

[perl #41185] [BUG]: examples/shootout/regexdna.pir.input: Persistently failing test

In ticket [perl #41185], James Keenan reported a problem with a failing test in shootout.t on Mac OSX.

[perl #41186] [BUG]: tools/build/ops2pm.pl: Variable used in both package scope and loop iteration

Ticket [perl #41186] was created by James Keenan to report a possible bug in ops2pm.pl. He wondered if it was intentional that a variable was used in two different scopes. His feeling was that using the same variable name would confuse someone.

[perl #41187] [PATCH] fix failed test t/examples/past.t

Lee Duhem reported that r16418 broke a test. He supplied a patch, but felt that there might be a better solution. Ticket [perl #41187] follows this report.

Users

gather { if $xy.was_taken { ... } }

Earlier, Gilbert R. Röhrbein asked if there is a way to look inside a gather-block if something was already taken. He included some example code of how he thought it would work.

Gabriele Renzi replied with a code correction, but noted that it would not work on Pugs 6.2.13.

99 problems in Perl6: problem 28

Gabriele Renzi decided to look at problem #28 from Ovid's list of 99 problems in Perl 6. Gabriele included a solution, but wondered if there was a better way to solve the exercise. Ovid suggested checking in the code, if it passed tests. Gaal Yahas provided the commit bit.

99 problems in Perl6: 32 and a question on number coercion

Gabriele Renzi provided an answer to problem number #32 from the list of 99 problems in Perl 6 and added it to the repository. Gabriele wondered what the expected behavior was for gcd. Steffen Schwigon had some questions on the code, which Gabriele answered. Steffen Schwigon

perl6-ish idiom for code and tests in one file

Gabriele Renzi inquired what the Perl 6 idiom would be for keeping code and tests in the same file. Juerd liked the idea of a macro or a standard subroutine, as did Gaal Yahas. Larry Wall offered an alternative using MAIN, but noted that autocalls to MAIN are not yet implemented. He suggested a temporary workaround.

Compiler

[PATCH] fix wrong $include_path (of parrot) in Makefile.PL

Lee Duhem submitted a patch to fix an incorrect Parrot include path. He noted that he is still seeing an error.

Acknowlegements

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.

I apologize for the lateness and brevity of this summary, which are due to ongoing computer problems.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 24-30 December, 2006

kudra — 2006-12-31T19:21:34+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"Grrr, otta profefreed my onw righting occashionaly."

-- Larry Wall's commit message for r13508--one typo correction of many

Language

Numeric Semantics

Luke Palmer wanted a clear definition of when math should use floating points and when it should be integer-based. In response, Darren Duncan highlighted a recent #perl6 discussion on the topic. He proposed distinct operators to allow users to explicitly choose the math mode. Jonathan Lang mentioned that in the one other instance where there were type-specific versions of a common operator, a third 'generic' version was required. Dr. Ruud suggested giving numerics multiple faces.

Parrot Porters

Re: [perl #41020] [PATCH] pmc2c.pl functionality extracted into separate package

Earlier, James Keenan supplied some patches which he noted were not completely functional.

This week, chromatic made a few suggestions on the style of the code. James explained that some of his choices had been dictated by the fact that this was maintenance coding.

In another subthread, James stated that he had found a good way to run the tests. They are meant to be run before make.

After Kevin Tew reported some failing tests, James requested the output with the failing tests. Will Coleda suggested that perhaps James could make the tests give a helpful error message if they are run at the wrong time. James added the suggested patch.

chromatic sent James his test results. With the newest patches, everything worked. chromatic committed them as r16345.

Building Parrot::Embed on Windows XP / Visual C++

Ron Blaschke reported two warnings he had seen from trying to build Parrot::Embed on Windows/VC8. He had some questions on how to proceed. chromatic and Ron tried to find a patch which would fix the problems. A solution was applied as r16229.

[perl #41125] [PATCH] Fix small typo in root.in

Nikolay Ananiev's patch in ticket [perl #41125] was applied as r16239.

[perl #41128] [PATCH] Fix #41122: ParrotObjects don't call init_pmc vtable

In ticket [perl #41128], Matt Diephouse submitted a patch but didn't commit it because it affected code other people are maintaining. chromatic agreed with the patch because it didn't break any tests or modify the external interface.

Creating Keys in PIR

chromatic discovered that writing tests for keyed variants is painful. He wanted to see working PIR for creating a key for a nested namespace. Bob Rogers supplied a patch and wondered if it was what chromatic had had in mind.

Re: [perl #41132] [BUG] Segfault in Parrot_call_sub_ret_int

Nikolay Ananiev created ticket [perl #41132] to deliver a patch. Jonathan Worthington replied that he had applied the patch, because it was consistent with Parrot_call_sub. He asked if Nikolay could look at related code to see if similar fixes were needed. Bob Rogers explained the underlying problem as he saw it.

chromatic wondered if it would be possible to create some documentation on how contexts, interpreters and code segments work. Bob said he'd try, but that he was just learning about code segments as well.

[PATCH] make pdump's output about debug segment more consistent

Lee Duhem submitted a patch to make pdump's output more consistent. This was ticket [perl #41140]. It was applied as r16269.

GC problem in parrot_pass_args to a tailcall (r16239)

Bob Rogers wrote about a segmentation fault which is triggered during argument passing after a tailcall. He gave an analysis of the problem and provided a patch. However, he hoped that there was a better option.

[PATCH] Add get_name() Method to Namespaces

chromatic supplied a patch to implement get_name() as specified in PDD21. He did not check it in because it changed the API.

[perl #41141] [PATCH][Win32][VC] Minor display cleanup during compilation

In ticket [perl #41141], Ron Blaschke reported a problem with compilation output on Windows. He supplied a patch to correct this.

[perl #41144] [PATCH] refresh front page of parrotcode.org

Allison Randal submitted a patch as [perl #41144]. The patch cleans up the main web page at Parrotcode.org. James E Keenan wondered who applied these types of patches. Will Coleda applied the patch and gave instructions on how to acquire commit access to the website.

Mac OS X Concurrency

Allison Randal gave the URL to an article on Mac OS X concurrency.

Exceedingly lightweight C embedding

Allison Randal posted a link on the topic.

Users

gather { if $xy.was_taken { ... } }

Gilbert R. Röhrbein asked if there is a way to look inside a gather-block if something was already taken. He included some example code of how he thought it would work.

Acknowlegements

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.

Happy New Year!

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 17-23 December, 2006

kudra — 2006-12-25T18:52:27+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"Short answer: absolutely.

"Long answer: emphatically not."

-- Larry Wall, in 'RAII in Perl6/Parrot'

Language

supertyping

Earlier, TSa asked about supertyping, specifically if supertyping will exist in Perl 6. Larry Wall wanted to see some more complicated use cases which would demonstrate that the concept was useful rather than simply an aspect of type theory. Several other people contributed to the thread.

This week, Jonathan Lang addressed TSa's other question of what would happen if an object's type changed while its identity was preserved. Tsa replied to the subthread.

RAII in Perl6/Parrot

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.

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.

Parrot Porters

[perl #33962] readline returns one too many lines

Allison Randal reviewed ticket [perl #33962], which was created almost a year ago by Matt Diephouse to report that the readline opcode returns too many lines. She decided to leave the ticket open and link it to the I/O PDD ticket.

Re: [perl #34994] [TODO] make useful parts of Parrot config available at runtime

Leopold Toetsch responded to ticket [perl #34994], which was created in April. He noted that there had been several attempts to solve the issue, and the only working scheme was to link with an object file which had the path inside. He left it as 'todo'.

[perl #39997] [PATCH] PGE P5 Test Cleanup

Patrick R. Michaud and Paul Cochrane looked at ticket [perl #39997], which was written in July. Patrick felt that it was safe to close the ticket, because all 'skip' and 'todo' markers had been factored out of the regex test files. Paul resolved the ticket.

Re: [perl #40361] [PATCH] #40278 [CAGE] perl coding standards coda. (cont.)

Ticket [perl #40361] from September was revived and elicited a great deal of discussion between Paul Cochrane, Chris Dolan, Bob Rogers, Allison Randal, Lee Duhem, Patrick R. Michaud, chromatic, and Nicholas Clark.

It started with Paul suggesting that the ticket could be closed once a decision was made on where formatting information for emacs and vim should be located. Chris mentioned a limitation with the verbose form of the Emacs settings. Bob elaborated, offering a patch as a work-around.

Allison suggested removing all emacs and vim settings from the source code files. She felt that having the tests check for correct formatting addressed the issue without the maintenance costs of editor tips. Patrick and chromatic agreed with her suggestion.

Paul thought that editor hints reduce the amount of cage cleaning work by ensuring that code contributions use the correct style. Nicholas Clark pointed out that the alternative, top-level editor settings, assumes that all a developer's projects use the same coding standard.

After further discussion on options, Allison proposed that for the time being, hints would be left out of Perl files with __END__ or __DATA__ blocks. A future task would be for someone to figure out a way to encourage good habits, without cluttering the source code or assuming that everyone uses emacs or vim. Paul updated the Perl::Critic policy accordingly, and made a note in PDD07.

[perl #40950] [PATCH] Compiling Parrot with the new Borland C++

Steve Peters added a reminder to ticket [perl #40950] that a patch still needs to be applied for compiling Parrot with Borland C++.

[perl #41064] Not-so-new 'make' failures on Darwin

James Keenan was happy to report in ticket [perl #41064] that further suggestions from Will Coleda fixed his problem.

Side effect between exit & .HLL

Last week, François Perrad showed some example code where an error of 'no exception handler' was seen when a .HLL directive was added before a simple subroutine. This week he supplied a patch to address the issue.

[perl #41095] [BUG] Segfault in test.exe during Configuration

In ticket [perl #41095], Nikolay Ananiev reported a segmentation fault on Win32. Jonathan Worthington thanked him for the report, and stated that other solutions were being looked at.

[perl #40802] Investigate Supposed JIT Bug with if/unless Optimization

Jonathan Worthington responded to Matt Diephouse's ticket [perl #40802]. He replied that the bug had been fixed, so he removed the comment from the code.

[perl #40816] open opcode creates file if it doesn't exist

Jonathan Worthington responded to open ticket [perl #40816] to clarify that he did not think that it was a bug for '+<' to be the default mode. Jerry Gay felt that it was a bug, unless it was explicitly documented that 'open' would create a file as default.

[perl #40801] [TODO] Rename enter_nci_method to something better

Matt Diephouse created ticket [perl #40801] to request a new name for enter_nci_method. Kevin Tew suggested register_nci_method.

[perl #41099] [PATCH] root.in Makefile and CREDITS

Eric B. Lubow created ticket [perl #41099] to include a patch to the makefile. Paul Cochrane noted that there were two patches and asked which one should be applied. Eric clarified, and Paul applied the patch as r16183.

[perl #41102] [PATCH] On Win32 with Visual C++, nmake was not automatically selected if mingw was also found on the system

David Woldrich reported a problem with the Parrot configuration script and included a patch, which was applied as r16129. Ticket [perl #41102] tracked the bug.

[perl #41103] [BUG] stdin.'readline'() segfaults on systems w/o readline support

In ticket [perl #41103], Patrick R. Michaud reported a segmentation fault.

[perl #41104] [PATCH] Building on MinGW is disrupted by the presence of /bin/sh.exe on the PATH, docs explain required environment change

David Woldrich's ticket [perl #41104] contained a patch which was applied as r16187.

[perl #41105] [PATCH] Silence a warning on Cygwin

Steve Peters created a patch to eliminate some warnings on Cygwin. It was applied as r16177 and can be viewed as ticket [perl #41105].

Generated .pm files in MANIFEST

Paul Cochrane wanted to know why some files, which are auto-generated, are mentioned in MANIFEST instead of MANIFEST.generated. He planned to move them if there were no objections.

[perl #31652] [TODO] Win32 - Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

In ticket [perl #31652], chromatic asked if the toolkit was still required, now that ICU is available. Jonathan Worthington replied that the toolkit was one of the easiest ways to get a C compiler for Windows, and therefore it was still useful to have it documented. Ron Blaschke commented that he thought it was going to be discontinued.

Jonathan Worthington requested a patch for readme.win32.pod, which Ron agreed to write.

[perl #41110] [PATCH] tru64: compile (src/nci.c) and runtime (src/memory.c)

Jarkko Hietaniemi created ticket [perl #41110] to provide patches, which were applied as r16208.

[perl #39802] [PATCH] [CAGE] turning up the warnings levels in gcc as much as we can

Some time ago, Kevin Tew created ticket [perl #39802] to offer a patch to increase warning levels in gcc. Paul Cochrane applied a modified version of the patch but asked what version of gcc some of the flags belonged to, as they did not work with his gcc. Kevin replied.

Re: [perl #39742] [BUG] installed parrot conflicts with dev parrot.

A while ago, Will Coleda reported in ticket [perl #39742] that there was a conflict between an installed version of Parrot and a development version.

Recently, Leopold Toetsch reported that it seemed like a BSD linker issue, because he couldn't verify the problem on Linux. David Landgren was able to verify that the problem is not resolved.

More Undef vs. Null...

Will Coleda wanted to know if Hash and Array keys are meant to have different results when keys are unset. Leopold's opinion was that the .Undefs returned by Arrays are a legacy, and that .Null is correct.

Jonathan Worthington submitted a patch which changes the PMC to use .Null. However, he did not want to apply it until there was a design decision, and until he'd had a chance to fix some of the code which expected to receive .Undef.

Patrick R. Michaud added that there are several places where .Undef was expected. He had no strong feelings about one design over another, but wanted people to be aware of the impact the change would have.

Jerry Gay felt that it would take a coordinated effort and suggested a dedicated day for the change, with community involvement.

Allison Randall gave the decision in favor of consistent use of null. She requested that someone add a note about the change in DEPRECATED.pod.

[perl #40253] [PATCH] [CAGE] always cast printf("%p") to (void *)

Ticket [perl #40253] received an update from Paul Cochrane, who asked if the patch should still be applied. Will Coleda was satisfied with whatever portions of the patch Paul had been able to apply. This was done as r16211.

Assertions and MMD (on Windows XP)

Ron Blaschke had some problems with compiling Parrot on Win XP with Visual C++ when assertions were enabled. He wanted to know if anyone else had this problem, and why the assertion checks if the lowest two bits of a function pointer are zero. chromatic explained that those two bits will be zero if the pointer is raw. Leopold Toetsch added that it was a hack, and the solution was to replace the table with an MMD cache representation.

Janitor Tasks

chromatic reported that he was creating the next Perl.com newsletter and needed a list of Cage Cleaner tasks suitable for someone with Perl and C skills, but very little free time?

Bind to an Unspecified Port

Matt Diephouse is writing a PIR socket library. He found that if he uses '0' as the desired port, the OS will select a port, but that Parrot offers no way to discover what the port was. He included a patch which fixed this for UNIX, and requested help with the Windows version.

Users

Unwanted scalar references

Ovid thanked the mailing list for answering some of his earlier questions. His latest question was how to dereference an unexpected scalar reference.

hello, does anybody who knows the svn respo of synopsis docs?

Fayland Lam asked for the location of the synopsis repository. Audrey Tang replied with the repository URL.

Junctions as arguments (Pugs bug)

Ovid included a code snippet where he was casting a junction as a string and received unexpected results. He wanted to know what the proper response was, in order to write a test.

Jonathan Rockway was not sure what output could be expected from say-ing a junction. He saw two possibilities, and thought that Ovid's expectation was better, but wanted to hear other opinions before tests were added.

Larry Wall answered that what Ovid described was standard autothreading behavior, as described in S09.

Compiler

take: bug or feature?

Ovid posted some code which was failing with the latest Pugs and asked if there was a problem with the code or Pugs. Sean O'Rourke also thought it was a bug. Ovid later confirmed that it was a bug and it was being worked on.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 10-16 December, 2006

kudra — 2006-12-17T09:47:22+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"With the little sense of smell I have left, this smells like INTERCAL's 'COME FROM' statement to me..."

-- Larry Wall, who has a cold, in 'supertyping'

Language

supertyping

In this thread, TSa brought up the concept of supertyping again. The example of Square <: Rectangle was included, along with others. TSa's question involved an example where the object's type was changed while its identity was preserved. Additionally, TSa asked if supertyping will exist in Perl 6, and if so, how would 'superdoes' and 'superis' concepts be expressed.

Jonathan Lang attempted to rewrite the question for a larger audience. He explained that the suggestion was to go from specific to general, rather than the other way around.

Jonathan then noted that there are four approaches to code reuse, three which add functionality, and one which restricts it. This led him to see supertyping in terms of exemptions for the fourth case. Luke Palmer responded with an equation to express the relationship, and his answers to the questions of whether it should be illegal to add a required method to A if B does not implement it, given role A superdoes B, and if a required method for A should automatically become a required method for B.

There was some discussion on how 'superdoes' would be written, with 'done_by', 'bequeath', and 'by' being proposed. Ruud H.G. van Tol offered more suggestions than a thesaurus.

Larry Wall first wanted to see use cases which go beyond the number examples in order to see the value of the proposal to those who aren't interested in type theory. Luke Palmer, on the other hand, expressed his interest in continuing to consider the idea until it is solid enough that he would be comfortable with it. Larry added his thoughts concerning namespace issues. There was a great deal more discussion formulating the specifics of the proposal.

Gather/Take and threads

Given a gather block which spawns multiple threads, Joe Gottman wanted to know if it is guaranteed that no object returned is lost, given that the relative order of items returned is indeterminate.

This week, Larry Wall responded that gather/take is defined over a dynamic scope, and each thread is a different dynamic scope, so by default there would be no results from other threads. He also entertained the converse, that gather/take is a normal way to set up inter-thread queuing. The short answer seemed to be that this has not yet been decided.

Parrot Porters

RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding

This thread was started by Bob Roger's proposal for dynamic binding. To date, it has included an extended discussion between Bob and Allison Randal, plus a request from Leopold Toetsch.

Allison began this week by explaining her understanding of the terms dynamic scoping, assignment and binding. Her view of the proposal is that it offers a textbook definition of dynamic scoping. The discussion has included dynamic binding, dynamic scoping, and temporization, however. With the terms defined, she went on to propose that Bob create a new proposal for implementing dynamic scope which does not contain any references to temporization. Bob agreed to do this, but asked for a few clarifications first.

[perl #40958] [BUG] - can't iterate subclass of ResizablePMCArray

chromatic responded to ticket [perl #40958] with a second patch, which improves upon his earlier attempt. However, he noted that it seems to work poorly with Data::Dumper and that his solution, while non-invasive, was not ideal. He described his preferred fix.

[perl #41055] [BUG]: 'Argument is not numeric' warning in Darwin configuration

Last week, in ticket [perl #41055], James Keenan registered a bug with running perl Configure.pl, which seemed to be related to having a 3-level version number.

This week, Lee Duhem commented that it would probably be enough to get the major OS version.

[perl #41064] Not-so-new 'make' failures on Darwin

Ticket [perl #41064] was created by James Keenan to report another failure to make Parrot on Darwin. He expressed frustration that he is still seeing the same problem which he encountered at the Chicago Hackathon and described the measures he has taken to resolve it.

Will Coleda found a possible file ownership problem, and suggested trying a new checkout. After determining that this was not the cause, Will asked several questions in an attempt to pinpoint the cause. Several further posts were made by both James and Will as they tried to determine the source of the problem. Eventually Will concluded that the most likely culprit was James using another compiler, rather than the Apple version of gcc/g++.

yield from a method

Will Coleda showed how the current :method and .yield implementations and asked if it was desirable for them to work in this way. He was working on the 'Range' object and encountered this problem.

Bob Rogers thought the proper fix would be to build Coroutine on Continuation instead of Sub. He also suggested storing the coroutine state explicitly in the object, and emulating yielding the method.

Allison Randal responded that the current functionality is desired for class methods, although it makes no sense for instance methods. She advised making yield object-specific within methods.

Side effect between exit & .HLL

François Perrad showed some example code where an error of 'no exception handler' was seen when a .HLL directive was added before a simple subroutine. He wondered if that was a feature or a bug.

Past-pm basic string types

Allison Randal asked how to best pass-through string types from a compiler to Parrot without doing string processing. Patrick R. Michaud replied that it is expected that it will be rare for a HLL string literal format to exactly match a string literal in PIR. Consequently, it expects that the HLL will have decoded the strong constant according to the HLL rules, and PAST-pm will re-encode the string to work in Parrot. He offered to modify PAST-pm to provide a "send literal" option.

Allison thought that was a good idea, and appreciated that the current system makes no assumptions about what constitutes a string. Later Patrick realized that the functionality already exists, if the ctype isn't set. This is subject to change, however, so he included more specific instructions for performing the task.

Past-pm printing the return value of the main routine

Allison Randal cited an example of printing a simple statement, '2', which would actually print '21' because the main routine is returning the value of the last statement (true), which is correct for Perl but not all languages. Also, the HLLCompiler is printing out this return value, and she wanted to know why that was happening. Patrick R. Michaud reported that this has since been fixed.

[perl #41082] [PATCH] Cygwin: conflicting types for _LIB_VERSION

Greg Bacon opened ticket [perl #41082] to report a failure with building r16097 on Cygwin. He supplied a patch. After Jerry Gay closed the ticket, he asked if it was a known issue, and what the solution was.

Bug Day

Will Coleda created a page to prepare for bug day. December 16th was bug day.

Users

Error running Pugs tests

Ovid reported that Pugs r15881 gave some errors with his new GHC 6.6 if he ran a test without -lblib6/lib. He wondered why it would generate a syntax error if he left out that portion of the line. Gaal Yahas suggested that it was due to an old version of Test.pm from the earlier installation.

Introspection and list question

Ovid had a quick question on how to do introspection in Pugs. He also wanted to know how to flatten nested lists in Perl6. Jerry Gay responded that introspection is mostly unimplemented. He also pointed Ovid to S02 for the answer to his other question. Gaal Yahas suggested that the Official Perl 6 Documentation was the best place to look for updated synopses. He proposed gather to flatten a list, but noted that it was not yet implemented. Larry Wall replied that that would only flatten a recursive structure with help, and noted that Pugs implements the block form of gather. jerry gay Gaal Yahas Larry Wall

Strange error message with anon subroutine

Ovid showed some code he had written to compress a list. He showed that once he had added some return statements inside an anonymous subroutine, he received an error message about using a control structure outside a routine. Ovid wondered if he had made a mistake or if there was a bug.

Larry Wall replied that it was expected to work that way. He quoted a section of S06, and also referenced S04. He advised changing the pointy block in to an official sub. Gaal Yahas also gave similar advice.

Compiler

6-on-5 and read only aliasing

Nicholas Clark announced a placeholder named BIND for 6-on-5 aliasing, which should replace the need for the Perl 5 internal type PVBM as of r29544. He included a list of features he thought were needed for 6-on-5, and asked for other 4-letter (or shorter) words which were better than BIND.

David Nicol noted that increasing internal types to 32 instead of keeping them at 16 would allow the top ones to accelerate tied and overloaded types. Nicholas replied that there were too many switch statements in the core, and he would prefer switching to vtables.

David Landgren thought BIND was an alias, which was like a nickname, and therefore proposed NICK.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 3-9 December, 2006

kudra — 2006-12-10T11:41:44+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"Your faithful Dynamic Environmentalist"

-- closing signature of Bob Rogers in 'RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding'

Language

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13487 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Last week, a commit from Larry Wall related to expanding tabs led TSa to ask if array equivalence should be defined in terms of Bags. Larry replied that he felt most people would prefer to look at Sets and Bags as Hashes, so he will not include Sets and Bags in the smartmatching table. Darren Duncan also felt that the current summary in Synopsis 6 was adequate.

This week, TSa responded to Darren's request that any change requests be explained in detail. According to TSa, the intent was not to change the synopsis but to have a few points clarified on list, such as the subtype relationship between Set and Bag. TSa also asked if KeyHash, KeySet and KeyBag are forced in to sigiled variables. Darren replied that he would expect that they would work like hashes.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13488 - doc/trunk/design/syn

In this commit, Larry Wall clarified the relationship between Set/Bag and KeyHash.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13489 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall elaborated on gather, which has been modified to be more like do in that it allows any statement.

Gather/Take and threads

Given a gather block which spawns multiple threads, Joe Gottman wanted to know if it is guaranteed that no object returned is lost, given that the relative order of items returned is indeterminate.

Parrot Porters

RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding

This thread was started by Bob Roger's proposal for dynamic binding. He compared two options, and later gave an analysis of a third (STM) at Leopold Toetsch's request.

Last week, Allison Randal responded to the proposal with the question of why dynamic binding should only apply to globals. She stated that the proposed implementation was not being approved, but noted that one of Bob's ideas concerning threads was of particular interest and likely to be included at some point. Bob replied in depth to the points she raised and asked if he could improve the proposal or if he should give it up.

This week there was further discussion between Allison and Bob.

[perl #40958] [BUG] - can't iterate subclass of ResizablePMCArray

chromatic responded to ticket [perl #40958] by including a patch which demonstrates the problem in the iteration code within the PMC. He noted that this is not the correct fix.

[perl #40966] [BUG] Parrot core dumps in perl6 (possible GC/pointer bug?)

Earlier, Patrick R. Michaud reported a bug in ticket [perl #40966].

This week, Matt Diephouse responded. He had seen the error in a different test, and identified the failing assertion. The problem seems to be that constant strings are being garbage collected too soon. He supplied a patch to not collect any constant PObj headers, but was not certain that was what should happen.

Leopold Toetsch replied that if they were being collected, they were being initially created in different object pools and then stored as constants. He requested information about the origin and contents of the constant, in order to track down where it was being created.

Initial feedback on PAST-pm, or Partridge

Earlier, Allison Randal initiated a discussion on Partridge (PAST-pm) with a post of her comments on user experience and implementation.

One subthread which developed dealt with a number of unrelated points. Leopold Toetsch joined Allison and Patrick R. Michaud in this thread. One of the topics involved Parrot limitations related to :init methods.

This week, Allison responded to a proposal from Patrick and asked if he had thought further about the syntax for initialization. She also agreed with treating moving code generation out of POST node objects as low priority. Patrick replied to some of the points.

[perl #41020] [PATCH] pmc2c.pl functionality extracted into separate package

Earlier, in ticket [perl #41020], James Keenan supplied a patch to make pmc2c.pl easier to test. This involved putting most of the subroutines in a new package. He fixed a problem with GetOptions but thought there were additional corrections to be made.

This week, James wrote that he had underestimated the challenges in testing Parrot build tools. He explained the problem, which involved the files which exist and the state of the system at the time that the tests are run, and concluded by asking what was the goal of testing the build tools.

[PATCH] tru64: compile (src/nci.c) and runtime (src/memory.c)

Jarkko Hietaniemi submitted two patches. One was to allow the Parrot trunk to compile in Tru64, and the second one was to eliminate some core dumps.

[perl #41044] use warnings not clean

In ticket [perl #41044], Will Coleda reported a problem with loading the platform and local hints file.

[perl #41047] [BUG] :multi doesn't work with :outer

Patrick R. Michaud created ticket [perl #41047] to report an error with the :multi pragma when :outer is present. Matt Diephouse reported it fixed in r15971.

[perl #41051] [PATCH]: Configure.pl: Spell out what 'ICU' means

James Keenan created ticket [perl #41051] to request that the POD in Configure.pl use 'International Components for Unicode' instead of 'ICU' for clarity. Will Coleda applied the patch as r16021.

[perl #41052] [PATCH]: docs/configuration.pod: Small grammatical corrections

In ticket [perl #41052], James Keenan included a patch to correct grammar in docs/configuration.pod.

Bug Day!

chromatic suggested a virtual gathering on the 16th in #parrot. The purpose of the meeting is to examine the bug database to verify, fix, or resolve issues. Additionally, this meeting would serve to help curious newcomers get started. Lee Duhem felt that some examples could be cleaned up to make it easier for people to get started.

[perl #41053] [TODO] More useful dumping of Env PMC

Bernhard Schmalhofer thought that generic Hash dumping functionality would make it easier to see things such as the Env PMC. This request was ticket [perl #41053].

[svn:parrot-pdd] r16036 - trunk/docs/pdds/clip

Allison Randal added additional notes to the overview PDD on the target platforms for Parrot. The requirement for the 1.0 release of Parrot is that it be supported on major versions of Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows.

[perl #41055] [BUG]: 'Argument is not numeric' warning in Darwin configuration

In ticket [perl #41055], James Keenan registered a bug with running perl Configure.pl, which seemed to be related to having a 3-level version number.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 26 Nov - 3 Dec, 2006

kudra — 2006-12-03T14:05:35+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"... On the sixth day of Christmas my true love sent to me,
Six versions of Perl,
FIVE LANGUAGES COMPILING!
Four bytes of bytecode,
Three POST nodes,
Two ASTs,
And a Partridge with a parse tree."

-- Jonathan Worthington, 'Naming PAST-pm compiler tool chain'

Language

Smart Matching clarification

Earlier, Jonathan Lang inquired about the matching operator for hash keys had changed. This led to a discussion about Sets, Seqs and Bags.

This week, in the subthread 'Set-returning .keys', Darren Duncan clarified his views, stating that while he saw Bags as a superset of Sets, he did not mean to suggest that their implementations should be related. TSa suggested that in a hypothetical inheritance structure, Set would be the main type and Bag would extend it. Ruud H.G. van Tol disagreed, stating that Set is more complex to modify than Bag.

Some discussion of the appropriate return values and operations also came up. For example, Darren proposed that a union of two sets would return a Set, and that Set operations should be terse as they would be common.

The thread 'beg for Bag' followed from this discussion.

implementation for subset types

Last week, TSa wanted to propose an addition to the subset type definitions, namely an implementation body like classes and roles. A rectangle example from an earlier thread was included. Jonathan Lang replied with an alternate code example.

This week, TSa responded to Jonathan's post, wondering how a general polygon would become an instance of an anonymous class once it was modified to become a rectangle. The purpose of the proposal was clarified as providing a means to attach methods to subset types.

beg for Bag

TSa started this new thread from the discussion in 'Smart Matching clarification'. He proposed the addition of a Bag type which completes the set of immutable types. Smylers wondered how this would differ from the Bag which is mentioned in Synopsis 3. Darren Duncan replied that while Bag is mentioned in examples, it is not included in the list of built-in types in Synopsis 6.

An exchange between Tsa and Jonathan Lang on the set operations of Seq was also part of this thread.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13483 - doc/trunk/design/syn

In this patch, Larry Wall distinguished Set and Bag values from KeySet and KeyBag containers, which made several people rather happy.

Interrogating closures

Yuval Kogman wrote in praise of the partial unification of objects and code references, and closures in general. He proposed allowing closures to declare that captured variables are an instance, and provided a code example. The purpose would be to give the option of inspecting what a closure is encapsulating.

Larry Wall replied that he would look for a declarative solution rather than a callback, which would mean the closure could have a declarator which explicitly captures a lexical and makes it available as an attribute. Yuval responded that the have syntax proposed by Larry looked nice.

Parrot Porters

[perl #40729] [TODO] Tcl - implement [file extension]

Nuno Carvalho responded to ticket [perl #40729] with a patch which implements the first version of file extensions for Tcl.

RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding

This thread was started by Bob Roger's proposal for dynamic binding. He compared two options, and later gave an analysis of a third (STM) at Leopold Toetsch's request.

This week, Allison Randal responded to the proposal with the question of why dynamic binding should only apply to globals. She stated that the proposed implementation was not being approved, but noted that one of Bob's ideas concerning threads was of particular interest and likely to be included at some point. Bob replied in depth to the points she raised and asked if he could improve the proposal or if he should give it up.

[perl #40978] [PATCH] Clean up parts of the MMD system

Ticket [perl #40978] contains a patch from Matt Diephouse to clean up portions of the MMD system. chromatic replied that the patch worked for him.

[perl #40990] [BUG] Parrot segfaults in perl6 08-regex.t (GC/pointer bug?)

Patrick R. Michaud reported a segfault in ticket [perl #40990]. The problem appears in r15837 and happens when the -G flag is not present. Later he reported a second problem as ticket [perl #41035].

[perl #39826] [CAGE] convert C<perl -w> to C<use warnings;>

Paul Cochrane replied to ticket [perl #39826] to report that a Perl::Critic policy has been added which requires use warnings in place of -w.

Naming PAST-pm compiler tool chain

Allison Randal proposed the name 'Partridge' for the PAST-pm compiler tool chain. Jonathan Worthington poetically agreed with the name.

[perl #40991] [PATCH] PAST-pm: Unnecessary dummy 'root' rule in POST transformation

Allison Randal submitted a patch which removes a dummy 'root' rule from PAST.pm's transformation grammar. It was ticket [perl #40991].

Initial feedback on PAST-pm, or Partridge

Allison Randal initiated a discussion on Partridge (PAST-pm) with a post of her comments on user experience and implementation.

Patrick R. Michaud noted that Partridge should not be considered complete, so many of the missing items Allison noted are things which simply haven't been implemented yet. He also added a more detailed response to her specific points.

Several sub-threads developed. One involved the standardization of compiler tools, for example the question of whether each language subclass of HLLCompiler should override the compile method. Some changes were committed as r15882, which Allison liked. She added a patch to keep strict boundaries and makes it possible to override the grammar. There was a discussion on giving each stage a compiler, which both Patrick and Allison wanted. However, Allison wanted each stage to act independently, with only the HLLCompiler controlling the order of the steps.

In another sub-thread, Allison responded to comments concerning types, layers of abstraction and tracking information as part of the compilation process. She was quite satisfied with the work which has been done so far, but had a few more thoughts.

Another response dealt with the remaining points. Leopold Toetsch also joined in, noting that the discussion of Parrot limitations related to :init methods had come up previously.

Finally, Patrick asked which constructs in Punie weren't working yet. Allison responded, and Patrick replied that he was going to be refactoring the HLLCompiler soon.

[perl #40998] [PATCH] Fix build error on Win32

Nikolay Ananiev reported that if the build directory contains spaces the build process fails. A patch was submitted as ticket [perl #40998]. Ron Blaschke proposed escaping or quoting the paths instead. Nikolay Ananiev replied that quotes would require refactoring some of the scripts in the build tree. He submitted a revised patch which only adds a short path if a space exists.

[perl #40999] Latest version of parrot doesn't make test

In ticket [perl #40999], Bob Wilkinson reported that the latest version of Parrot did not pass make test. He included the errors. Patrick R. Michaud gave some suggestions on how to fix the problem, which may be related to an earlier installation of Parrot.

[perl #41000] Can't compile simple parrot example with latest stable parrot

Bob Wilkinson reported that he could not compile an example with the latest stable Parrot. This was noted in ticket [perl #41000]. Patrick R. Michaud replied that he thought the example was out-of-date. Matt Diephouse agreed that the example needed to be updated. This was made into a cage task and fixed.

[perl #41014] [PATCH] Autobox Native Types for MultiSubs

Matt Diephouse created ticket [perl #41014] to address bug ticket [perl #40968]. He decided to match native types using their autoboxed PMC types rather than change _ to mean any PMC in a :multi signature.

Leopold Toetsch replied that he felt that this was not the best choice because it prevented native type optimizations. Patrick R. Michaud agreed with Leopold, but felt that in the short term the patch was better than the current situation. There was some discussion concerning an example of how this would be a problem.

The issue was resolved with r15910.

Interesting post on concurrency models

Allison Randal posted a link to a post on concurrency models.

[perl #41020] [PATCH] pmc2c.pl functionality extracted into separate package

In ticket [perl #41020], James Keenan supplied a patch to make pmc2c.pl easier to test. This involved putting most of the subroutines in a new package.

[perl #40815] Summary of 'make test' failures on Darwin

Earlier, in ticket [perl #40815], James Keenan sent a summary of Parrot test
failures on Darwin. Steve Peters reported that one of the problems had
been fixed in r40818.

This week, James noted that the problem persists. Andy Bach suggested that the problem might have to do with the compiler version. chromatic found it odd that Configure is using g++ as the linker and cc as the compiler. Nicholas Clark replied that this was due to ICU.

[perl #41020] [PATCH] pmc2c.pl functionality extracted into separate package

James Keenan reported in ticket [perl #41020] that he had fixed problems with GetOptions. This led to a discussion of the problems he had with compilation, and a question of what tests on build tools were meant to accomplish.

[perl #41021] [NEW] Parrot::Pmc2c::Utils and t/tools/pmc2cutils/*.t

James Keenan sent in 8 new files in a patch as ticket [perl #41021]. These were created as a result of refactoring pmc2c.pl to make it easier to test.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 19-25 November, 2006

kudra — 2006-11-26T12:48:39+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"...of course [that] can't be a bug as there are no specs ;)"

-- Leopold Toetsch, in '[perl #40968] [BUG] :multi doesn't seem to work right'

Language

Smart Matching clarification

Last week, Jonathan Lang brought up some information relating to hashes and was wondering if the matching operator ought to be modified since the concept for hash keys has since changed. Larry Wall replied that === was correct, but that the decisions on sorting may need to be rethought. Jonathan thought that not only was the current description suboptimal, it might not even be possible. Darren Duncan added in his opinion that .keys should return a Set. Jonathan had some concerns about the idea. Meanwhile, Paul Seamons made another suggestion based upon Template Toolkit's handling of the concept.

This week, Darren went in to more detail on the methods which ought to be available for Set, Seq and Bag. TSa also added comments on the relationship between Seq, Bag and Set.

Closures, compile time, pad protos

Yuval Kogman initiated a thread on scoping and closures with some code examples. Anatoly Vorobey tried to further clarify the question. They were not clear on how inner lexically scoped subroutines view their enclosing environments. There was some question on how compile-time pads are linked at runtime. Juerd's had a question which led Yuval to further define the original question.

Buddha Buck added some comments based upon an understanding of other languages; Anatoly joined in the discussion.

Synopsis 26

Damian Conway attached S26 and thanked everyone who offered feedback on the first draft. He also stated that the Pod-to-XTML module and Perl 5 implementation of the POD parser will be available soon.

implementation for subset types

TSa wanted to propose an addition to the subset type definitions, namely an implementation body like classes and roles. A rectangle example from an earlier thread was included. Jonathan Lang replied with an alternate code example.

Parrot Porters

RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding

Bob Rogers responded to Leopold Toetsch's earlier request for an analysis of the impact of using STM for dynamic binding with a detailed comparison.

set_pmc + setref/deref: anyone using them?

Earlier, Matt Diephouse wanted to know if anyone would be upset if he removed the set_pmc vtable and the setref and deref opcodes. Allison Randal thought it sounded like a bad idea to simply remove opcodes because they were broken. She wanted to know what problem they were intended to solve, and what the replacement strategy for is.

This week, Matt explained what he knew about the history of the opcode. Allison agreed with him that set_pmc needs to be split from assign_pmc and that they may need to be renamed. She asked for a more complete proposal for creating the new reference pmc so that the effects can be carefully considered.

[perl #40884] [CAGE] update parrothist.pod from email archives

Earlier, Paul Cochrane took a stab at ticket [perl #40884], which was Chip Salzenberg's request for Parrot release names to be recorded. Will Coleda completed the task and gave a brief overview of the history of the naming schemes.

pmc2c.pl: Proposed Strategy for Revisions and Testing

Last week, following his introduction to Parrot at the Chicago Hackathon, James E Keenan posted a proposal on how pmc2c.pl could be tested. He hoped for some feedback at an early point to prevent him from wasting effort on useless patches.

He proposed extracting as much functionality as possible in to subroutines which are then placed in a package. He also wondered about some options which were described in the documentation but didn't appear to be used.

This week, James clarified that gen_def() is indeed not used. Jonathan Worthington took responsibility for this, and said that he thought it was unneeded. James stated his intention to deprecate it.

Allison Randal advised James to begin with an extensive and tested refactor, with Particle's help.

[perl #40945] [PATCH] languages/abc test suit, basic tests

Nuno Carvalho created ticket [perl #40945] to add more features for testing the abc language.

[perl #40946] [PATCH] languages/abc TODO file

In ticket [perl #40946], Nuno Carvalho included a patch which is a TODO file for the abc language tests. This is a list of missing tests for features.

[perl #40951] [tcl] namespace "lost" inside an if statement.

In ticket [perl #40951], Will Coleda included some example code demonstrating how a Tcl namespace is lost inside of an if statement.

[perl #40947] [PATCH] languages/abc test suit, function tests

Nuno Carvalho created ticket [perl #40947] to submit a patch to add some simple abc functions to the abc test suite. It was applied as r15714.

[perl #40953] [PATCH] languages/abc test harness, correct todo option

In ticket [perl #40953], Nuno Carvalho included a patch to correct the abc test harness's todo option. It was applied.

Re: [perl #40955] [BUG] :anon .subs aren't anchored to a namespace

Matt Diephouse created ticket [perl #40955]. In it, he explained the relationship between namespaces and subroutines. Namespaces contain subroutines, and subroutines are anchored to namespaces. Matt wrote that anonymous subroutines should not be in a namespace, but should still be anchored to one; in Parrot this is not the case. He included a test case to demonstrate the problem.

Although the issue was resolved in r15674, this ticket generated some discussion. Allison Randal replied that she thought anonymous subroutines should not be anchored to a namespace. She thought that what Matt had in mind was a new concept, and asked for code examples and use cases which would allow her to define the concept better.

Matt responded with a Perl 5 example, and Allison replied. She proposed starting a new thread, which Matt did with ':anon Subs and Namespaces'. Ben Morrow also replied to the original ticket-based thread.

[perl #40958] [BUG] - can't iterate subclass of ResizablePMCArray

Patrick R. Michaud reported a problem with using iterators on subclasses of ResizeablePMCArray. This was ticket [perl #40958].

[perl #40950] [PATCH] Compiling Parrot with the new Borland C++

Steve Peters created ticket [perl #40950] which contains a patch to get Parrot to compile with the new Borland C++. He noted that more patches would probably follow.

[perl #40959] Parrot compile fails on OpenBSD/ppc in src/asmfun.s

In ticket [perl #40959], Steve Peters reported a compilation failure and included the error messages. chromatic thought the error looked familiar and proposed a solution.

[perl #40960] [BUG] :multi namespace pollution

In ticket [perl #40960], Matt Diephouse reported that making a :multi sub affects the namespace by adding an extra entry for the :multi variant.

Some thoughts on Microsoft Visual C++ 8.0

Ron Blaschke posted a summary of Microsoft's Visual C++ compilers and their take on bundled code. Steve Hay replied that he spent a while working on the same issues for Perl 5. Ron replied with a link to a page he had found on building C/C++ isolated applications and side-by-side assemblies.

3 subroutines with same name

James E Keenan included some snippets from three different files where a subroutine with the same name, gen_c, is used. All of these are in places where he plans to refactor. chromatic suggested whichever one is currently used should be considered authoritative. He thought it would be nice to compare the output of all three to see if there are significant differences between them.

:anon Subs and Namespaces

This thread continues from 'Re: [perl #40955] [BUG] :anon .subs aren't anchored to a namespace'.

Matt Diephouse tried to explain the anonymous subroutine namespace issue he is experiencing from the perspective of what Tcl needs. He posted some examples of the Tcl PIR. Allison Randal replied that it seemed like the same problem as Perl 5's 'main' routine. She also tried to explain why having anonymous subroutines anchored to a namespace would cause problems in Parrot. She suggested a feature which allows a post-compilation modification of the namespace a compilation unit uses for default lookups.

[perl #40968] [BUG] :multi doesn't seem to work right

Patrick R. Michaud filed ticket [perl #40968] to report a problem with underscore arguments in ':multi'. Leopold Toetsch replied with some thoughts on how they ought to work, but felt that it wasn't exactly a bug. Patrick gave some more detailed examples of why the current semantics are not useful. chromatic answered that he did not see any reason not to make the primitive types and their related PMCs equivalent in the distance value function.

[perl #40966] [BUG] Parrot core dumps in perl6 (possible GC/pointer bug?)

In ticket [perl #40966], Patrick R. Michaud reported a possible GC or pointer bug.

[perl #40972] Iterator over Env under Win32

Bernhard Schmalhofer noticed an iterator test which was being skipped under Win32 and wondered if it still needed to be skipped. His post was recorded as ticket [perl #40972].

pmc2c.pl --dump : What Files Does Makefile Supply as @ARGV

James E Keenan had a question about how the Parrot Makefile uses pmc2c.pl. Specifically, he wanted to know what files the Makefile places in @ARGV. chromatic replied that he did not see anything except the .pmc files.

[perl #40646] [TODO] PGE - add tests for <alpha+[_]>, <alpha-[Jj]>, etc.

Patrick R. Michaud created ticket [perl #40646] to request some new tests. He recently added code to add combined enumerated classes to PGE. Nuno Carvalho added some tests to the rx_subrule but noted that two were unexpectedly failing. Patrick noted why the tests were failing and corrected them.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 12-18 November, 2006

kudra — 2006-11-20T16:33:44+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"Sadly, the hallucinogens are essential, not external."

-- Mark J. Reed in 'List assignment question'

Language

how to change the type of objects

Last week, TSa asked how an object could change its type without loosing its identity. As an example, TSa suggested an add_vertex method which could be called on a polygon but not on a rectangle subtype of polygon. Darren Duncan wondered why one would declare a type as a rectangle and then mutate it so that it was no longer a rectangle. His opinion was that add_vertex should be fatal for the rectangle; the user can explicitly cast a rectangle into polygon first; or that the polygon class is immutable, and the add_vertex method creates a new polygon.

This week TSa elaborated, stating that there were three issues: subtyping, the preservation of object identity, and the mutating add_vertex method, which were not all addressed by Darren's answer.

generic ordinal-relevant operators

Darren Duncan showed a list of comparison operators and the type of comparisons they perform. Missing in the list were generic ordinal-relevant operators for less-than, greater-than, and so on, although there are numeric and string comparisons of this type.

Jonathan Lang replied that he doesn't see the need for distinct eqv, == and eq operators; he would rather replace these with ==, '+==, and '~==, or even just == alone. There was further discussion on this proposal, with Darren preferring generics to be the shortest and prefixes indicating the numeric or string casting versions.

Smylers requested that proposals for new operators should be accompanied with an example of awkward code which could plausibly be written in a natural setting, and a second example showing how the proposed operator would correct the situation. Larry Wall added the opinion that perfect orthogonality is neither possible nor desirable.

However, before and after operators were accepted, as were min and max operators. This led to some further discussion on the syntax.

named sub-expressions, n-ary functions, things and stuff

Darren Duncan is designing an RDBMS which is a subset of Perl 6 with simple syntax and domain-specific additions. He gave an overview of the features of the language. This led to a few questions and suggestions on Perl 6. One was for something similar to the SQL (some dialects) with clause, which is an expression which can be embedded in other expressions, with repeated portions calculated only once. Another request was for a syntactical short-hand to add an immutable bag type. Thirdly, he suggested separate operators for integer and numeric operators, especially division. Next, there was a call for floor() and ceil() functions which take a number as input and return an integer. Finally, he proposed that built-in Perl 6 types all have multis for operators.

Mark J. Reed and Mark A. Biggar commented on the absence of 'undef' and 'NaN' concepts in the RDBMS language Darren described, which Darren replied to.

Smylers replied to Darren's first point, suggesting that the do block is similar. Darren replied that it may be sufficient for his purposes, and thanked Smylers for the suggestion. Dr. Ruud added some more examples.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13475 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall added missing generic boolean comparisons to S03.

List assignment question

Vincent Foley supplied some tests for the * operator, which is currently not implemented in Pugs. Larry Wall replied that perhaps $ should be used instead, as * is likely to be confused with the slurpy *. He offered a few suggestions on the tests as well.

There was a side discussion on when my ($a, undef, $b) = 1..3; worked in Perl 5.

Smart Matching clarification

Jonathan Lang brought up some information relating to hashes and was wondering if the matching operator ought to be modified since the concept for hash keys has since changed. Larry Wall replied that === was correct, but that the decisions on sorting may need to be rethought. Jonathan thought that not only was the current description suboptimal, it might not even be possible. Darren Duncan added in his opinion that .keys should return a Set. Jonathan had some concerns about the idea. Meanwhile, Paul Seamons made another suggestion based upon Template Toolkit's handling of the concept.

Parrot Porters

Coding Standard Questions

Previously, there was a discussion on coding standards. This week, Chip Salzenberg joined in. He thanked Kevin Tew for asking the questions and gave his answers on what the standards should be.

[perl #40934] [TODO] Tcl - check for open channel in src/builtin/flush.pir

Paul Cochrane submitted a patch for ticket [perl #39704] as [perl #40934].

How do I associate methods with a compiler?

Earlier, Patrick R. Michaud gave some background in to the issue, explaining how Parrot currently handles compilers, and what PDD21 has to say on the subject. He was curious about how to conceptually model compilers in Parrot. He favored a compiler with an object which has a compile method as a model.

This week, Patrick summarized a #parrotsketch meeting where it was decided that the convention would be to have a compreg opcode return an object with a compile method, instead of returning an invokable subroutine. Allison Randal clarified a few points from the meeting.

Leopold Toetsch recommended against recreating the compile opcode as a means of making the compile method call. Allison elaborated on what was intended by the suggestion, and Leopold clarified his stance.

[perl #40788] Tcl - bug in interactive tclsh

Will Coleda posted details on how someone could resolve ticket [perl #40788].

[perl #40814] [PATCH] Assorted Solaris fixes

Steve Peters sent in a patch to make Parrot compile on Solaris. It was sent as ticket [perl #40814]. The patch was applied in r15445.

[perl #40815] Summary of 'make test' failures on Darwin

In ticket [perl #40815], James Keenan sent a summary of Parrot test failures on Darwin. Steve Peters reported that one of the problems had been fixed in r40818.

[perl #40816] open opcode creates file if it doesn't exist

In ticket [perl #40816], Jonathan Rockway reported that the open opcode creates the file if the file doesn't exist. He was not sure if this was a bug.

[perl #40817] [TODO] track generated files during the configure/make process

Jerry Gay suggested appending each file to a list when it is created, replacing the MANIFEST. The idea was described in [perl #40817].

[perl #40818] [PATCH] Silence warning in t/library/pcre.t

In ticket [perl #40818], Steve Peters created a patch to fix a warning in t/library/pcre.t, which was applied as r15442.

[perl #40819] [TODO] Remove Duplication in t/codingstd/*.t Files

chromatic created ticket [perl #40819] to request the removal of duplicate tests in the coding standards section.

[perl #40822] Pg NCI Test Makes Unportable Connection

In ticket [perl #40822], chromatic commented that t/library/pg.t's assumption of a certain database setup is faulty. He proposed using an environment variable to define the user name and password.

[perl #40823] Win32 vs. the world - length for sprintf('%e') - what's right?

In ticket [perl #40823], Chip Salzenberg requested that someone see what Perl does on Win32 to test sprintf. SADAHIRO Tomoyuki answered that it drops the superfluous zero from the return value.

Jerry Gay noted that he preferred a fix in Parrot_sprintf, rather than in the related test. He felt that Parrot should act in a consistent way across platforms. Allison Randal noted that the decision had been made to go with a platform-independent implementation.

[perl #40824] loadlib opcode causes problems with exceptions

In ticket [perl #40824], Matt Diephouse included a patch to fix loadlib failures which were previously not catchable exceptions. Bob Rogers noted that he thought the problem was in the :init code. The patch was committed as r15413, but it was agreed that the questions remain.

[perl #40826] Mac OS X and Dylib Funcs

In ticket [perl #40826], chromatic reported some portability wrappers which were deprecated in Mac OS X 10.3 in favor of the functions themselves. He removed the test which relied upon the old behavior, but noted that the Darwin hinter should pick the correct dl.c file based upon the OS X version.

[perl #40827] [BUG] testing alarm with exception handlers causes runloops to play leapfrog

Jerry Gay noted in ticket [perl #40827] that there is a problem with alarm and exception handlers. He included some sample code. Bob thanked Jerry for the example but replied that he didn't yet have a good solution to the problem.

[perl #40834] [BUG] - PMC methods aren't inherited to PIR subclasses

In ticket [perl #40834], Patrick R . Michaud reported that if a METHOD is defined in a .pmc file, it is not automatically inherited by PIR subclasses. Leopold Toetsch clarified that some METHODs are implemented in a way which doesn't cope with inheritance. He thought this was related to ticket [perl #39329].

Assertion failed: (PTR2UINTVAL(mmd_table[i].func_ptr) & 3) == 0

Ron Blaschke reported that in r15444, Parrot failed to smoke on his Win XP box. He included the results of the attempt.

RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding

Bob Rogers included a patch to the proposal for dynamic binding in Parrot, and requested comments. Leopold Toetsch asked Bob to consider the impact of a third variation using STM, which is already implemented. Bob replied with a description of the problems he saw with STM and continuations.

Allison Randal thanked Bob for the proposal and gave some comments she had on it. Bob replied.

[perl #40861] [CAGE] - add a Perl::Critic policy to look for FIXME|TODO|XXX

In ticket [perl #40861], Paul Cochrane noted that the test which checks for TODO (and related) comments only applies to C-language files, and that it would be good to look for them in Perl as well. Chris Dolan replied that there is a policy available on CPAN which would do this.

Will Coleda asked Andy to adjust the patch to allow TODO comments with RT tickets attached to them, but to disallow those without. Andy Lester objected to Will's suggestion, and proposed instead that TODO items with tickets simply include 'RT' and the ticket number. This was addressed in '[perl #40912] [CAGE] Tcl - convert all XXX (#...) comments to the RT#... format '

set_pmc + setref/deref: anyone using them?

Matt Diephouse wanted to know if anyone would be upset if he removed the set_pmc vtable and the setref and deref opcodes. Allison Randal thought it sounded like a bad idea to simply remove opcodes because they were broken. She wanted to know what problem they were intended to solve, and what the replacement strategy for is.

[perl #40863] [TODO] Tcl - Actually support bignums

In ticket [perl #40863], Matt Diephouse showed some code which checks if the value is too large to be represented by a normal integer, and sets the value to zero if it is. He thought it should be possible to change the code to support larger numbers.

[perl #40865] [TODO] ensure isxxx() and toxxx() are only passed unsigned char values

In ticket [perl #40865], Chip Salzenberg noted that the isxxx and toxxx functions should only be given unsigned character values. He requested that a cage cleaner check calls to them, and repeat the task periodically.

Fwd: Re: [pirate] Re: languages/python - any plans?

Leopold Toetsch forwarded a letter from the pirate development list. In the mail, Tyler Coumbes said that he had some Python PMCs based off the ones in Parrot's repository. He had hoped to clean them up and submit patches, but life was interfering. He indicated where the files could be found, in case someone else was interested in looking at them.

Release: Parrot 0.4.7, "Caique"

Chip Salzenberg announced the release of Parrot 0.4.7, "Caique".

[perl #40884] [CAGE] update parrothist.pod from email archives

Chip Salzenberg created ticket [perl #40884] to request that someone check the email archives for the names given to previous releases to add to the history in docs/parrothist.pod.

Paul Cochrane reported that he had done some of the work, but that he was unable to find reports of other releases. Also, he thought there were some duplicated names.

Object design revisions

Allison Randal reported that she had finished reviewing the PMC object design meeting notes, which was a summary of the design discussion written during last weekend's hackathon. She invited questions or comments. chromatic had a few notes, and Allison responded to his points.

[pmc_object_design_meeting_notes] Properties

Leopold Toetsch responded to the recommendation to deprecate property support in PMCs. Discussion ensued, with chromatic and Allison Randal participating. Allison suggested that the discussion of properties should be delayed for a week because it is related to the role architecture.

[perl #40905] [CAGE] coding standards hammer too big

In ticket [perl #40905], Will Coleda noted that files copied from external sources should not be required to meet internal coding standards.

[perl #40909] [BUG] Tcl - [namespace eval] + [source] + [proc] don't play well together

In ticket [perl #40909], Matt Diephouse reported that some Tcl code was not working as expected. He thought there should be a test, but because it depends upon an external file, he was not sure how to best write it.

Fwd: MC units refreshed

Based upon a post from H. Merijn Brand to the Perl 5 Porter's list, chromatic wondered if the configure system needed to be updated.

[perl #40910] [CAGE] Fix t/distro/file_metadata.t to work in svn

In ticket [perl #40910], Paul Cochrane wanted t/distro/file_metadata.t to work with both svn and svk. chromatic reported it fixed in r15616.

[perl #40911] [CAGE] Merge manifest generating scripts with mk_manifest_and_skip.pl

Paul Cochrane created ticket [perl #40911]. In it he suggested merging the functionality of two tools, gen_manifest_skip.pl and mk_manifests.pl.

[perl #40912] [CAGE] Tcl - convert all XXX (#...) comments to the RT#... format

In ticket [perl #40912], Paul Cochrane asked for all TODO items to be changed to 'RT #' style. This request stemmed from the discussion '[perl #40861] [CAGE] - add a Perl::Critic policy to look for FIXME|TODO|XXX '. It was done in r15651.

[perl #40923] test errors

Seth Whelan reported a problem with Parrot 0.4.7's make test. He included information about his system in ticket [perl #40923].

Perl segfault in cppcomments.t

Paul Cochrane reported a segmentation fault with a test. It looked like a problem with the regular expressions which were used to remove C-comments.

[perl #40932] [PATCH] languages/abc test harness

In ticket [perl #40932], Nuno Carvalho sent a patch which is designed to finish the test harness for the language abc. Patrick R. Michaud applied the patch.

pmc2c.pl: Proposed Strategy for Revisions and Testing

Following an introduction to Parrot at the Chicago Hackathon last week, James E Keenan posted a proposal on how pmc2c.pl could be tested. He hoped for some feedback at an early point to prevent him from wasting effort on useless patches.

[perl #40937] bad links in docs/ROADMAP.pod

Will Coleda wanted some bad links to be corrected. He requested this in ticket [perl #40937].

[perl #40938] [PATCH] languages/abc test suit

Nuno Carvalho submitted a patch in ticket [perl #40938]. It is designed to add more files to the abc test suite. It was applied.

[perl #40939] [PATCH] languages/abc test suit

In ticket [perl #40939], Nuno Carvalho sent a patch which cleans up the abc test harness. It was applied.

cvs-parrot

[svn:parrot] r15517 - in trunk: . src

chromatic reported an error with r15517. Patrick R. Michaud confirmed that it broke on Linux/x86_64 as well. chromatic attached a patch which he was not happy with because he was curious about how it affected Patrick's system. Patrick agreed the patch was just masking a deeper problem, but that it did appear to fix the problem. Leopold Toetsch checked in the patch.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 5-11 November, 2006

kudra — 2006-11-12T08:34:27+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"...problem 2 is probably just me being confused (though I'd love an explanation, from @leo ;-))."

-- Jonathan Worthington, in 'set_pmc_keyed_int delegates to set_pmc_keyed...?'

Language

how to change the type of objects

In this thread, TSa asked how an object could change its type without loosing its identity. As an example, TSa suggested an add_vertex method which could be called on a polygon but not on a rectangle subtype of polygon. Darren Duncan wondered why one would declare a type as a rectangle and then mutate it so that it was no longer a rectangle. His opinion was that add_vertex should be fatal for the rectangle; the user can explicitly cast a rectangle into polygon first; or that the polygon class is immutable, and the add_vertex method creates a new polygon.

Parrot Porters

Anyone relying on objects stringifying to class names?

Last week, Jonathan Worthington asked if he could change the behavior of ParrotObject instances, but later changed his mind because he thought the current system is being used in PGE. This week, Patrick R. Michaud responded that he couldn't think of anywhere PGE would be using this, and requested an example.

RFC: Actions without barriers

Earlier, Bob Rogers and Allison Randal had a discussion on how to change action invocations to remove the continuation barrier. It was decided that Bob's current approach wouldn't lead them in the desired direction. This week, Bob continued to elaborate on Error_handler, which he thought was worth keeping under the name of ExitContinuation.

:init Where should we put the flag?

Last week, Kevin Tew asked which flag he should use for :init. There was some discussion on reusing flags, but tests were not successful. This week, Leopold Toetsch replied that it clearly was not safe to reuse compile-time flags, and made a list of requirements for flags in general and Kevin's request in particular.

[perl #40626] [BUG] :vtable fails for subclasses of core classes

Earlier, Patrick R. Michaud reported that the new :vtable pragma didn't work when used on methods of subclasses of core classes, and added a test demonstrating this to t/pmc/parrotobject.t. This was ticket [perl #40626]. Jonathan Worthington thanked him for the test case which enabled him to find the bug.

This week, Patrick replied that Jonathan may have already addressed an issue relating to saved properties of subroutines, but that he was providing another test class to show the item that was giving him difficulties.

set_pmc_keyed_int delegates to set_pmc_keyed...?

Patrick R. Michaud had been working on the Capture PMC type and ran in to a number of issues with subclassing, which he expressed in his post. Leopold Toetsch replied that class inheritance from PMCs will hopefully be improved with the :vtable patches. Jonathan Worthington suggested removing defaults from default.pmc and creating an extra attribute for PMCs such as auto_keyed which generates missing keyed methods. Nicholas Clark was not satisfied with the proposed solution, which felt like a hack to him.

Jonathan Worthington sent a patch which tries to address the root problem by searching vtables of parent classes. There were some problems with the patch, which led Jonathan to conclude that there's a real issue with a subclass always being an instance of ParrotClass PMC.

There was further discussion on possible solutions. Leopold Toetsch removed the default as r15111.

TODO] release prep: update CREDITS and NEWS

In ticket [perl #40686], Jerry Gay requested that someone update the CREDITS and NEWS files in preparation for the upcoming Parrot release.

SVN tips in wranglers.pod

Paul Cochrane included a patch on SVN usage tips for doc/dev/wranglers.pod. He asked for any additional comments. Bernhard Schmalhofer suggested that when a commit is associated with a ticket, the ticket header can be used in the commit message. Jerry Gay replied that he added some material and committed the patch, which is r15225.

[perl #40696] [CAGE] t/doc/pod.t should report filenames upon failure, like coding standard tests do

In ticket [perl #40696], Jerry Gay reported that t/doc/pod.t gives test numbers rather than filenames when failing, which isn't very useful. He wanted it changed to one test which reports filenames on failure.

[perl #40632] [TODO] classify failing tests for next release

In ticket [perl #40632], Jerry Gay included a list of failing tests. Will Coleda added his failures to the ticket. chromatic suggested working from the smoke server to collect and upload data.

How do I associate methods with a compiler?

Patrick R. Michaud gave some background in to the issue, explaining how Parrot currently handles compilers, and what PDD21 has to say on the subject. He was curious about how to conceptually model compilers in Parrot. He favored a compiler with an object which has a compile method as a model.

Adriano Rodrigues asked if it would be possible to support both that and a subroutine-based system.

Patrick replied that it was, and both are possible within the existing current framework. Patrick was interested in which would be considered the standard.

[perl #40783] [CAGE] get fixme.t to check for an RT ticket number after TODO items

In ticket [perl #40783], Paul Cochrane reported that t/codingstd/fixme.t only searches for 'FIXME|XXX|TODO' and suggested that if there is an RT ticket number associated with it, it should not be an error. Will Coleda replied that it was fixed in r15324.

[perl #39704] [CAGE] Tcl - Convert TODO/XXX comments to RT tickets

Paul Cochrane reported that he had taken all the warnings generated by 'TODO' items in the code and converted them to RT tickets. This had been requested in [perl #39704].

[perl #40788] Tcl - bug in interactive tclsh

In ticket [perl #40788], Will Coleda noted a problem with interactive tclsh.

[perl #40217] Parrot_autoload_class() knows about Python and Tcl

Will Coleda sent a patch to remove a function with hardcoded language names. This was in response to ticket [perl #40217].

Users

modifying within a perl5 block

Richard Hainsworth included some example code and committed a test to t/perl5 which demonstrates the problem he is experiencing.

Compiler

ANN: Pugs Repository URL Changed.

Audrey Tang announced that the Pugs repository has a new location:

http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/
https://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/

Subversion users should switch their working copy with: svn switch --relocate http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs

SVK users should use: svk mirror --relocate //mirror/pugs http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs

Further information can be found in the original post.

Acknowlegements

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also

Perl 6 summary, 29 Oct - 4 Nov, 2006

kudra — 2006-11-05T19:50:13+00:00

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists

"That fuzziness is classic $Larry. Some of the rest of @Larry can be more *mumble*matic."

-- chromatic in 'where constraints as roles'

Language

where constraints as roles

A few clarifications were added to the original thread 'how typish are roles'.

In the subthread 'where constraints as roles', started by Trey Harris, the discussion from the previous week continued.

Last week, Trey asked if a where clause or junctive type defines an anonymous role, while a type parameter defines a lexical role, and suggested adding this information to S12. Larry Wall replied, saying that a where clause is there for pattern matching...but went on to note other possibilities. Jonathan Lang felt that S02 gave some indication of what Trey suggested, and that where clauses and junctive types should not be turned in to roles: roles and junctive types should be turned in to where constraints.

[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13350 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall committed a patch on applying dwimmy hypers to hashes, then disagreed with himself...maybe. He sees two ways of looking at it, and finds merit in both.

mmd-draft.txt

Earlier, TSa noted that multi-method dispatch is not yet in S06 and asked if someone could explain the voting mechanism used to select the dispatch target.

This week, Audrey Tang replied that the plan had been for Larry Wall to review it in Brazil, but that it may now have to wait a while as Larry cannot make it to Brazil. She tried to answer the question on voting, and elaborated further on #perl6. TSa summarized her explanation.

Parrot Porters

[perl #40443] Separate vtable functions from methods (using :vtable)

Earlier, in ticket [perl #40443], Matt Diephouse noted that it was decided at OSCON 2006 that vtables and methods should be separated.

Jonathan wondered if this should be postponed until the object and namespace issues have been dealt with. Allison Randal summarized the results of her last conversation with Chip Salzenberg on the topic. Jonathan thanked her for the specifications and said he would work on an implementation.

This week, Jonathan reported the implementation in r15039. Allison suggested a two release cycle for deprecating the old syntax. A bug she reported with Punie was addressed in r15048, but some tests continued to fail (the bug was covered in '[perl #40626] [BUG] :vtable fails for subclasses of core classes '). There was further discussion about optimization, with it being agreed that first the functionality would be added, and later the code could be improved.

Anyone relying on objects stringifying to class names?

Jonathan Worthington noted that if you have a ParrotObject instance and write $S0 = foo, $S0 will contain the name of the class. He finds this problematic because you cannot overload what class it stringifies to. He would like to get rid of this but asked if anyone was relying on the current behavior. He wants to get rid of it in a week.

Patrick R. Michaud joked that he thought a week was too long to wait for its removal. He had no objections so long as tests still pass. Allison Randal agreed with a week, provided tests pass.

Later, Jonathan wrote that he had been confused when he wrote the post; the code is being used in PGE, for instance.

[perl #40608] key_append segfault

In ticket [perl #40608], Jonathan Worthington showed a program which segfaults in Parrot on Windows. This issue was resolved in r15043.

RFC: Actions without barriers

Bob Rogers considered different approaches to eliminating the continuation barrier from action invocation and wondered if his latest idea was worth pursuing. Allison Randal replied that she saw the temptation in the solution, but was glad Bob had paused to ask because it would ultimately lead in the wrong direction. They discussed the matter further.

:init Where should we put the flag?

Kevin Tew implemented :init some time ago but cannot check it in because it requires a flag. Currently he is using PObj_private7_FLAG; Leopold Toetsch suggested PObj_private2_FLAG but that broke tests. He would like to know what flag he should use.

Jonathan Worthington asked if PObj_private3_FLAG could be used, as it is labeled as unused.

Leopold Toetsch suggested 2 or 0. Kevin included his failing test results with these flags.

[perl #40616] [PATCH] Helping splint check further through the parrot source

This week, Paul Cochrane submitted the following patches:

In ticket [perl #40616], he submitted a patch to enable lint checking of Parrot source code.
In '[perl #40618] [TODO] Tcl - Missing channelId tests in t/cmd_puts.t ' (ticket [perl #40618]), he responded to task [perl #39704] with tests for channelld for Tcl.
In '[perl #40619] [TODO] Tcl - need -regexp tests in t/cmd_switch.t ' (ticket [perl #40619]), he supplied Tcl tests of -regexp in response to cage ticket [perl #39704].
'[perl #40620] [TODO] Tcl - tests error wrongly in t/cmd_expr.t ' is ticket [perl #40620] and relates to task [perl #39704]. It corrects a false negative in Tcl's stringified integers test.
'[perl #40627] [TODO] Tcl - test actual flushing in t/cmd_flush.t ' is ticket [perl #40627] and relates to cage task [perl #39704] on testing flushing for Tcl.
'[perl #40628] [TODO] Tcl - need to test reading something in t/cmd_gets.t ' (ticket [perl #40628]) addresses cage task [perl #39704] and tests reading something in t/cmd_gets.t for Tcl.
'[perl #40629] [TODO] Tcl - need to test classes in t/cmd_stringOld.t ' addresses cage task [perl #39704]. The patch tests classes in t/cmd_stringOld.t for Tcl and is ticket [perl #40629].
In '[perl #40637] [TODO] Tcl - Throw exception about invalid boolean type in src/pmc/tclstring.pmc ' (ticket [perl #40637]) in response to cage task [perl #39704], Paul submitted a patch to throw an exception about an invalid boolean type for Tcl in src/pmc/tclstring.pmc.
In ticket [perl #40638], posted as '[perl #40638] [TODO] Tcl - work out why hash implementation insufficient in src/pmc/tclarray.pmc ', Paul responded to cage task [perl #39704] with a patch to languages/tcl/src/pmc/tclarray.pmc.
Message '[perl #40639] [TODO] Tcl - hack src/pmc/tclfloat.pmc to approximate right precision output ' (ticket [perl #40639], addressing cage task [perl #39704]) fixes tclfloat.pmc to the right precision of output.
'[perl #40640] [TODO] Tcl - move backslash hash and hex hash into a class attribute ' (ticket [perl #40640]) is in response to cage task [perl #39704]. The patch moves backslash and hexadecimal hashes into a class attribute.

'make rsync' failing - required anyway?

Paul Cochrane reported a "is this still working" comment he found in config/gen/makefiles/root.in. He found that it didn't work, and wondered if this was something which should be fixed. If so, someone else should look at it because Paul does not have privileges to do it.

PDD 25 "Concurrency" - first review

Allison Randal announced the first version of PDD25 on threading and concurrency. She opened the floor to discussion. Joshua Gatcomb linked to a related Perlmonks thread.

Allison thanked him for the link and wrote a bit about the lo language, which uses 'futures' for concurrency. Larry Wall replied that lazy lists can be viewed as a form of futures.

[perl #40625] [BUG] website pointer to PDD25 is broken

Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #40625] to note that the link on parrotcode.org to PDD25 is broken.

STM runtime test hanging intermittently

Paul Cochrane reported a hanging test in t/stm/runtime.t and wondered if other people have seen the same problem. He included his configuration.

[perl #40631] [TODO] add tests for native PMC types

In ticket [perl #40631], Jerry Gay requested some tests for native PMC types in the t/pmc directory. At the moment there is just one test for each which verifies if they can be created. The testing should be much more extensive.

[perl #40632] [TODO] classify failing tests for next release

In ticket [perl #40632], Jerry Gay noted the tests which are failing. Will Coleda included his list of failures.

[perl #40634] leftover files...

Will Coleda created ticket [perl #40634]. He listed some unexpected files. He thought that one should be ignored by svn, and the others should be cleaned up after creation.

[perl #40635] osx build warning:

Will Coleda posted some warnings he got on OSX to ticket [perl #40635].

[perl #40646] [TODO] PGE - add tests for <alpha+[_]>, <alpha-[Jj]>, etc.

In ticket [perl #40646], Patrick R . Michaud invited people to write tests for code which adds combined enumerated classes to PGE.

[perl #40653] [CAGE] [TODO] test pdd format

Jerry Gay created ticket [perl #40653] for the task of testing that PDDs follow the format laid out in docs/pdds/pdd_template.pod.

Users

variables inside an eval

Richard Hainsworth asked how to use a scalar inside an eval with Perl 5 from within Pugs. Audrey Tang reported the bug fixed as of r14574.

Acknowlegements

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.

Yuval Kogman helped with this week's summary.

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.

Distribution

This summary can be found in the following places:

See Also