use Perl

So last time I wrote, I hoped not to get too many issues that kept me from hacking on Perl 6 and Parrot. As it happens, I did get sick and that wiped me out for about a week. :-( This week I've had a more fun reason not to be doing so much, which is that I've got a friend visiting me. They're the first person I've had to visit since I got my own place out here in Spain, so it's been great fun showing them some places, taking them on a tapas crawl (lots of delicious food and beer) and so on.

Amongst it all, I found time to write a few lines of code for the Perl 6 compiler. I really, really didn't want to go to Ukraine and talk about the Perl 6 object model without people being able to play with it. So...I started implementing it. And now you can have classes with methods and attributes.

class Foo {
    has $a;
    method set {
        $a = "w00t";
    }
    method get {
        say $a;
    }
}

my $x = Foo.new();
$x.set();
$x.get(); # prints w00t


No accessor and/or mutator methods yet, but I plan to do those next. Then I will do compile time role composition, provided everyone is happy with me doing so. I already implemented roles and the composition algorithm in Parrot anyway, so it should be relatively easy to get the basics of that into the Perl 6 compiler too.

Beyond that, my personal roadmap (as in, what I plan to hack on if it doesn't get in the way of what others are doing) is:

• Refactoring to get every non-Junction type inheriting from Any.
• Parsing type annotations on parameters and variables.
• Getting those type annotations to be applied to MMD (so we get type-based MMD dispatch as well as the arity based one that already works).
• Re-implementing junction auto-threading in terms of MMD, as it should be done.