[Neworleans-pm] Fwd: This Week's Summary (per6)

[E. Strade, B.D.]

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----- Original message -----
From: "The Perl 6 Summarizer" <p6summarizer at bofh.org.uk>
To: perl6-announce at perl.org
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 08:56:58 +0100
Subject: This Week's Summary

NB: The links are probably broken at present. Normal service will
hopefully be resumed once Google gets caught up with the perl6 lists.

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-08-27
    Where does the time go? I blame folk festivals. Once I'm getting
    busy
    with the teacher training I'm going to have weekends free to write
    the
    summaries. And if you'll believe that...

    We start with perl6-internals.

  Incremental garbage collection
    Discussion of implementing incremental garbage collection continued.

  Calling conventions for unprototyped subroutines
    Mattia Barbon asked for some clarification of how the calling
    conventions work for unprototyped subroutines in IMCC. Specifically,
    whether IMCC was behaving as documented in the Parrot Design
    Document
    (PDD3). Leo reassured him that the TODO entry that had caused his
    disquiet was obsolete and that IMCC does the right thing.

    http://xrl.us/cw77

  Compile op with return values
    Steve Fink asked how to go about returning something from
    dynamically
    compiled code. He, Leo and Dan went over the issues. An unnamed (and
    as
    yet unvolunteered) volunteer will probably write it all up and add
    it to
    the parrot compiler FAQ.

    http://xrl.us/cw78

  NCI and callback functions
    Stephane Peiry and Leo continued to work on getting NCI callbacks
    working with the GTK library. They finally tracked the problem down,
    but
    it looks awfully like Stephane's going to have to reimplement the
    "gtk_main" loop to get everything working. Best of luck Stephane.
    ParrotGTK would definitely be a cool thing.

    http://xrl.us/cw79

  Planet Parrot
    Robert Spier announced the creation of Planet Parrot, an aggregator
    of
    Parrot related blogs. If you have such a blog, Robert would probably
    be
    interested in hearing from you.

    http://xrl.us/cw8a

    http://planet.parrotcode.org/

  GC/DOD API
    Leo and Dan continued to discuss and work on documenting Parrot's
    memory
    management API.

    http://xrl.us/cw8b

  NCI GC issues
    Dan noticed a problem with garbage collection and NCI PMCs. Leo
    tracked
    the problem down and fixed it.

    I love it when a plan comes together.

    http://xrl.us/cw8c

  Opinions on base behaviour
    Base behaviour is disgusting and should be stamped out I tell you.
    We
    have a moral duty to...

    Ah...

    Actually, the subject refers to Dan and Leo's desire to nail down
    the
    behaviour of Parrot's basic types. He outlined the issues and asked
    for
    discussion. And that's what he got.

    It looks like Parrot's going to have a reasonably complete set of
    numeric types which will allow accuracy nerds to avoid reals for as
    long
    as possible. Which will be nice.

    http://xrl.us/cw8d

    http://xrl.us/cw8e

    http://xrl.us/cw8f

    http://xrl.us/cw8g

    http://xrl.us/cw8h

  Concat, Cows & Basil
    Comfortably winning the "weirdest subject line of the week" award,
    Sam
    Phillips laid out some of the problems he's having implementing a
    Basil
    compiler which targets Parrot. Leo supplied answers.

    http://xrl.us/cw8i

  Low level math[s] op behaviour
    As well as discussing basic types, Dan opened a discussion of the
    proper
    semantics of Parrot's low level maths (yeah, he spelt it 'math', but
    I'm
    English and I'll spell it correctly) operators. In particular he
    proposed variants that throw exceptions if strange things happen.

    http://xrl.us/cw8j

  Benchmark stuff
     Joshua Gatcomb posted some patches he'd made to F<parrotbench.pl>
     to
     make it a little less fragile and more useful. A few days later he
     announced a slightly more finished set of patches (Leo had checked
     his
     original patches in rather sooner than expected). 

    http://xrl.us/cw8k

    http://xrl.us/cw8m

  Resuscitating a mod_parrot
    Dan Sugalski looked upon mod_parrot and saw that it was cool, to the
    point of being laid out on a mortuary slab. He thought that the time
    had
    come to try and put some life back into the project, now that
    Parrot's
    so much more capable. He asked for volunteers and Jeff Horwitz seems
    to
    be (the only?) one of 'em.

    http://xrl.us/cw8n

  PMC instantiation
    Leo posted another of his discussion documents, this time on
    instantiating PMCs. No response so far.

    http://xrl.us/cw8o

Meanwhile, in perl6-language
  Return with no expression.
    In the usual freewheeling perl6-language way, a thread entitled
    'return
    with no expression' ended up discussion how to disambiguate a "::"
    which
    is part of "... ?? ... :: ..." expression and "::" in its role as
    module
    sigil. (According to Luke it's easy; white space is required).

    http://xrl.us/cw8p

  Synopses discussed
    Discussion of the draft synopses continued

    http://xrl.us/cw8q - Synopsis 2

  POD tables?
    Aaron Sherman wondered if Perl 6's incarnation of POD would have
    support
    for tables. Luke wasn't overly keen on Aaron's proposed syntax, and
    Larry pointed out that they'd managed to use Perl 5's POD and some
    clever processing to write tables for the third edition of
    Programming
    Perl. Once again, it seems that everyone agrees that POD is great,
    but
    could be greater, but nobody can agree on how to *make* it greater.
    Me,
    I think Larry got it right enough.

    http://xrl.us/cw8r

  Constructors and mixins
    Ovid had some questions about how Constructors work in Perl 6 and
    about
    how to disambiguate methods when using Roles. Larry and Damian
    provided
    answers.

    http://xrl.us/cw8s

  Instantiation
    Instantiation was on Aaron Sherman's mind too. He proposed some
    syntactic sugar for creating objects at 'use' time. For some reason,
    syntactic sugar proposals do seem to create lots of discussion.

    http://xrl.us/cw8t

Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements
    I am reliably informed that a lot of last week's links were broken.
    Which is odd because the code to generate them hasn't changed. It
    looks
    like the problem's down to the gateway between nntp.perl.org and
    groups.google.com being slightly radished at present.

    However, I'm going to stick with the Google links in this summary in
    the
    hopes that normal service will be returned shortly and things will
    get
    backfilled. If anyone has a handy tool for getting from a message id
    to
    an archive URL that works then I'd be happy to hear from them.

    If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider
    contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development
    of
    Perl. You might also like to send feedback or contributions to a
    'getting Piers to OSCON 2005' fund to mailto:pdcawley at bofh.org.uk

    http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation

    http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site

    Amazingly, there's a small amount of newer content on my website
    this
    week. Will wonders never cease?

    http://www.bofh.org.uk/