From mark at ecn.purdue.edu Wed Jul 14 13:16:50 2004 From: mark at ecn.purdue.edu (Mark Senn) Date: Mon Aug 2 21:35:43 2004 Subject: [Purdue-pm] Purdue Perl Mongers Message-ID: <200407141816.i6EIGoCK027906@resolute.ecn.purdue.edu> After a long period of inactivity, the Purdue Perl Mongers (one of many in a loose association of internation Perl Users Groups) is having a meeting. I sent out email on 6/23 suggesting a July 15 meeting from 6--7pm. Around five people responded and said they were interested. It's an informal meeting for people to meet each other, share information, etc. and will be 6--7 pm, Thursday, July 15, in the basement of KNOY hall, room B29. Beginners through advanced users are welcome. KNOY hall is at the intersection of Grant Street and Northwestern Avenue in West Lafayette. See http://news.uns.purdue.edu/newsweb.maps.html for maps. The closeup of the campus map at http://www.purdue.edu/oop/campus_map/areas/ghi_456.html shows KNOY hall and PGNW (the Northwestern Parking Garage) where there is free parking after 5pm. Would any students like to make the Purdue Perl Mongers an official Purdue University student organization? (Something to put on your resume?) (Unless we come up with something better I plan to give a one hour Beginning Perl short course at the next meeting shortly after the fall semester starts. (I've given Beginning Perl one hour short courses before and can teach enough in an hour to write real (unsophisticated) programs if you already know how to use a text editor and maybe have heard of variables, arrays, etc.) I'll talk about how to use use the Perl6::Rules module briefly so you can use Perl 6 style regular expressions in Perl 5 so you don't need to learn Perl 5 stuff now and later the better Perl 6 stuff later---don't worry if this sentence doesn't make any sense.) -mark From mark at ecn.purdue.edu Tue Jul 20 15:43:41 2004 From: mark at ecn.purdue.edu (Mark Senn) Date: Mon Aug 2 21:35:43 2004 Subject: [Purdue-pm] The Perl 6 Summarizer: This week's summary Message-ID: <200407202043.i6KKhffr022501@resolute.ecn.purdue.edu> I've been getting these weekly Perl 6 summaries for a long time. They are the most efficient way I know of to stay up-to-date on Perl 6. Thought you might be interested. According to the mail header email perl6-announce-subscribe@perl.org to sign up. -mark ------- Forwarded Message Return-Path: perl6-announce-return-409-mds=ecn.purdue.edu@perl.org Delivery-Date: Tue Jul 20 15:09:30 2004 Received: from helios.ecn.purdue.edu (helios.ecn.purdue.edu [128.46.102.23]) by resolute.ecn.purdue.edu (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i6KK9Tsj022254 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NOT) for ; Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:09:30 -0500 (EST) Received: from onion.perl.org (onion.develooper.com [63.251.223.166]) by helios.ecn.purdue.edu (8.12.11/8.12.11) with SMTP id i6KK9M72024905 for ; Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:09:24 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 92687 invoked by uid 1005); 20 Jul 2004 20:09:09 -0000 Mailing-List: contact perl6-announce-help@perl.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: Delivered-To: mailing list perl6-announce@perl.org Delivered-To: moderator for perl6-announce@perl.org Received: (qmail 78924 invoked from network); 20 Jul 2004 13:46:51 -0000 Delivered-To: perl6-announce@perl.org X-Spam-Check-By: la.mx.develooper.com To: perl6-announce@perl.org Subject: This week's summary From: The Perl 6 Summarizer Reply-To: perl6-internals@perl.org, perl6-language@perl.org Cc: perl6-internals@perl.org, perl6-language@perl.org Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:46:18 +0100 Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.110003 (No Gnus v0.3) Emacs/21.3.50 (darwin) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at bofh.org.uk X-Virus-Checked: Checked X-Spam-Rating: onion.develooper.com 1.6.2 0/1000/N X-Virus-Scanned-ECN: by AMaVIS 0.3.12 (perl 5.8) (http://amavis.org/) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by resolute.ecn.purdue.edu id i6KK9Tsj022254 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on resolute.ecn.purdue.edu X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-4.7 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=2.63 The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-07-18 Following last week's bizarrely dated summary (I misplaced a day) we're back with the correct week ending date, but I'm ashamed to admit that I've slipped to writing on a Tuesday again. My head hangs in shame and I am filled with the direst remorse. It will probably happen again though; life's like that. Pie-thon! Anyone would think that the possibility of not even being able to run the Piethon benchmark (let alone getting a pie in the face for running it too slowly) weighs heavily on Dan. The bulk of the week's traffic related to getting to the point where we can at least run all the tests. Python::Bytecode, the module that parses, well, python bytecode, shot up in version numbers; I think it reached 2.7 by the end of the week. Dan released a Piethon translator, a tool that uses Python::Bytecode translate python to parrot. So has Leo. Dan's is on his website (see the link below, you'll find Leo's in languages/python/pie-thon.pl). http://xrl.us/chh9 -- Parrot runs a python lambda http://xrl.us/chia -- Notes on pie-thon.pl http://xrl.us/chib -- Namespaces for builtins http://xrl.us/chic -- Dan's translator Semi-stack code In a quest for speed when emulating python's stack manipulation ops, Dan outlined a plan for manipulating a pseudo stack using some of Parrot's PMC register (18-29, with P31 used for overflow). Leo wasn't convinced it was needed. http://xrl.us/chid "string_to_num" precision Leo's got some problems with the precision of the "string_to_num" function found in string.c. He doctored things to use "atof", but Dan's not so keen on that idea because "atof" doesn't have standard behaviour across platforms. He recommended grabbing Perl 5's string to num code (which he thought we'd already done). Nicholas Clark wasn't convinced that this was a good idea; he reckoned that Perl 5's code wasn't good enough. I think Nicholas convinced Dan that "atof" is actually the right thing to use (with a little preprocessing to deal with C99's "atof" being incompatible with C89's -- Parrot expects C89 behaviour). http://xrl.us/chie GMP Licensing Armin Obersteiner reported his investigations into the licensing requirements of the GMP maths library. It appears that the FSF's 'GPL Compliance Engineer' reckons we won't need to include the GMP's source code with binary distributions. We just have to make it available from the same source as the distribution. Which is handy. http://xrl.us/chif Parrot configuration -- a small perl task Leo asked for volunteers to fix up Configure.pl in order to make it less dependent on the host Perl's configuration. Brent Royal-Gordon provided a teeny-tiny patch that's actually shorter than Leo's description of the problem. http://xrl.us/chig Meanwhile, in perl6-language Scalar subscripting Remember Guatam Gopalakrishnan's question about subscripting scalars? Discussion continued. One Piers Cawley (who he?) suggested that it should be possible to specify a "postcircumfix:[] is rw" method in the String class to make string subscripting behave in a helpful fashion. He also suggested pulling this (and other similar behaviours) out into a Sequence trait. Juerd thought the proposed method name was a little verbose compared to Ruby's syntax for doing the same thing and showed off some rather pretty Ruby metaphors. Another subthread discussed interpolation in strings. Larry's changed his mind so that "$file.ext" is now interpreted as "$object.method". You need to do "${file}.ext" or ""$( $file ).ext"". Or maybe "$«file».ext" by analogy with "%foo«bar»". James Mastros pointed out that "." is rather ambiguous in a literal string; sometimes a full stop is just a full stop. http://xrl.us/chih Pushing lazy lists This thread continues to resemble the lists it is nominally discussing: Infinitely long and possibly endless. http://xrl.us/chii Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, 2nd Edition Leo pointed us at an O'Reilly press release announcing that the second edition of *Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials* is available. Huzzah! Let joy be unconfined. http://xrl.us/chij Rules to match abbreviations Hans Ginzel wondered wondered about adding something to the rules system to easily match specified abbreviations of a string. Luke Palmer came up with a (pretty ugly) solution which he then wrapped very neatly in a rule. http://xrl.us/chik Enhancing "open" There's a good deal of mileage to be had talking about how to improve the "open" function it seems. Larry continues to come up with new and interesting ways of designing the language in such a way that almost every decision about how to do something can be deferred. Speaking as someone who wishes he could just write "Application.new.run" and then debug his way to working code, I'm all for this kind of late binding. It's also amazing how much use Larry's getting out of his colon. (The character, obviously). http://xrl.us/chim Cartesian products and iterations Michele Dondi wondered whether Perl 6 will support Cartesian products between lists. Short answer: "Yes". It's probably called "outer". http://xrl.us/chin Do we really need filehandles? Dave Whipp thought the unthinkable (but in a good way) and wondered if we actually *need* user visible filehandles give the tools we have for slicing and dicing strings, manipulating lazy data structures, etc. He proposed being able to write: my $text is TextFile("/tmp/foo.txt"); for $text.lines -> { ... } Which is rather neat isn't it? Personally I'm not sure we can get rid of filehandles, but I do like the idea of a library that implements something like this. Alex Shitov pointed out that there would still be a need for methods like "$text.flush()" or "$text.close()". http://xrl.us/chio Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements Okay, so the interview was on Tuesday 13th of July. It went well; I'm going to be a maths teacher. 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 me feedback at mailto:pdcawley@bofh.org.uk http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site ------- End of Forwarded Message