Planet Perl Six

german Perl 6 article in the next $foo

2010-03-20T23:58:07+00:00

3 years ago I wrote a 2 part article about the Perl 6 project for $foo perl magazine (issue number 2 in summer 2007 and 3 autumn). Since than, nearly every year I write an update. I also did for the next release, since Rakudo * is a good reason for that.

Beside that I did minimal TPW wiki maintenance and clearing of some details for the Perl 6 Tablets.

"Perlito" MiniPerl6 4.0 - string-eval, more bootstrapped backends by Flavio S. Glock

2010-03-19T17:39:08+00:00

Perlito is a subset of Perl 6, which was designed as a light
bootstrapping language.

Changelog for version 4.0:

4.0 2010-03-20
- Go backend bootstrap.
The Go backend was updated to the latest Go language spec.
- Perl5 backend optimized; 30% faster
- More library functions, added to all backends
- New 'Eval.pm' module - implements a MiniPerl6 interpreter in MiniPerl6.
This should add some debugging capabilities later on.
- New test suite. See README on how to use 'prove' for each backend.
- New compiler options to create binary executables
- Currently the stable backends are: Perl5, Javascript, JVM, Lisp, Go.
See README for bootstrapping instructions for all backends.
- Removed support for features that are not standard Perl6.

Thanks to pmurias++ for helping test this release.

Version 4.0 can be downloaded from
http://github.com/fglock/Perlito/tree/7f0ac392dfcf04d390ebefe5f4274bb37cbd7b6e

Enjoy!
- Flávio S. Glock (fglock)

Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #27 ("Copenhagen") by Nuno 'smash' Carvalho

2010-03-18T11:26:58+00:00

Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #27 ("Copenhagen")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
March 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #27 "Copenhagen".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the March 2010 release
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named
after a Perl Mongers group. The March 2010 release is code named
"Copenhagen" for Copenhagen.pm, hosts of the Perl 6 Copenhagen
Hackathon [1], which took place in connection with the Open Source Days
Conference. The main goal of the hackathon was to raise some awareness
around Perl 6, and to give everyone a chance to get their hands-on with
Perl 6.

The Copenhagen hackathon helped nail down a number of issues regarding
module loading. During these days we also saw a heightened activity on
the channel, in the Perl 6 and Rakudo repositories, and in the number of
passing tests. All this was contributed by people both on location and
elsewhere. The RT queue peaked at 725 new/open tickets, and then started
on a downward trend. Apart from the great steps forward in productivity,
it was the first time some of the core Perl 6 contributors had a chance
to meet.

Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this
release include:

* Numerous updates to trigonometric functions and the Rat class

* Basic s/// and s[...] = '...' implemented

* use improved and need/import implemented, with some basic support
for versioned modules and lexical importation

* Grammars work again and now include support for regexes taking
parameters and proto-regexes

* Series operator now has basic support for the current Spec.

* User defined operators working again

* Support, though with caveats, for !, R, X and Z meta-operators

* Performance improvements for invocation and hash creation

* Various parsing bugs fixed

* Variables initialized to Any by default now, not Mu

* ROADMAP updates

For a more detailed list of changes see "docs/ChangeLog".

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute,
see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org
mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#28) is scheduled for April 22, 2010.
A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2010 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!

[1] http://conferences.yapceurope.org/hack2010dk/

Bad news, revisited

2010-03-17T04:32:16+00:00

For those of you who are wondering where I've been lately with Perl 6 and Rakudo development, here's the story. As many of you know, my wife was diagnosed in early 2008 with ovarian cancer and remission [1,2]. Over the past few weeks various tests have indicated a probable cancer recurrence; and on March 2nd my wife was diagnosed with a small-bowel obstruction requiring immediate hospitalization. Since then nearly all of my time and energy has been essentially dedicated to caring for her and her needs. As of this writing (Mar 16) we're still in the hospital and hope she will be able to return home in the next couple of days.

The most obvious question relating to Rakudo development is "How does this affect scheduling of the Rakudo Star release in April?" Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for this at the moment, as I don't yet have a firm date of when her recovery might be sufficiently far along that I can devote significant time again to Perl 6. I could be available again in just a few days, or it could take many weeks.

For now I've asked the core Rakudo and Perl 6 developers to work out what they think will be the best course of action for Rakudo Star given my current situation. As far as I'm concerned, all options are on the table (e.g., delaying the release a bit), but I think that whatever is decided needs to be a consensus among the entire development team. I suspect we will collectively announce an updated plan sometime in the next few days.

As I did in 2008, I'll tend to limit any further public posts about the current medical situation to major developments. But if anyone has any questions, I'll be glad to answer them.

As always, my wife and I send our thanks to everyone for your prayers, support, and understanding.

1. http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/35389
2. http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/37315

Parrot 2.0 Released! by Christoph Otto

2010-03-16T10:46:16+00:00

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of
the old ones.”
- John Cage

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.2.0
"Like Clockwork." Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed
at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 2.2.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the
download instructions at http://parrot.org/download. For those who would like
to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using
Subversion on the source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 2.2.0 News:
- Core changes
+ Most internal allocations now use the GC
+ RNG non-randomness fixes
+ Elimination of much dead code
- API changes
+ PMCs can now be initialized from an int
+ Many legacy ops are removed
- Platforms
+ Sun cc and Intel icc support have been restored
+ Compiler invocation no longer goes through a Perl script
- Tools
+ NCI thunks are now generated by self-hosted PIR code

Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project. Our next scheduled release is 20 April 2010.

Enjoy!

My life refactored, Zavolaj, workshops, Rakudo and more!

2010-03-16T00:48:36+00:00

It's been a while since I scribbled anything here, so a few quick updates.

First, an update on me. Since last time I wrote, I've moved country. Yup, I actually left behind my beloved Bratislava and I'm now hacking from Lund in Sweden. The beer - like everything else - is more expensive, and I don't have views of a beautiful city castle from my apartment here. But the city is overall very pleasant, I'm located a short walk to the center and the train station, and the supermarkets have a great range of international nom (and HP sauce!) I've yet to try the nearby curry house, or any of the other many appealing restaurants here, but I'm optimistic there will be plenty of WIN. Anyway, here's hoping I can get nicely settled down here.

I was greatly assisted with the move to Sweden by Perl 6 hacker Martin Berends, to whom I am extremely grateful. On the way, we went via the Netherlands Perl Workshop. I gave a couple of talks; I'll get the slides online shortly. It was really lovely to be at the Netherlands Perl Workshop again - the atmosphere was every bit as warm and friendly as I remembered from the last time. To everyone who organized and attended: thanks for a wonderful couple of days. :-)

In the couple of days before the move and during the NPW, mberends++ and I hacked on a shiny new project: Zavolaj! It is a way of doing native calls from Perl 6, just by adding a trait to a stub subroutine, and is a first draft for native calling in Perl 6. The upshot is that we now have a working MySQL client written using Zavolaj, in pure Perl 6! mberends++ is continuing to build this out, and happily this all means that Rakudo * will ship with database access, amongst other things. (I've also done an example of calling a Win32 API, and we're both pondering an ImageMagick binding with it too).

My first days in Scandinavia were actually mostly spent in Copenhagen, at a Perl 6 hackathon organized by Copenhagen.pm - a group I hope to drop in on now and then, since I'm only an hour or so's train ride away. There's a wonderful write-up by moritz++ that tells a lot of what went on, and I can only echo his sentiments about how much fun it was to hack and hang out in meat space with other Perl 6 folks. I'm already looking forward to the next time we get to do that!

Rakudo wise, the work goes on at a good pace. I've been working on lots of bits, and colomon++ has been having quite the patch fest too. The release later this week is a good step forward from last month's release, which was the first after the ng branch was merged. We've won back a lot of functionality again, and this is the first release ever that has some basic support for versioned modules - a direct consequence of the hackathon - and also regexes taking parameters, thanks to a patch from bkeeler++.

Anyway, that's all for now. Only to note that I expect to be making it to the Nordic Perl Workshop in Iceland in May, and with a bit of luck to the Perl workshops in France and Ukraine too (will take some fun logistics to do the two, but I did miss the French Perl Workshop last year, and I always really love to visit Ukraine, so I'll try and work out a way). Have fun, and I'll try and blog again soonish!

Plain old assignment, and freaky binding

2010-03-15T22:47:17+00:00

What happens when we do assignment? When we do $a = 42;, for example.

Intuitively, in almost every language, what happens is at least something like this: the symbol $a becomes associated with the value 42. In pseudo instruction code, it might look something like this:

my $a; $a = 42; $0 = 42 store '$a', $0

(Feel free to read $0 et al. as "some register in the VM". And to fantasize liberally about the opcodes.)

From this model, we expect variables to be independent, even when we've assigned from one to the other. So in this piece of code...

my $a = 42; my $b = $a; $a = 5; $0 = 42 store '$a', $0 $1 = fetch '$a' store '$b', $1 $2 = 5 store '$a', $2

...we expect $b to still be associated with the value 42, and not to have suffered some freaky action-at-a-distance which causes it to be changed when $a is assigned to 5.

"Well, obviously $b won't do that", you interject. "It can't, if we believe in the model in which there are only symbols and their associated values. No freaky action-at-a-distance can occur." And that's right, as far as that goes.

But it turns out that Perl 6 allows a middle abstraction layer between symbols and values. The entities occupying this middle layer are usually referred to as "containers", but that's a terribly overloaded term. I'll call them "buckets" in this post, hoping I won't throw some hash expert into a fit. 哈哈

To explain the behavior of (and need for) buckets, let's take an almost identical example as the one above:

my $a = 42; my $b := $a; $a = 5; $0 = 42 store '$a', $0 bind '$b', '$a' $1 = 5 store '$a', $1

(Note the two surface differences from the earlier example: := rather than =, and bind rather than assign.)

The state at the end of this new program is a case of freaky action-at-a-distance. When the value of $a is changed to 5 in the last statement, the value of $b will also be changed to 5.

The reason for this is simple: the := (and the bind) causes the symbol $b not to have a bucket all of its own, but to acquire $a's bucket. When 5 is subsequently stored in that bucket, both $a and $b are simultaneously affected, since the two symbols share one and the same bucket.

Now as a language feature, freaky action-at-a-distance may at first seem to be situated somewhere on a spectrum between "useless" and "dangerous". But it is the feature that makes pass-by-reference parameter passing work:

my $a = 42; foo($a); # freaky! say $a; # 5 sub foo($b is rw) { $b = 5; }

Note how that's practically the same example as the above with binding, except that it's now mediated through a layer of parameter passing. But $a and $b still share one single bucket, as before.

I only have two more things to say about this. First, jnthn++ explained in Copenhagen that the difference between scalar bucket and an array/hash bucket is that the former always forwards method calls to the value it contains. I don't grok that yet, so I may have got it wrong.

Second, there's still a way to circumvent buckets, assigning values directly to symbols:

my $a := 42; $0 = 42 bind '$a', $0

What this means is simply that the variable $a is bound directly to a value, and has no buckets to which one can assign new values. It's a bit like a read-only value, except that $a can still be rebound to something else.

These are the kinds of thoughts one gets when starting to write a time-travelling debugger.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 03 March 2010

2010-03-13T23:19:22+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

noted how lastcall allows nextsame control of nested dispatchers
reserved the final paren-based shape declaration syntax without committing to it meaning anything
clarified that Nil itself is defined but likes to produce undefined values when indexed
added some clarifications of how the series operator deals with type information
clarified that Pair.ACCEPTS uses "so" and "not" semantics so :s returns True or False
removed the 1/2 and +2-3i literal forms, now rely on angle forms <1/2> and <+2-3i> for literals, and the bare forms now rely on constant folding rather than a fragile special syntax
in STD, made undeclared variables more fatal
STD now tries to be helpful if the user makes the typical P5-ish variant-sigil mistake on arrays and hashes
also improved error message on the -{}> kind of mistake that P5 programmers will make
my $a, $b now gives better message
STD now reserves the () shape syntax per current spec
fixed regression on indirect method knowing that method name is not bound early
moved unexpected-!! panic from infixstoppers to infix:<!!> for better extensibility
so a user's infix definition isn't ignored if it starts with !!
you can define user operators starting with that, and it only complains for the right reasons now
STD now gives an accurate message when a prefix is missing its term
removed deprecated rational and complex literal forms from STD
much preliminary work for moving operator defs to CORE.setting, not yet checked in
only blocker is not being in Copenhagen

Patrick:

Jonathan, Carl, Moritz, and Martin will be there
I proposed a panel discussion instead of my talk on Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm
I'll be online then
can't make it due to sudden personal reasons
will be online quite a bit the next few days though
can participate in the hackathon remotely
worked mostly on helping other people get their tasks done
updated the parser to handle more operator conditions
working toward enabling user-defined operators
quite a few new people submitted patches
several were non-trivial
one patch put grammars, regexes, and tokens back in Rakudo
that's not trivial and it worked pretty well
I'm reviewing patches and making comments
lots of good progress
expect lots more during the hackathon

Allison:

going to work on code stuff this weekend instead of traveling
had a very productive trip
glad to be home to get work done
working on the PCC branch this week
should be, fingers crossed, small and easy to get done
want to avoid creature feeping
get the re-ordering through and move on

Jerry:

having trouble building Rakudo on Windows
have time to debug with people online
this is preventing me from talking to Patrick about and working on S19

Patrick:

we can work on that tomorrow

Will:

saw that problem on p6c as well
fixed a Parrot bug for Patrick related to STRING indices
we have some speed fixes on top of that
still working on the build cleanup
hope to merge to trunk in the next two or three days

haven't had and won't have much time
fixed a few bugs
working on helping other people get stuff done

Jerry:

is there a hackathon or meeting time available after OSCON?

Allison:

recommend the weekend after

Patrick:

there'd have to be a hackathon for me to get TPF sponsorship

Jerry:

the pace of spec changes has picked up
any ideas what's driving that?
is it different from before?
was the end-of-year lull the same as before?

Larry:

everyone did take a break over Christmas
most of the changes are still simplifications
or responses to implementation issues
dealing with inconsistencies

Patrick:

a lot of implementation issues have come up over the past three weeks

Larry:

ng has flushed out a lot of design issues

Jerry:

that's great!

Patrick:

that's great for Larry, but I have a deadline!

Allison:

remember, it's a stake in the ground
"This is a release of Perl 6 you can use NOW!"

Patrick:

we're driving the spec with regard to lists and arrays

Larry:

they essentially have the same structure
they need separate typology
you need to know whether to clone an iterator
that's the only reason you have to know

Patrick:

did you see my comment about binding being the distinguishing feature?

Larry:

I think about that in inside out terms
not sure I can put that in words yet
had a conversation with Solomon about the FP view of iterators and arrays
that's some of my thinking
do we promise to hold a pointer fixed, or go on to the next thing?
whether that thing is persistent is mostly the bailiwick of the GC, from the standpoint of the language

Patrick:

I wasn't sure how that applied to my specific context
maybe I should work up a description of words or implementation
some lists I want to keep around reified elements
some lists I don't
the distinction is whether it's bound to any variable

Larry:

may depend on what it's bound to
we might make the keeparound promise only for binding to @

Patrick:

I came up with binding to $ examples
we can get laziness but eat up a ton of memory
if we throw things away when iterating, we get more things wrong

Larry:

it's a matter of tracking
are we bound to something that tells the GC to keep the rest of the list around?
that's the FP view

Patrick:

that's not just a GC view
it's how people refer to them
my GC is taken care of by my virtual machine anyway
it's about reachability from the HLL
or did you see it disappear

Larry:

that's whether you have a reference to it

Patrick:

how do you know whether to keep a reference to it?
I've produced this element
can I send it back to the caller
or do I need to keep it around so something else can get to it
if the iterator itself is bound, you keep the reference
if it's not bound, you can return it but not keep the reference around
I'll write up my thoughts

Jerry:

will these changes settle down after Rakudo *?
are they a precursor to that release?
will they continue afterward?
will Rakudo * go stale?
that's a tough one to answer

Patrick:

I can't guarantee stability at this point
we want a useful release
we'd like not to have any deprecations after that point
given how implementations and applications drive implementations
Rakudo * exists to encourage people to develop applications
we've never made that stability an explicit goal for Rakudo *
we'll probably institute deprecation cycles when it comes out
we don't want to change the world out from under people
it doesn't represent a spec freeze
thinking of a separate distribution release from the compiler release
a three month stability cycle of releases for Rakudo *
a different point of view
any distribution release doesn't have to be tied to the newest compiler release
I see Rakudo * as a series of releases, not a single release

Report from the Perl 6 Hackathon in Copenhagen

2010-03-10T19:59:11+00:00

During and the "Open Source Days 2010" in Copenhagen there was a Perl 6 track, and also a hackathon that stretched out three more days after the conference.

I arrived on Saturday afternoon (which happend to be the last day of the conference) and thus missed all of the talks and the more public part of the hackathon.

Module Loading

On Sunday we discussed module loading extensively. Martin Berends had prepared that topic, and drove the effort by asking the right questions.

Discussions

Modules are complicated beasts in Perl 6. They not only have a name and a version as in Perl 5, but they can also have so-called authorities, which handle the case when different programmers write modules with the same name. Also unlike Perl 5 a module can be installed with different versions, and the programmer can either request a particular version or the highest version available.

Also they have Unicode and case sensitive names, which Perl 6 must support even if the underlying file system does not provide both features.

Although it doesn't really sound like it, this combination of requirements make it incredibly hard to implement a module loader that is both correct and efficient. Previously all discussions on the mailing lists and IRC channels ended in huge threads full of bikeshedding and even more feature ideas.

We were well aware of these requirements before the hackathon, and also aware of the fact that we have no chance of implementing all that in a reasonable time frame. So the first step was to decide what subset of features to implement, and how that could be achieved.

We decided not to implement Unicode emulation/mapping, and partially ignore authorities for now. Still we leave some room for wriggeling in the mapping from module name to file name: a module My::Module can live in the file My/Module.pm or in My/Module.ignored.pm. That way several modules with the same name but different versions or authorities can be stored in the same module repository.

This also implies that the Perl 6 compiler has to actually read and parse those files to find out which file to load. In a later stage the compiler will write a cache file to store the mapping from file name to module name(s), verisons, authorities, a timestamp and probably also dependencies plus timestamps (in order to know when to recompile a module).

Once this caching mechanism is implemented, it solves the Unicode problem mostly for free, because it will store the full Unicode module name and ASCII file name in the cache, and makes it available to the module locater.

After reaching an initial consensus, the discussion went on to other topics: can we use the existing CPAN infrastructure to actually distribute our modules? The conclusion was that we most likely can use (with very little patching) the PAUSE and mirroring infrastructure, but we likely have to write our own indexing and searching facilities and also a completely separate module installer.

Implementation

I wrote a very simplistic prototype of a module locater in Perl 5, which Jonathan mostly translated to NQP on Monday, and actually plugged it into Rakudo's module loading facility on Tuesday.

So now you can actually have multi modules with different versions, and load the one with the highest version - requesting a particular version is not yet implemented, but hopefully now a mere SMOP.

Other matters

Martin Berends wrote up the results of our module discussions, and spent the rest of his hacking time on a foreign function interface.

Not everybody worked full-time on module things; baest worked on some builtin functions and (most of the time) number handling. Carl Mäsak spent some time on tardis, his time travelling debugger. He also spent quite some effort on getting enums back into Rakudo, with occasional assistance from Jonathan.

Many of us fixed some bugs that popped up, and also found new bugs

RT Queue

The perl6 RT queue has grown to such a size that it was both scary and hard to use at all. On Sunday it peaked around 725 open tickets.

I did rough sweep over most of the tickets, identifying those that were either fixed (but not yet closed), superseded by changes to the specification or actually not bugs at all (spam and false reports), or could be closed by simple changes to Rakudo.

That way I closed about 80 tickets, and identified another 40 or so tickets that are actually fixed, but need test coverage before being closed.

Personal notes

This was the first Perlish event to which I have traveled, and it was just awesome. I met friends in "meat space" that I previously only (or mostly) knew over the Internet, and found them to be just as I had experienced them from the distance: friendly, witty, full of good jokes and bad puns, curious, relaxed and all in all a very enjoyable company.

We enjoyed the hospitality of Jonas Brømsø Nielsen and the OSD folks who did everything to make our stay pleasant: prepare the arrival with maps and tips about the public transport system, booking and funding (!) our accommodation, inviting us to lunch or dinner now and then, and being available whenever questions or problems arose. Thank you!. The March release of Rakudo will be named Copenhagen for very good reasons.

Calling All Google Summer of Code Mentors by Jonathan Leto

2010-03-09T01:12:17+00:00

Howdy,

I am working on the application for The Perl Foundation and Parrot
Foundation to participate in Google Summer of Code 2010 [0]. GSoC is a
program where Google funds eligible students to hack on open source
projects for a summer. It is a great opportunity for the students and
the communities that mentor them. You also may be interested in this
summary of our involvement last year [1]. Our application will be
submitted by the end of this week.

Please join us in getting prepared for this year. There is a page for
possible mentors to volunteer [2]* as well as a page for project ideas
[3]. If you would like to help with the wiki, our main GSoC page [4]
is the best place to start. You are also invited to join our mailing
list [5] and come ask question in #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

Thanks!

Duke

[0] http://socghop.appspot.com/
[1] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/10/perls-of-wisdom-perl-foundation-parrots.html
[2] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc_mentors
[3] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc_2010_projects
[4] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?gsoc
[5] http://groups.google.com/group/tpf-gsoc

* If you listed yourself as a mentor last year and you are not
interested this year, please remove yourself from the page.

--
Jonathan "Duke" Leto
jonathan@leto.net
http://leto.net

The ghost of Algol 68

2010-03-08T22:01:20+00:00

Ever wonder why bash closes if blocks with fi? This practice was inctroduced in Algol 68, a language that Perl 6 was accused of reinventing yesterday on the perl6-language list.

Curious, I went to the Wikipedia article to read up on Algol 68.

ALGOL 68 (short for ALGOrithmic Language 1968) is an imperative computer programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics.

"Successor." "Wider scope of application". "More rigorously defined syntax and semantics". Sound familiar?

ALGOL 68 has been criticized [...] for abandoning the simplicity of ALGOL 60 becoming a vehicle for complex or overly general ideas, and doing little to make the compiler writer's task easy [...]

Oh dear. ☺ We even have the 'do little to make the compiler writer's task easy' meme in Perl 6...

<TimToady> after all, Perl Philosphy is simply to torment the implementors on behalf of the user (#perl6, 2008-10-09)
<pmichaud> aha! I have a quote for my keynote.

Besides that, there's all these other little parallels, such as

Algol 68 seemingly playing with words (they borrowed the term 'gomma' from Finnegan's Wake, but the feature it denoted got scrapped in a 1973 revision),
something junction-like called 'multiple value',
a whole heap of values for different forms of nothing and undefinedness,
a newly-invented grammar formalism, and
a general feeling of deep ambitiousness and a desire to get things right.

So, there are deep similarities between Algol 68 and Perl 6. There's not much to say to that, except perhaps "huh".

If there's anything in it all that's uplifting though, it's the second paragraph of the article:

Contributions of ALGOL 68 to the field of computer science are deep and wide ranging, although some of them were not publicly identified until they were passed, in one form or another, to one of many subsequently developed programming languages.

If that's not spot on for Perl 6, I think it will be in a decade or so.

the low hanging fruits are gone

2010-03-08T01:21:58+00:00

an impressive post like that one a week ago won't come again so fast. Last days I added Pawel Murias and Gabor and mentioned pixie, but the main part is done here. The timeline (structured and with 33 items) is now also mostly done. You can also see that we exceeded the zenith of edits. The number of articles touched in last 14 days is now sinking rapidly. it So whats next?

Well renee needs the next perl 6 article, which I want deliver this week. All the experience I collected writing the 200+ changes in last 2 weeks will go into that. But my next goal for the TPF wiki will be the translation of my perl 6 tut and the release of Kephra 0.4.3, which is some weeks overdue.

3 new facts about the TPF wiki

2010-03-04T23:35:30+00:00

we touched 101 articles in last 2 weeks
currently I'm writing on the Perl 6 timeline
I saved the content of ponie's page into its's wiki page because it might will soon disappear

I'm a snowplow

2010-03-02T11:15:32+00:00

Oops. I think excessive distractedness just made me miss a 10-day interval, thereby falling off the Iron Man challenge. Oh well. [Sidenote: Is there a way to easily check one's Ironman status?]

Lately, I've been feeling a bit like the snowplows shuffling snow around outside my office window. I have a lot of things I want to blog about, but I've been pushing them ahead of me. That's exactly what the Iron Man thing is supposed to counter. Guess procrastination won out in this case.

So, how much blog would a masak write if a masak could write blog? Here's a list off the top of my head of the things I've been thinking of blogging about:

The presentation I'm writing for the Open Source Days in Copenhagen this weekend. I'm really excited about it.
The "7 Wonders of the Ancient Grammar Engine" series. I've started on it, and I like what I have so far.
More E03 stuff. Guess that's what I didn't blog about in the past 11 days.
snarkyboojum++ and I have started toying with writing a time-travelling debugger. Yes, really.
A lot of things are happening in Rakudo-land this month, after the successful ng merge. colomon++ especially shines like a bright star right now, bringing lots of tests back online each day.
I'd like to get enums in Rakudo before this month's release. I've already done anon enums. Next up: named enums.
I've been starting to think seriously about u4x lately. Partly because of other people's questions, partly because it seems the the time is ripe to start it.
However, every time I have that thought I realize that the book is more important at the moment. I have some unimplemented ideas there as well.
GGE is very near being PGE-compliant. Just a few finishing touches are needed. This will likely usher in a new era in Perl 6 grammars and parsing.

Will I have time in the near future to expand these one-liners into full-fledged blog posts? Only time will tell.

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 24 February 2010

2010-03-02T05:12:09+00:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

my work last week was almost entirely responsive to various discussions on irc and p6l, even when it doesn't seem like it
clarified that LEAVE-style phasers do not trip till after an exception is handled (and not resumed)
the implementation of take is specifically before unwinding even if implemented with a control exception
simplified series operator by moving generator function to the left side (any function on right side will now be a limiting conditional)
a * is no longer required to intuit the series on the left; the absence of generator before the ... operator is sufficient
first argument on the right of ... is now always a limiter argument
for convenience and consistency, added a new ...^ form to exclude a literal limiter from the generated series
unlike ranges, however, there is no leading exclusion ^... or ^...^
series is a list associative list infix, and each ... pays attention only the portion of the list immediately to its left (plus the limit from the right)
an "impossible" limit can terminate a monotonic intuited series even if the limit can never match exactly
variables now default to a type of Any, and must explicitly declare Mu or Junction type to hold junctions
this is to reduce pressure to duplicate many functions like == with Mu arguments; most of our failure values should be derived from Any in any case
a Mu result is more indicative of a major malfunction now, and is caught at first assignment to an Any variable
Instant/Duration types are biased away from Num and towards Rat/FatRat semantics
Instant is now completely opaque; we no longer pretend to be the same as TAI, numerically speaking
Instants are now considered a more basic type than epochs, which are just particular named instants
all culturally aware time can be based on calculations involving instants and durations
list associative operators now treat non-matching op names as non-associative rather than right-associative, forcing parens
Whatever semantics now autocurry any prefix, postfix, or infix operator that doesn't explicitly declare that it handles whateverness itself
WhateverCode objects now take a signature to keep clear how many args are not yet curried
so *+* is now more like WhateverCode:($x,$y)
autocurrying is still transitive so multiple ops can curry themselves around a *
added semilists as Slicel type to go with Parcel
this allows us to bind @array[1,2,3] differently from @array[1,2,3;4,5,6], for instance
the Matcher type now excludes Bool arguments to prevent accidental binding to outer $_ when closure is needed
when and ~~ will now warn of always/never matching on direct use of True or False names as matcher
STD generalizes \w lookahead to all twigils now
STD now treats non-matching list associatives as non-associative
things like 1 min 2 max 3 are now illegal, and require parenthesization for clarity
STD now treat invocant colon as just a comma variant so it does not fall afoul of the list associativity change
CORE now recognizes the TrigBase enumeration

Patrick:

first release of the new branch of Rakudo last week
passing ~25,000 tests at the release
thanks to optimizations from chromatic, Jonathan, and Vasily, Rakudo has a lot of speed improvements
in particular, it can run those tests in under 10 minutes, non-parallel, depending on your hardware
older releases took 25 minutes and more
the regex tests will slow things down
ultimately, we're seeing a big speed improvement over the past releases
cleaned up lists and slices, now they work pretty well
worked with Solomon Foster and others to speed up trig operations
fixed a bug related to lexicals declared in classes
fixed the long-standing and often recurring problem with curlies ending a line/statement causing the next statement to be a statement modifier
easy to fix in the new grammar
that was nice
made an initial implementation of the sort method
it's very short, because Parrot provides one
there are a few bugs in Rakudo there still, but I'll get them
planning for the Copenhagen hackathon on March 5 - 9
Jonathan and I have been updating the Rakudo roadmap
will check that in in the next couple of hours
so far, every time we review it, we surprise ourselves at how much we've accomplished
we're meeting all of the top priority goals without making any heroic efforts
we'll put those goals in as well as timelines
most of the major tasks from previous roadmaps have happened

Allison:

working on Python this week
attended Python VM summit, Python language summit, and PyCon
Parrot's on good track to support what Python needs
useful to make community connections
when I reviewed Pynie, I was surprised to see how close it is to supporting the whole Python syntax
some of those features are big, like objects
but we should support them soon
Debian packages delayed by the absence of a sponsor
they should go into Debian soon though
I put in a request for feature-freeze exception for Ubuntu 10.4
Parrot 2.0 should go in
haven't made any commits to the PCC branch
that'll be a top priority for next week

fixed a Parrot GC bug for last week's Rakudo release
made some optimizations in Rakudo and Parrot
helped Jonathan find a few more
fixed a long-standing math MMD bug
still working on HLL subclassing; more tricky than you think
may be some conflicting design goals about vtable overriding and MMD

Allison:

Patrick, do we need an explicit deprecation for old PGE and NQP?

Patrick:

I think Will already added one for NQP
we can add one for PGE if we need
they don't necessarily have to disappear at the next release
but no one's planning to maintain them

Allison:

no reason not to put in the notice now
we don't have to remove them at the earliest possible date

It's not over yet

2010-03-02T01:15:14+00:00

The wiki madness continues, I did 2,3 People stubs(Will Coleda, Gabor) and a lot stubs around Parrot: PCT, NQP, Blizkost, PIR, Parrot compiler, PGE but that will slow down. There are some community related things missing like conferences, hackathons and so on and maybe a perl 6 timeline but what I want to show today, are articles which became well formated good content.

Sprixel was done its coauthor Martin.

what we got so far?

2010-02-25T23:46:11+00:00

Now its's the third time I'm rambling about the recent TPF wiki overhaul. Beside the fresh cleaned frontpages that just containes links to the 5 most important pages and aggregation of recent recent blog posts (was there before), many new pages were created. before we had 3 or 4 pages about wiki contributers now we have:

Kudos to lot of these people who helped me to write their article. Masak is last because the November bug is still there. :) Then we had an article about KP6, SMOP , Rakudo and Parrot. Now we have:

Special thanks here to chromatic++. Yes, yes almost all of them are stubs, but i add constantly. then I also added:

Like said, many of them are very short, but sometimes its only necessary to give form like a crystalization point.