Starting with this update, Ann Barcomb will be writing the Perl 6 summaries. Her plan is to release new issues on Sundays, initially dealing with the backlog at a rate of one month per week, and eventually returning to posting a summary of the previous week on a weekly basis.
[Edit: Outdated 2003-era Parrot content removed. -- Jesse 10 July 2006]
The proposed schedule is:
Compiler (perl6-compiler)
Making Pugs aware of Parrot
Peter Schwenn requested a concrete example settings to make Pugs aware of Parrot. Beau Cox replied with step-by-step instructions.
Difficulty installing Pugs on Cygwin
Syed Uzair Aqeel reported a Cygwin problem with finding package plugins when creating a makefile. Audrey made a suggestion.
Installation failure of Pugs revisions 9188 and 9204
Beau Cox reported that the 9188 revision of Pugs failed to pass smoke tests and install, and that the problem persisted with Pugs 9204 even after a reinstall of ghc and Haskell. Beau wrote a makefile patch, which also worked for chromatic, who had experienced the same problem.
Internals (parrot-porters)
Ed.: It turns out that the summaries in this section were mistakenly from 2003. This space will be filled with corrected summaries as they become available. Sorrie!
Language (perl6-language)
Typo Alert: Synopsis 5
Amos Robinson found a typo and Luke Palmer promptly corrected it.
Implementation of :w in regexes and other regex questions
David Romano asked some questions on extending the Rules domain specific language, the semantics of whitespace skipping, and negated matching semantics. Luke Palmer replied and explained that the extensions were not yet specified, and recommend possible solutions to the other two questions. Discussion ensued.
Overloading the variable declaration process
Darren Duncan wondered if he could get default values in variables instead of undef, in order to avoid calling the constructor, by simply annotating the type of the variable. Audrey Tang explained that a similar construct is available. This was followed by a discussion on the subject of class prototypes as default values for typed variables, as well as philosophical issues.
Instance attributes collision
Yiyi Hu asked what happens when different sigil attributes with the same name are declared in a single class. Various participants debated the merits of errors versus warnings.
CODE {...} mentioning variables without interpolation
Brad Bowman asked about the semantics of quasiquoting and variable interpolation for Perl 6's Macro language.
Larry Wall explained the semantics of AST binding,
the caller's scope,
interpolating ASTs into the macro,
and the COMPILING:: variable prefix.
This was followed by a comment on Brad's signature about intelligence and good sense.
Selective String Interpolation
Brad Bowman wanted to know if string interpolation and escaping could be optimized for creating strings of Perl code that selectively interpolate. Ideally he would be able to declare which variables are interpolated. He also mentioned closure interpolation and how it does not work well when quoting strings of code. Many people provided ideas, covering Lisp and Ruby, backslashes, and custom quote operators.
Some newbie questions about Synopsis 5
H. Stelling asked about Rule capture numbering, aliasing semantics, and nested subpattern details. Patrick R. Michaud clarified and the capture numbering scheme was discussed.
Named Subroutine return values
Joe Gottman wanted to know if subroutine declarations without an explicit declaration type (my,
our) can be annotated with a return value type.
Damian Conway replied that the returns trait can used regardless of the declaration syntax.
Luke Palmer and Larry Wall discussed the exact semantics of our Type sub foo,
--> and returns style return type declarations.
S02: Reserved namespace ops
TSa asked what reservations the design team had about the various uses of the reserved syntax for type subscripting.
Larry Wall reserved his right to silence,
adding that he thought that is reserved means "we don't have the foggiest idea what we'll do with this,
but we have a suspicion that if we let people use this particular thing right now,
we'll regret it someday." The official status of the various items in the notes/ directory was clarified -- they are considered to be unofficial.
Synopsis 29 patch
Larry Wall posted a patch for Synopsis 29, recognizing it as official. Ruud H.G. van Tol followed up with questions about a round function, and pi/atan/atan2.
Synopsis 29 and Complex numbers
Jonathan Lang noted that Synopsis 29 deals with complex numbers when describing the sqrt function, but omitted others. He proceeded to list the functions which require special handling of complex numbers. Several people commented.
Acknowledgments
chromatic recruited me at YAPC::NA 2006, and Jesse Vincent proposed this task. Audrey Tang helped me to get started and reviewed this summary, and Yuval Kogman assisted with the Language section.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
http://donate.perlfoundation.org/
Comments on the summary can be sent to kudra@domaintje.com.
See also
Re:This xrl.us business just doesn't have a future
audreyt on 2006-07-10T07:24:17
All agreed (and indeed that was just following previous summaries's examples). However, hough 123-characters URLs is a bit too long.After some discussion on #p5p, there seem to be a middle path: Link to the full URL, but display the xrl.us address as textual content between anchor tags. Does that sound plausible, or even more insane?
:-) Re:This xrl.us business just doesn't have a future
audreyt on 2006-07-10T07:25:43
Or, alternately, make the headings themselves links, and remove explicit links-as-texts altogether. Saner?:) Yay! :-)
hummassa on 2006-07-10T15:38:33
Now _that_ is saner.Re:This xrl.us business just doesn't have a future
chromatic on 2006-07-10T17:53:01
My heart would sing a little more if explicit links as texts went away everywhere for good.
short links do no harm
ferreira on 2006-07-10T17:53:35
P5P summaries also use short links, so that 123-characters-long URLs (like audreyt said) are avoided. These are also used in the summaries as sent to perl5-porters and perl5-summary mailing lists. Both, mailing lists and use.perl are considered transient sources of readable information. In P5P case, the summaries are archived with full URLs at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/ assuring the permanence of these. (Well, as long as the archives themselves they point to survive.)Re:This xrl.us business just doesn't have a future
ask on 2006-07-12T20:33:11
> will eventually break (see xrl.us TOS)
We haven't actually ever deleted any URLs, and when we do we'll make sure that the expiration logic doesn't expire any of the links used in the summaries. Likely then the web crawlers will keep them "in use" for us.
> are another point of failure anyway
The reason we made the service in the first place was so the Perl community would have one that'd be as dependable (or not;-) ) as the perl.org services we run.
> are a privacy liability
That's sorta goofy. If you feel that way then you should probably unsubscribe from the perl.org lists, disable your cpan.org email address and not use any of the perl.org sites we host anymore. (The httpd running Metamark is on the same server as www.perl.org and many other sites).:-)
(I should add a note to http://metamark.net/about on our privacy policy though...)
- ask
Re:This xrl.us business just doesn't have a future
ask on 2006-07-12T20:33:50
Oh -- all that being said, I agree it's better to use the full link when linking from websites.:-)
- ask
Re:Please disregard parrot summaries
audreyt on 2006-07-11T03:02:15
Oopsie. Thanks for pointing it out!
Sorry for being a sloppy reviewer, I'll try to do better next time.
:-( Meanwhile, obra++ has Ed'ed the contents away.
