This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists
"Your faithful Dynamic Environmentalist"
-- closing signature of Bob Rogers in 'RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding'
Language
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13487 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Last week, a commit from Larry Wall related to expanding tabs led TSa to ask if array equivalence should be defined in terms of Bags. Larry replied that he felt most people would prefer to look at Sets and Bags as Hashes, so he will not include Sets and Bags in the smartmatching table. Darren Duncan also felt that the current summary in Synopsis 6 was adequate.
This week, TSa responded to Darren's request that any change requests be explained in detail. According to TSa, the intent was not to change the synopsis but to have a few points clarified on list, such as the subtype relationship between Set and Bag. TSa also asked if KeyHash, KeySet and KeyBag are forced in to sigiled variables. Darren replied that he would expect that they would work like hashes.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13488 - doc/trunk/design/syn
In this commit, Larry Wall clarified the relationship between Set/Bag and KeyHash.
[svn:perl6-synopsis] r13489 - doc/trunk/design/syn
Larry Wall elaborated on gather, which has been modified to be more
like do in that it allows any statement.
Given a gather block which spawns multiple threads, Joe Gottman wanted to know if it is guaranteed that no object returned is lost, given that the relative order of items returned is indeterminate.
Parrot Porters
RFC: Proposal for dynamic binding
This thread was started by Bob Roger's proposal for dynamic binding. He compared two options, and later gave an analysis of a third (STM) at Leopold Toetsch's request.
Last week, Allison Randal responded to the proposal with the question of why dynamic binding should only apply to globals. She stated that the proposed implementation was not being approved, but noted that one of Bob's ideas concerning threads was of particular interest and likely to be included at some point. Bob replied in depth to the points she raised and asked if he could improve the proposal or if he should give it up.
This week there was further discussion between Allison and Bob.
[perl #40958] [BUG] - can't iterate subclass of ResizablePMCArray
chromatic responded to ticket [perl #40958] by including a patch which demonstrates the problem in the iteration code within the PMC. He noted that this is not the correct fix.
[perl #40966] [BUG] Parrot core dumps in perl6 (possible GC/pointer bug?)
Earlier, Patrick R. Michaud reported a bug in ticket [perl #40966].
This week, Matt Diephouse responded. He had seen the error in a different test, and identified the failing assertion. The problem seems to be that constant strings are being garbage collected too soon. He supplied a patch to not collect any constant PObj headers, but was not certain that was what should happen.
Leopold Toetsch replied that if they were being collected, they were being initially created in different object pools and then stored as constants. He requested information about the origin and contents of the constant, in order to track down where it was being created.
Initial feedback on PAST-pm, or Partridge
Earlier, Allison Randal initiated a discussion on Partridge (PAST-pm) with a post of her comments on user experience and implementation.
One subthread which developed dealt with a number of unrelated points. Leopold Toetsch joined Allison and Patrick R. Michaud in this thread. One of the topics involved Parrot limitations related to :init methods.
This week, Allison responded to a proposal from Patrick and asked if he had thought further about the syntax for initialization. She also agreed with treating moving code generation out of POST node objects as low priority. Patrick replied to some of the points.
[perl #41020] [PATCH] pmc2c.pl functionality extracted into separate package
Earlier,
in ticket [perl #41020], James Keenan supplied a patch to make
pmc2c.pl easier to test. This involved putting most of the subroutines
in a new package. He fixed a problem with GetOptions but thought there
were additional corrections to be made.
This week, James wrote that he had underestimated the challenges in testing Parrot build tools. He explained the problem, which involved the files which exist and the state of the system at the time that the tests are run, and concluded by asking what was the goal of testing the build tools.
[PATCH] tru64: compile (src/nci.c) and runtime (src/memory.c)
Jarkko Hietaniemi submitted two patches. One was to allow the Parrot trunk to compile in Tru64, and the second one was to eliminate some core dumps.
[perl #41044] use warnings not clean
In ticket [perl #41044], Will Coleda reported a problem with loading the platform and local hints file.
[perl #41047] [BUG] :multi doesn't work with :outer
Patrick R. Michaud created ticket [perl #41047] to report an error
with the :multi pragma when :outer is present. Matt Diephouse reported
it fixed in r15971.
[perl #41051] [PATCH]: Configure.pl: Spell out what 'ICU' means
James Keenan created ticket [perl #41051] to request that the POD
in Configure.pl use 'International Components for Unicode' instead of
'ICU' for clarity. Will Coleda applied the patch as r16021.
[perl #41052] [PATCH]: docs/configuration.pod: Small grammatical corrections
In ticket [perl #41052], James Keenan included a patch to correct
grammar in docs/configuration.pod.
chromatic suggested a virtual gathering on the 16th in #parrot. The purpose of the meeting is to examine the bug database to verify, fix, or resolve issues. Additionally, this meeting would serve to help curious newcomers get started. Lee Duhem felt that some examples could be cleaned up to make it easier for people to get started.
[perl #41053] [TODO] More useful dumping of Env PMC
Bernhard Schmalhofer thought that generic Hash dumping functionality would make it easier to see things such as the Env PMC. This request was ticket [perl #41053].
[svn:parrot-pdd] r16036 - trunk/docs/pdds/clip
Allison Randal added additional notes to the overview PDD on the target platforms for Parrot. The requirement for the 1.0 release of Parrot is that it be supported on major versions of Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows.
[perl #41055] [BUG]: 'Argument is not numeric' warning in Darwin configuration
In ticket [perl #41055], James Keenan registered a bug with running
perl Configure.pl, which seemed to be related to having a 3-level
version number.
Acknowlegements
This summary was prepared using Mail::Summary::Tools, available on CPAN.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
Thank you to everyone who has pointed out mistakes and offered suggestions for improving this series. Comments on this summary can be sent to Ann Barcomb, kudra@domaintje.com.
Distribution
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See Also
