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Piers Cawley | 6 Nov 2002 10:35
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This weeks Perl 6 summary

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021103
    Welcome to the latest of the ongoing series of Perl 6 summaries, in
    which your arrogant moderator does battle with the forces of prolixity
    in a Brobdingnagian attempt to tame the tortuously tangled threads of
    Perl 6's design and development mailing lists. And if I keep up the
    purple prose at that rate it'll *still* be clearer than the tangle that
    is this week's perl6-language discussion.

    However, because it's customary, and because the language list scares
    me, we'll start with the comparatively tame perl6-internals.

  Fun with file formats
    Toward the end of last week, Rhys Weatherley had asked about being able
    to insert arbitrary chunks of metadata into parrot bytecode files. Dan
    ended up producing a `draft sketch' of the bytecode generation
    facilities and the ability to add arbitrary chunks of metadata was
    conspicuous by its absence. People didn't seem to be happy about this,
    lamenting a lack of flexibility, both in the overall file structure and
    in what one could stick into the bytecode. Dan mounted a sturdy defence,
    pointing out that we want `a file format that does what we need it
    to--present executable bytecode data to the interpreter--as fast as
    possible. Everything else is secondary to that.'

    Kv Org wondered if it would be a good idea to worry about sandbox issues
    in the bytecode format, but nothing came of that question. Well, not
    this week anyway.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?S1F442C52

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?V20551C52
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Piers Cawley | 13 Nov 2002 10:07
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This week's Perl 6 Summary

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021110
    Far off in distant Newark a figure, muttering something about `Leon
    Brocard', shambles across a railway bridge and makes its way into a
    waiting room. Time passes. After a while, a train arrives and the figure
    shambles on board, takes its seat, pulls a laptop from its bag and
    starts to type. This is what it types: `=head1 The Perl 6 Summary for
    the week ending 20021110'.

    Yes, it's time for another update on the japes and tomfoolery from the
    world of Perl 6. We start, as usual, with perl6-internals.

  The Myth of Fingerprints
    At the end of the previous week, Gregor posted an outline of his
    proposal for fixing the fingerprinting issue with dynamic loading. (The
    fingerprinting issue is that 'old' .pbc files may break big time when
    run on newer Parrots. Ideally we'd like Parrot to refuse to run such
    files *before* bad things happen. It's proposed that this be done by
    adding `fingerprints' to .pbc to allow for identification by Parrot.)
    Leopold Tötsch wasn't at all sure about Gregor's approach, pointing out
    that it would have massive speed implications, and lo, the thread got
    dragged off in the direction of a discussion of optimizing Parrot for
    speed. How did that happen then?

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?T12252F62

  "on_exit" not portable
    Andy Dougherty pointed out that Solaris doesn't have "on_exit", which is
    used by Parrot to clean up after itself, and suggested that
    interpreter.c be reworked to use "atexit". However, SunOS has on_exit
    but doesn't have atexit. It's a quandary. Josh Wilmes suggested
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Piers Cawley | 21 Nov 2002 11:02
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This week's Perl 6 summary

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021117
    "Oh! my ears and whiskers, I'm late!"

    It's 0650, it's 20021120 and I've only just started writing the summary.
    Call me lazy, call me a shirker, call me anything you damn well please,
    just don't interrupt me while I'm writing this.

    Yup, it's past time for another peek into the lives of those strange
    beings we call the Perl 6 development community, starting off, as usual,
    with the perl6-internals crew.

  Quick Roadmap
    Dan returned unscathed from this year's Lightweight Languages workshop
    and presented a short roadmap for the next few miles. Dan reckons that
    if we hit all those milestones we'll have a complete imperative core.
    Which will be nice.

    http://makeashorterlink.com/?N1CE21482

  Branch Dump
    Michael Collins stuck his head above the parapet to report that using
    "branch" provoked a core dump on his Linux setup. It turned out to be a
    problem with his code. Dan debugged his code and offered a reasonably
    full explanation of how parrot's "branch" actually works (and why you
    should really use labels in hand written assembler.) Gopal V worried
    that allowing branches to non-instructions was unsafe and wondered if,
    at least, a "parrot -fverify" switch might be in order. Dan agreed, but
    his reasoning was somewhat different.

    Elsewhere in the thread Dan tells us that he wants safe interpreters to
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Piers Cawley | 27 Nov 2002 15:02
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This week's summary

The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20021124
    And some rough beast, its hour come 'round at last slouches toward...

    And then the scansion goes to pot and I can't make a joke fit. Shame.

    Anyhoo, it's time for another episode of the continuing saga of Perl 6
    development. When I say 'saga' I don't mean a long, long poem of
    alliterative lines, but a bright, breezy and brisk tale of the bods in
    the lists. Well, one week mayb, when we've been quiet...

    We start, as usual with the internals list.

  C#/Parrot Status
    Rhys Weatherley, who has been absent from the internals list lo these
    many days popped up again to ask about:

    *   Object/class support

    *   Fixed-size integers and/or conversion opcodes

    *   Embedding of binary extension sections

    He noted that "Not Done Yet" was an acceptable answer. Which is good,
    because, as Leopold Tötsch pointed out, none of them were done yet. Leo
    also reckoned that a start would be to implement fixed size integers and
    conversion ops, and asked for details of what was wanted. Iacob Alin
    wondered if the various types would be PMCs (answer: Only those types
    which don't easily map to native types.) Florian Weimer wondered about
    trapping integer arithmetic. Dan says these will be handled using
    Parrots standard exception handling mechanism (which doesn't actually
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