headers
Piers Cawley | 7 Oct 2003 07:46
Picon

This week's summary

The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20031005
    Hello, good evening, and welcome from the teeming metropolis that is
    Newcastle/Gateshead, home of The Angel of the North, the Winky Eye
    Bridge, the ham and pease pudding stotty and freezing your extremities
    off on a Saturday night down the Bigg Market.

    This isn't (yet) a permanent move, but I'm here, my laptop is here, and
    there's a summary to write so let's get on with it shall we?

    As per always, we'll start with the internals list.

  Disassembler issues
    Marcus Thiesen had some problems getting the disassembler working (it
    was throwing segfaults, never a popular behaviour). Leo Tötsch (who
    else?) fixed it.

    http://xrl.us/v4g

  Pondering proper parameter passing
    The argument passing discussion continued. Leo suggested some changes to
    PDD03 for Dan to bear in mind when he rewrote it. (Something that was
    only going to take a few hours last week. Dan? I don't wish to nag you
    understand.)

    http://xrl.us/v4h

  Multimethod dispatch function installation issues
    Dan's in the process of writing the the Multi Method Dispatch (MMD)
    subsystem (at least the parts needed for operator overloading) and is
    scratching his head over what to do when a Multimethod is defined that
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Piers Cawley | 14 Oct 2003 20:07
Picon

This Week's Summary

The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20031012
    Good afternoon readers. You find me sitting comfortably and tired after
    a vaguely frantic week involving large amounts of new (and huge)
    equipment, the delivery of a new Mini Cooper, and four days offline at a
    large format photography workshop (photos will be going online soonish,
    if you're interested). All of which hopefully goes some way to
    explaining the fact that I've only just started writing the summary at
    ten to four on Tuesday.

    We start (and finish) with the internals list.

  New PMC compiler
    Leo Tötsch isn't exactly happy with the current classes/pmc2c.pl PMC
    compiler. He outlined the drawbacks as he sees them, proposed a scheme
    for reimplementing it, and asked for comments. Dan said that so long as
    the resulting code is clearer than the current PMC compiler, Leo should
    go for it. So he did.

    http://xrl.us/w5m

  The Status of Language, Credit Where It's Due
    Melvin Smith has added a LANGUAGES.STATUS file in the languages/
    subdirectory and asked for language authors to add summaries of the
    various language subdirectories to the file.

    Fresh from this success he added a CREDITS file for giving credit where
    it's due. Rumours of an entry reading

        N: Leon Brocard
        D: Running Joke
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Piers Cawley | 22 Oct 2003 16:51
Picon

This week's summary

The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20031019
    Lumme! Another week, another summary.

    Every week (almost) we start with the perl6-internals list, so here
    goes.

  An Evil task for the interested
    Our Glorious Leader, Dan Sugalski, last week asked for volunteers to
    work on making ordered destruction work. (Ordered destruction is where
    the system tries to ensure that 'parent' objects get destroyed before
    any of their children). Jeff Clites announced that he'd got a partial
    implementation working.

    Neither Leo Tötsch nor Jürgen Bömmels were sure that the approach Jeff
    was taking would be the Right Thing in the long run, proposing instead a
    more general iterator mechanism.

    http://xrl.us/x8k

  Perl 6 Sub calling
    Bringing the perl6 compiler (in languages/ back to live, Steve Fink has
    committed a 'rather large' patch which implements a subset of the
    Apocalypse 6 subroutine signature rules. The implementation is
    apparently very ad hoc and shouldn't be regarded as the final word. But
    it looks like a very good start to me.

    http://xrl.us/x8l

  Website timeliness
    Responding to Matt Fowles' observation that the parrot website is rather
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Piers Cawley | 29 Oct 2003 00:31
Picon

This week's Summary

The Perl 6 Summary of the week ending 20031026
    Where does the time go? It seems like only yesterday that I was sat
    hiding Leon Brocard in the first letters of the first 11 body paragraphs
    of the last summary. Now, here I am, on the train, typing away in a
    desperate attempt to get this mailed out before Wednesday. Let's start
    with perl6-internals again.

  Object Freezing
    Whoever would have thought that freezing objects would be so
    controversial? Object freezing is when you take an object and generate a
    'frozen' representation of it that can be used to make a copy of the
    original object. It's what Storable, Data::Dumper and YAML (to name
    three Perl 5 modules) all do more or less successfully. (Most of the
    time there's no problem, the tricky case is a composite object which
    involves a circular data structure. Consider this:

        Ring -> A -> B -> C -> D
                ^              |
                `--------------'

    (It's not *quite* a purely academic example, I can point to at least one
    text editor that uses a similar data structure).

    When you come to freeze your ring, you need some way of detecting the
    cycle and generating a finite representation that works. This isn't the
    only problem; thread safety is hard, for instance.)

    Dan's set some fairly stringent requirements on whatever mechanism is
    used for freezing. The most important/stringent is the requirement that
    (because freezing during object destruction will be a possibility)
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Leopold Toetsch | 31 Oct 2003 15:11
Picon

Parrot 0.0.13 "Screaming Pumpkin" Released!

           Parrot 0.0.13 "Screaming Pumpkin" Released!

Your new Bluza[1] proudly presents Parrot 0.0.13 Halloween edition[2].
Proposed originally as a fun release it has a remarkable list of
improvements, additions, and fixes[3].
While not really milestones are reached, many steps towards these are
done.

After some pause you can grab it from
<http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/L/LT/LTOETSCH/parrot-0.0.13.tar.gz>
or just get the latest and best from CVS by following the directions at
<http://dev.perl.org/cvs/>.

Turn your web browser towards <http://www.parrotcode.org/> for more
information about Parrot, get involved, and:

Have fun!
leo

[1] Austrian dialect word for pumpkin with some aftermath of an head
     filled with water.

[2] Version number fits nicely todays date - and we don't release
     by the dozen.

[3] The list of changes includes:

     - The Big Move: Parrot source and build files rearranged into sub dirs
     - Build imcc as parrot
     - Objects more finished
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |

Gmane