Exegesis 7 Released (Perl 6 Text Formatting) 319
chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Exegesis 7, Damian Conway's explanation of how text formatting will work Perl 6 (and now, Perl 5, thanks to his Perl6::Form module) will work. Think of it as Perl 1 for the 21st century. Also, Parrot 0.1.0, the virtual machine for Perl 6 and several other dynamic languages, released on Leap Day -- ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?"
The best thing about Perl (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that you really have to love about the people who write Perl is that they have a sense of humor. This kind of document could be extremely boring and bland, but Damian had the good sense to liven it up by using humorous examples, mostly drawn from Shakespeare. He's doing some great work, but he's also obviously having fun doing it.
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:5, Informative)
But for something like Perl, it's all in the documentation. Here's to writers like Damian Conway not only providing summaries for new releases, but writing the original documentation!. If only it paid well!
That been said O'Reilly would sell a good deal less books if the original docos were all they should be cracked up to be. Guess it doesn't have to be that good! There's nothing like getting a new fresh O'Reilly title in the mail.
Mac desktops, OSX hints, scripts and more [67.160.223.119]
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:5, Interesting)
I blame POD for this. POD [ualberta.ca] is just a simple set of markup controls you can add to a plain text document to make it easy to translate it into other documentation and markup formats. It's so simple in fact that there's really no mental hurdles to sitting down and writting the docs for your program, module, language feature, etc., and so people do! Just about every peice of code uploaded to CPAN has a full suite of documentation for every module it provides for this reason. What's more, you can type "perldoc Foo" on any system with the "Foo" module installed and get a copy of that documentation ready at your fingertips.
I even use Pod at work. it's an easy format to teach to people, and what could be simpler than writing a simple text file documenting a procedure you want people to follow. Then it's automatically turned into HTML and added to our internal Web site. Would that the rest of my job was that easy...
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:3, Interesting)
$a = $b + $c;
does. Compare this with languages like C or Scheme or (I think) Python that have a formally defined and documented semantics (even if C allows for some cases that are explicitly implementation-defined or undefined behaviour).
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:4, Insightful)
$a = $b + $c;
Even if you know what + does, the semantics of the above statement are still not defined anywhere. Which of $b and $c is evaluated first, for example? (And yes, it does matter, consider tied variables.)
The fact is, Perl is defined almost entirely by its implementation - there's no way you could start with the current manual pages and write a different implementation that would be compatible with most code. There's far too much DWIM which is not clearly defined anywhere.
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me that this is more of a problem with the language design than a problem with the documentation-- most operations are somewhat ambiguous when used in odd ways (like trying to add two strings even though the manual clearly states that + wants to add two numbers). Do you really expect the docs to attempt to cover every possible thing that might happen as a result of using the + operator? Personally I'd prefer the language throw an er
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:3, Informative)
That's both true and false. I would consider any program which implemented everything that was in the Perl documentation to be "compatible" (you have to understand what a behemoth undertaking that would be...), but Perl has never had a formal specification, and as such... just like every other language for which that's the case... there is a great body of code that relies on bugs, undocumented features and other implementation
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:3, Informative)
So, not only can you easily document your code, but you can trivially insert automated test cases for later verification. Good stuff, that.
PS: I'm at home, sick with a fever, and jac
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:3, Informative)
you mean like "man ls"? i thought we were creating documentation websites...
Sure that too [perlpod.com], or PDFs or command-line extraction form installed modules or whatever. There should be no difference. Docs are docs, and it should all come from the same source, no?
Me: Javadoc is not just simple text[...]
You: could you explain further[...]
Sure, here's an example from the Javadoc site:
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:5, Interesting)
A great combination of humour, intensity and analogies created an enthusiasm to listen and in turn learn. He even spent long hours writing applications to demonstrate principles (think virtual C intepreter with GUI).
Whats more he loved to teach, he wasnt just there to complete his hours required like most lecturers.
I wish we could find more people as talented as Damian to teach us. The world would be much smarter if we could.
Academia is Backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they all go off and become Perl programmers instead of going to grad school?
But seriously: academia has very little room for people with interests like Damian's. Academia does not encourage the kind of research that would make professors better teachers, instead the research should be as esoteric and far from undergrad subjects as possible. And grad students who like to "hack" are told to get over that impulse despite the fact that it would probably make them better teachers.
Re:The best thing about Perl (Score:2)
Uh... (Score:5, Funny)
Uh... I gotta say... No.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Funny)
register cx public inherit register ax
push bx
push dx
ax::pop cx
bx.mov ax
shl bx->shr
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Leaking is especially apropos, because you should be thinking about encapsulation -- keeping implementation details from leaking --, not inheritance.
I actually did a toy program or two -- very toy, class assignments -- in assembly after I knew C++, and consciously employed an Object Oriented outlook in designing the programs.
This really is easier than it might seem at first: the second biggest hurdle -- and the most important first step -- to OO design is to always think of the entities in your program as objects with responsibilities.
(The biggest hurdle is discovering -- and I use the word "discovering" intentionally, because it's a iterative process of exploring your problem domain -- where to "carve nature at the joints", or where one object ends and the next starts. Alas, a further discussion of this hurdle is beyond the scope of this comment.)
Given that you keep in mind that you're dealing with objects, and that OO requires you to do so polymorphically, -- that is, you want to be able to do the same sorts of things with objects of different sizes and shapes -- you'll quickly find that you need a level of indirection, some stand-in for the actual object, a proxy that is itself the same size and shape for every kind of different object. In C (and C++ and Java) that "same-ness" proxy is a pointer; in perl, it's a hash, which the language conveniently handles the pointing to; in assembly it's a pointer too, or given assembly's inherent weak typing, a memory address.
Just as the real first parameter to every C++ member function is the (hidden and implicit) this pointer, any object-oriented assembly is going to have to pass an object pointer to any functions called on that object. The object pointer will be the address of the actual object, and the object's state, instead of residing in numerous functions -- as you'd do in non-OO structural programming -- will reside in the object, at that pointed to memory.
Finally, and most tedious, is the need for one function called on the object to access other member functions of the object. Essentially, we need a way to determine which of several possible functions foos should be the foo called for a particular object. C++ generally implements this as an array of pointers to function, perl by means of a hash map. Implementation details are implementation details, but essentially you need to specify some ordered list of (address of) functions when the object is created. A naive (and inefficient) implementation that would look like very late binding (and weak typing) to a C++ programmer would be simply to have each object include in its state an array of address; better solution would, as usual in computer science, involve a few more levels of indirection.
The point I'm trying to make is this: Object Orientation isn't so much a property of one language or another -- although some languages support it far better than do others --, as it is a property of the way you think about the problem domain and about programming in general. It's an outlook, a mindset, a world-view, and it's maintaining that world-view, much more than worrying about the implementation details, that matters.
Good Object Oriented programmers can -- and do -- write OO code regardless of the language they're writing in. Programmers who still don't get OO will write bad, pointless OO even in languages that support OO the best. And really good programmers know when to use OO, what parts of it to use, and when not to use OO.
Me either ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The main reason being it's potential use as a generic high level "ABI" of sorts. Look at GTK/GNOME for example. The developers choose to use C as the base language, largely because it was the easiest language to create bindings for - everything can link to C. But the problem is that C only implements procedural concepts. Anything else must be crafted from hand, like gObject. So you end up reimplementing all the features of a high-level object oriented language, in C, and often this implementation isn't even as efficent as the high level language's implementation. On top of that, when create bindings for a high level language, you wrap all of these gObjects inside of a native language object, and end up with double the overhead. So what it comes down to is that you worked four times as hard, and came up with something twice as slow, just to be able to have an object oriented library that many languages can link to.
Parrot has the oportunity to be for object oriented languages, what the C ABI has become for procudural languages - a common interface for programs of different languages to communicate. Imagine having high level libraries, that can be efficiently used by python, perl, ruby, befunge. Or having scriptable applications that are not just scriptable by one language, but by anything that targets parrot.
When you add to that they fact that it will be cross-platform, and more efficent then most of these high level languages were to begin with, it's hard not to get excited.
Re:Me either ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parrot is not the first try at this "execution machine" model, and I suspect not the last one either. The only ones that survived (so far) are the ones that target a single language. Python, Java comes to mind, while mono and
At the same time it would be really exciting to see the birth of the first SUCCESSFUL cross-platform execution machine...
Re:Me either ... (Score:2)
The JVM might work better, but I'm not sure. You can get other languages compiled for Java, but Java lacks support to invoke scripts (AFAIK). Seems like a shame. Java's 2 step process of compiling PLUS interpreting is annoying.
Re:Me either ... (Score:3, Informative)
DinamicJava [koala.ilog.fr] on the other hand is an interpreter of a superset of Java.
I don't know what you find annoying: compiling and executing. That's the norm for most programs. Java programs are Just In Time Compiled [mindprod.com] but that is done transparently by the virtual machine and is faster than
Re:Me either ... (Score:2)
I look forward to the Java port to Parrot for many reasons, not the least of which is being able to provide all of CPAN (or CP6AN or whatever we end up calling it) to Java, Python, Ruby, Scheme, etc., etc.
Imagine being able to grab a piddle from PDL (Perl Data Language), sub-class it in Java to add some interesting network abstraction, and then pass it to a Python class that someone else wrote. No more choosing the lan
Re:Me either ... (Score:2)
I too am a little upset they didn't just use an existing VM instead of going and inventing another. IMO both the JVM and the CLR would have worked well enough for their needs. In fact at some point they were actually talking about using the JVM, I wonder where they went wrong... ;-)
Interestingly there is a language they are writing for Parrot called Cola, which looks a lot like Java but runs as Parrot.
Re:Me either ... (Score:2, Interesting)
More than that, parrot gives people the ability to quickly implement experimental or highly specific languages.
Want a language custom built for the analysis that your lab boys do? Want to use some old code from another language? You can do that quite quickly. Your compiler is written in Perl (or whatever you want), targeting Parrot.
The speed with which people have been able to implement new languages is astounding (the python-on-parrot project made huge strides in a week or so).
And since these languag
Re:Me either ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, back when Assembler was all we had (Score:2)
When I met my first computer, an IBM 1440, Assembler was the only thing they taught us and we developed some very useful application software to run within its 12,000 characters of decimally addressed magnetic core memory.
Even through the transition to System/360, assembler was it, though there was Fortran on the 7044 at uni and PL/1 was coming as a promised advance on both Fortran and Cobol which others had
I predict... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I predict... (Score:2, Funny)
#!/usr/bin/perl
($e,$x,$y,$v,@m)=(shift,0,0,1,1
@p=(1,0);for(@s){push@m,$d = shift@m;push@p,$a=shift@p;$d?$a?++$x:++$y:$a?--$x: --$
y,$l[$y][$x]=($e=>10?$v10?'00':$v100?0:'':$ e10?$v10?0:'':'').$v++,for 1..$_}
warn"@$_\n"for@l
But yeah, I *do* like Perl, I use it and it's FUN. Moreso than most other languages *shudder*vbscript*shudder*
Re:I predict... (Score:2)
Oh well, this being
Re:I predict... (Score:2)
if you want, you could write Perl code that reads just like English (with the exception of regular expressions, but they're so powerful it's worth it).
A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:5, Funny)
of a copy of "The Matrix" screen saver.
He looks at it a minute, and realizes that the coworker
is reading it, so it can't be a screen saver.
He thinks about it a second, and then asks "Do you always
ready your email fully encrypted with PGP like that?
Decoding PGP in you head like that is _really_ impressive!".
"No," says the coworker, "that's just a Perl script I'm
working on".
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:5, Insightful)
With Perl, you can make the script/program/module as beautiful as you want, or as ugly as you want. Just to contrast with Java, Java forces you to be verbose -- very verbose. People claim that it makes them productive and it leads to maintainable code, but too much verbose code can be very confusing. With Perl, you have a choice of coding style, but there is no choice with respect to verbosity in Java.
There are places where clear, concise expression is useful. The tradeoff is that the readers have to have the vocabulary to comprehend what is written. Very few people complain "Gee, that guy writes in complex language, it is unreadable." Likewise, reading well written Perl code requires some familiarity with Perl.
Regarding how things look to unfamiliar people, try to look at a screenful of the most beautiful poetry (just pick a language that you are not familiar with -- may be Chinese, some Indian language), and then look at Perl code
S
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:2)
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:2)
Or even just indentation.
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:4, Insightful)
With Perl, you can make the script/program/module as beautiful as you want, or as ugly as you want. Just to contrast with Java, Java forces you to be verbose -- very verbose. People claim that it makes them productive and it leads to maintainable code, but too much verbose code can be very confusing. With Perl, you have a choice of coding style, but there is no choice with respect to verbosity in Java.
Other than your suggestion that Java code's "verboseness" makes it confusing, what you describe is exactly how things should be.
Java is highly maintainable precisely because it doesn't employ a "there's more than one right way to do it" approach. That is why it is so suitable to distributed projects, multi-programmer projects, and in fact, why it is used in a lot of large open-source projects.
Perl is a glue language designed to be used for short programs that perform useful tasks for an individual programmer. For such purposes, archaic structures and code conventions are perfectly acceptable. Can it be used for other things? Sure it can. COBOL can. PASCAL was. Doesn't mean that it is the best tool for the job, by the way.
Maintainable code isn't produced by a desire for self-expression. It is produced by following conventions. Java platform code has been described as "self-documenting" precisely because it lacks shortcuts that create obscurity. Of course, no code is REALLY self-documenting, but Java code comes darn close.
Please note that I am not knocking Perl. I use it myself and it is very useful for the things it does well. You should not, however, compare peas and apples. Perl is not comparable to Java. The languages are designed for different purposes and their structures and means of writing source for those languages reflect those differences. Perl was designed to be a super-shell language. Java was designed to be a net-ready systems and application programming language. Different purposes make for different languages and platforms.
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed. Of course this makes Java the new Cobol... am I the only one that thinks this?
Yes, it's dependable. Yes, it's good for large scale projects. But God yes, it's boring.
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:2)
But judge by yourself, look a small sample of what's coming [jroller.com]. How does this compares with perl and how much clearer it seems? less the comments, of course
Re:A guy walks into his coworker's office.... (Score:3, Insightful)
And you claim that a page of full blown Java code, complete with classes, initializations, templates etc. is easier to understand than a quasi-functional transformation (as it would have been written in Perl). Well, duh.
Have you ever wanted to... NO! I HAVEN'T! (Score:5, Funny)
Y'know, that couldn't be ANY MORE WRONG than an HTML rendering of a .GIF of a psychotic nun in a bondage outfit clubbing a baby seal to death with an Al Gore doll.
(With apologies to the denizen of the Monastery, from whom I stole the idea.)
ruby! ruby! (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I'm interested to see Perl 6 when it comes out, but I sure as hell won't be using it for anything.
Also I'm looking forward to a common runtime between the three languages so I can use Perl modules from Ruby. Now *that's* the best of all possible worlds, eh?
Re:ruby! ruby! (Score:3, Informative)
Parrot is very exciting. I personally can't w
Re:ruby! ruby! (Score:2)
Finally, a good update. (Score:4, Interesting)
Being one who's never gone along with the best methods of coding, I've stuck with Perl for the past few years. I deem myself pretty proficient in it, and I find a new plethora of exploration available to me now that Perl6 is out.
The fact that Perl6 is now a subroutine rather than hardcoded allows me to directly stream the formatting through the test. This is immensely helpful, for it allows me to organize the code more efficiently and get more out of my hard worked code.
Sure, some parts may seem like a step back, but this new versions is much simpler to use, and has some huge advantages that all coders should get use from.
Re:Finally, a good update. (Score:5, Insightful)
I too wouldn't put perl as a "technically" best way to code ANYTHING, but it is however an intensely easy and powerful set of hacks, joined together quite well, and with a consistency that matches my own disorganised brain!.
I'm good for that. Getting something technically 'correct' in the coding world seems to me to be revolved around far more efficient use of resources and cpu speed than perl does. In my job however we have thousands of fast PCs, and only so many good coders. I go for whatever supports the coders, and for many of us that's perl
webalizer stats. thousands served monthly [67.160.223.119]
C++ is object oriented high level assembler (Score:5, Funny)
Re:C++ is object oriented high level assembler (Score:5, Funny)
Olde Quote:
Re:C++ is object oriented high level assembler (Score:2)
Re:C++ is object oriented high level assembler (Score:2)
"C is a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language"
VM's (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:VM's (Score:4, Informative)
However, for what it's worth, Parrot's relationship to the JVM and the
What specifically about the JVM puts you off? Or is it the host language that bothers you?
Re:VM's (Score:3, Informative)
I have to disagree about typing. Python and Lisp (don't know about the others) type systems aren't "weak," but rather dynamic, meaning that they keep type inform
'Weak vs. Dynamic': Type Systems (Score:5, Informative)
A weak type system will allow implicit type conversions, even those that are 'lossy' or improper. For example, converting a float to an int without requiring a cast. Or, more importantly, treating memory references (pointers) identically to integers. Pointer arithmetic is an abuse of a weak typing system.
Strong typing requires explicit casts and will throw errors where casts do not appear. Java, Lisp, Python are all strongly typed. Haskell is _really_ strongly typed. When you cast a object to type Object in Java, you are losing type information, but you are doing it _explicitly_.
C, Pascal, and Java are statically typed. Variables are created with a specific type in the code, not on demand. Python and Lisp are dynamically typed -- a variable's type is determined at run-time.
For example, in C:
int foo( int a, int b );
declares a function that returns type 'int' and takes two arguments a, b, both of types 'int'.
In Python:
def foo( a, b ):
declares a function that may or may not return a value (and whose type is known only at run-time) and takes two arguments, which may be of any type (although, internally, the program likely assumes a type).
There are some quirks in the type systems of many languages. In Java, for example, "str" + 3 doesn't have any normal meaning, but the developers have defined any operation using a string as concatenation. In Python, and in most languages, such an expression will either return an error on compilation (static) or when running (dynamic).
However, all combinations are possible and type systems are a fertile area of research.
Perl 6 is hugely ambitious, and that worries me (Score:5, Insightful)
So why am I worried? Well, it feels like Larry saw Microsoft's
Also, like a very impatient, immature kid on December 23, I want my Perl 6 now, damnit!
But, I trust the Perl 6 team. They're smart people. Read the newsgroups and the forums, and you'll agree. When Perl 6 and Parrot are ready for prime-time, I am pretty sure that I won't be looking over at Python and PHP and feeling guilty anymore.
Ah well, back to coding...
Agreed, this may just be too much, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there are the practical issues - will Parrot be fast enough and mostly bugless in time for Perl 6 to sit on top of it? I am concerned that we will need eighteen months of point releases and we haven't even had an alpha yet. Meanwhile people are looking at Ruby, Python, Mono/C# etc.
I recommend they just wrap up whatever concepts they have now and start moving toward an alpha. If we don't see one in 2004 I think most people will have moved on.
Re:Agreed, this may just be too much, too late (Score:5, Informative)
Camel book :] (Score:2)
I intend to buy the new camel book from O'Reilly (just like I did for Perl 5), which will surely help me learn all the new bits (and, quite probably, help me relearn the bits I only thought I knew).
I wonder if they'll do anything new with regular expressions? (I haven't RTFA just yet, and I don't remember anything from the past exeg
Re:Camel book :] (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Camel book :] (Score:2)
In the mean time, I must say that I hope, now that I RTFA here, that Larry Wall & co. haven't been appropriating any of SCO's IP. I mean, just look at the following bits of code and judge for yourself if they look like something SCO might have written...
print form
'Name Bribe (per dastardry)',
'{[(11)[} {]],]]].[[[} ',
@names,
@bribes;
[...]
# X out any doubleplus ungood words
$nextline ~~ s:ei/(@proscribed)/$( 'X' x lengt
Re:Agreed, this may just be too much, too late (Score:3, Informative)
The good things about Perl 6 are a) you have a rich and powerful language at your disposal that provides everything from dynamic grammar construction to advanced functional programming concepts and b) parrot will allow you to use libraries written in any other Parrot client-language.
Re:Perl 6 is hugely ambitious, and that worries me (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, Parrot sounds like it's going to shake some people up. From what I understand, it's a register based VM as opposed to stack based, meaning that preemption is possible. Judging from the speed and smoothness gained by using preemption in the Linux kernel, I'm drooling to see wh
Re:Perl 6 is hugely ambitious, and that worries me (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between stack and register based has nothing whatsoever to do with preemption, and has to do with reduction in the number of opcodes (adding two numbers becomes one instruction instead of 3 for instance). You still have to save register sets the same way you have to save stacks in a stack-based VM, since the task yo
Re:Perl 6 is hugely ambitious, and that worries me (Score:3, Informative)
Parrot uses registers for speed, that's "all".
Re:Perl 6 is hugely ambitious, and that worries me (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, Parrot isn't the bottleneck. Parrot development has actually moved pretty fast: they quickly came up with a raw-functionality virtual machine, and at this point the Parrot engine seems to meet the basic runtime needs of Perl5, Perl6 [as specced out to date], Python, and PHP.
Parrot isn't done yet to be sure, but it's already complete enough that, for example, the employer of one of Parrot's main developers is already using Parrot as the runtime engine for their corporate software. [I'd get in to details, but I forget the details -- Dan Sugalski talked about it for the Boston Perl Mongers a month or two ago.] Likewise, there's already a mod_parrot Apache module under development that will allow Parrot targeted code to run, and run very quickly, while embedded in the web server. Longer term, one of the target languages for Parrot is Z-code, so that Parrot will be able to run old text games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy -- with luck, this could lead to Parrot being the embedded virtual machine for portable game machines.
Parrot is, in other words, being actively developed, and there are big plans for it.
Parrot is hardly holding Perl6 back.
The bottleneck with Perl6 seems like the actual design work. Once Larry Wall puts out one of his Apocalypses, it never seems to be long before Damian Conway comes out with an explanation, including working code that can often be experimented with today under Perl5, with his Exegeses. There seems to be a ready pool of people eager to implement this stuff as it becomes available, it's just that the project is so *big* that it's taking a while for people to get anywhere with it in their spare time.
Yeah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. However, some nights when I drive home from work I eye a bridge abutment thinking I'd like to bury my car in it at 140mph. So I'm not certain that whether I'd like to do something is a great way to evaluate it. What's your point?
BTW, is there a simple way to disable an airbag? Isn't there supposed to be a switch someplace? Thanks.
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, sure, it's a three-step process (and I'm sure there's MTOWTDI):
*Click* remove seatbelt.
*Clunk* open door.
*Splat* roll out.
We need an alpha in 2004 (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sure something is coming down the pike, but making a huge announcement like a major rearchitect puts a lot of developers in suspended animation - unwilling to invest more time mastering and extending the "end-of-life'd" perl 5. Many of those people are now looking at other options.
As an aside, I'm not sure where the consensus is coming from for the new language proposals - the code samples in Larry and Damian's writings are becoming more and more cryptic. I wonder if they are making perl 6 to unapproachable by new coders.
Re:We need an alpha in 2004 (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't pick a language because you think it'll be good in a year or two. You pick a language because it fits your current needs, and gets the job done.
Re:We need an alpha in 2004 (Score:2)
Re:We need an alpha in 2004 (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the combination of a long ramp to Perl 6 and no Perl 5 upgrades could have made the whole thing moot. Another year could have killed it.
Anyway, I'm glad to see Perl moving forward. For some reason Perl is the only script language I know (I've done Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl) that I don't have to rel
"end-of-life'd" perl 5? (Score:2)
Where oh where do you get that? Perl 5 is a live and well, and has seen quite a large boost in support and development in the last several years. Right on the heels of the overdue perl 5.8, we've got 5.10 coming down the pike(still a ways off).
There have been nice improvements in the perl 5 core, stable threading support, more useful core modules, major updates for unicode support, etc.
Then there's POE (poe.perl.org), and other stuff.
Perl 5 is far from being "end-of-life'd".
Re:We need an alpha in 2004 (Score:5, Informative)
Second, he posted (as you can see from the link above) a full outline of Perl 6's specifications-to-be and explained that he's been spending a lot of time on A12. That's right, he's skipping over A7 (delegated to Damian) and A8-A11 (which he'll return to later) and doing the chapter on objects. This is an important part of the language, and really did need to be covered before the rest could be fleshed out. It seems that he expects most of the rest of the spec to be about as much work as A12 is alone, and he claims that's just a few days or weeks at most away from being finished.
That said, keep in mind that the cryptic things you see on p6l are the result of reading code snippits written in a language that doesn't exist yet. Every time Larry steps in and explains things, the picture gets a bit clearer (partly because Larry is a great communicator but partly because he's quite capable of and willing to cut away a lot of noise and render some signal from its remains).
Perl 6 is, as far as I can tell a lovely evolution of Perl... it's perhaps more orders of magnitude more evolved than I would have suggested as the next step, but looking at the good work it has resulted in for Parrot, I'm not sure I'd turn back.
Python/PERL users unite! (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about the possibility. First port PyQT and wxPython to parrot. You write your GUI code with Python and byte compile it to a neutral Parrot format. You need to do complex substring matching so you write some good reusable functions th
Re:Python/PERL users unite! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Python/PERL users unite! (Score:2)
You can bet that Dan wouldn't be risking a pie in the face if he didn't care about whether or not parrot could host python.
to be a pedant (Score:2)
Don't ever write "PERL" in correspondence with a diehard Perl programmer.
Only perl can parse Perl.
Re:Python/PERL users unite! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parrot will run Python before it runs Perl, *that* should demonstrate how commited Parrot is to not just being Perl 6's back-end.
You'll be able to create a class in Python as a sub-class of a Perl 6 class which further derives from a Ruby class, and then call a method on such an object which is defined all the way up in Ruby.... no problemo. Parrot is going to change the way we choose programming languages for the tasks at hand....
Ewwwww (Score:4, Insightful)
God no. It's bad enough when a high level compiler attemps to guess what you want (C++, etc)... it'd be horrid if ya had to have something supposedly machine level guess...
I did RTFA (Score:2)
And for those who hate Perl, it's still worth reading, for great texts used in the "text formatting examples" like a recipe for 2 doomed souls or 10 reasons why you didn't do your English Lit. homework.
Conclusion/Highlights (Score:3, Informative)
Aw geez... (Score:2)
Perl remains beautiful (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to forget, when using perl, just how, well, tedious, it is to work in C (let alone C++) or shell or Java or even, yes, Python.
The exegeses so far have been full of fabulous goodies to use and abuse. The main problem, as others have pointed out, is that perl6 is still largely vaporware.
OO Assembly? (Score:4, Informative)
No, but if I wanted to, I could already [sun.com], thanks.
Re:OO Assembly? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the JVM is not really a very good development environment. It is, for the most part, only used as a back-end. Parrot is designed from the beginning to be programmed in because there wi
Is text formatting relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
"Who gives a crap?"
Most the projects I've worked on for the last few years have predominately displayed text in web pages. Almost all the reports produced have been generated as HTML and then printed as necessary. The only text output done has been generally into log files, where you really don't need a lot of formatting.
While this is obviously a really great, well thought out piece of coding,
Maybe I'm just missing a huge community of people who spend most of their time looking at command lines and printing out reports in fixed width fonts.
Yes you are (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is text formatting relevant (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps the biggest thing I took from this is that the increasingly specialized and unused fixed width formatting functionality in Perl is moving out of the core language and into a powerful module. Those of us who don't need it will never need to worry about it; those who need it will find it actually improved over previous versions. Finally "write" will be free in Perl to mean something slightly less crazy.
That said, I can think of one important use for fixed width formatting: email reports. Sure, yo
Re:Is text formatting relevant (Score:2)
[Sentence using the phrase "Cost Benefit Analysis" elided]
One that comes to mind is an extensible module I can use that lets me send exception reports as an XML attachment via email (or whatever other fun system you like) with as little
Re:Is text formatting relevant (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously not.
Re:Is text formatting relevant (Score:2)
(Not to mention that most HHDs/appliances don't even give you anything even vaguely resembling a
OO assembly anyone? (Score:2)
No.
Parrot didn't configure for compile (Score:2)
use Parrot::BuildUtil;
there's no file with 'BuildUtil*' name in the source distro.
Conclusion: not ready for prime time.
Comparing to other templating implementations (Score:2)
Object Oriented Assembly does/did exist (Score:3, Interesting)
OOPs in TASM [mujweb.cz]
Why Perl reports are *so* important ? (Score:3, Informative)
Furthermore, 'reporting' is a not a feature of a programming language. The same report package could be done with C++, for example. Will Perl 6 bring something *really new* in the programming languages department ?
Re:I tried, but I failed (Score:5, Funny)
If you like Python, check out Ruby. I've been monkeying around with it at work for small things. It's like Perl but readable.. and object oriented from the ground up.. and easy to work with.. hmm, on second thought, it's nothing like Perl.
Re:I tried, but I failed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I tried, but I failed (Score:2)
Re:I tried, but I failed (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing I've come to realize though is that perl is unique among the languages that I know. Perl is the only computer language I know of that is so complete as a language.
Like a spoken language, perl is highly context-sensitive and one idea can take many different forms. It's deterministic and precise, of course, but it has a much more natural feel.
For example:
while(<STDIN>) {
chomp;
print;
print "
}
is a valid perl program, yet we
Re:I tried, but I failed (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry buddy, this is where you are wrong. (Score:2, Interesting)
Perl6 does not assemble to VM bytecode anymore.
Perl6 now assembles to assembly.
Re:Parrot progress (Score:2)
There's this CPU that has clearly been designed by a complete bunch of morons... can you believe the documentation listing the opcodes is 566 pages long [intel.com]?
Obviously this x86 thing will perpetually be 6 months from doing anything useful.
Re:Meanwhile PHP surges ahead (Score:2, Interesting)
Judging by the number of sites that depend heavily on Perl I can assure you that it's not going to be sidelined soon.
It's true that PHP is a fantastic language for small sites. Mod_perl is a hog when it comes to memory but memory is cheap and mod_perl is tried and tested. There's a reaso