Perl6 Daydreams (on topic but frivolous)
Miko O Sullivan
has slowed down to a trickle, hopefully because everybody is relaxing in a
cool place, idly sipping non-alcoholic spritzers next to some special person,
reading low-brow literature (or, as in my case, Apoc 6).
This is a good time for a little daydreaming. I know everybody here has at
some point thought of some feature in Perl6 "Ooo, I can't wait to use that."
It would be interesting to hear your Perl6 daydreams.
I'll start the show.
- I'm looking forward to more Pure Perl modules. I frankly admit that I
don't like coding in C. Every time I download a module that has compiled C
code I feel like I'm stuck in some place where I want to play baseball and
everybody else wants to play cricket. Maybe C and cricket are "better" by
some set of constraints, but they aren't the games I want to play, and I
think a lot of other people feel that way too (about Perl, anyway). I predict
that with byte-coded Perl as the standard, more modules will be written in
Pure Perl. I more than predict it, I intend to help make it happen. One of
the projects I would like to initiate in Perl6 would be a Pure Perl graphics
class for generating PNG graphics on the fly.
- I'm just vain enough to admit that I'm looking forward to pointing out some
small feature of Perl6 and saying "See that? That was *my* idea."
-Miko
Miko O'Sullivan
Programmer Analyst
Rescue Mission of Roanoke
Jonathan Scott Duff
> It would be interesting to hear your Perl6 daydreams.
My only dream is that by this time next year we have a fully-
functional-people-can-use-it-in-production Perl6. It doesn't even
have to be 100% complete; I think just 85% would be enough if it were
the right 85%.
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
du...@cbi.tamucc.edu
Rafael Garcia-Suarez
>
> My only dream is that by this time next year we have a fully-
> functional-people-can-use-it-in-production Perl6. It doesn't even
> have to be 100% complete; I think just 85% would be enough if it were
> the right 85%.
20% would be enough if it's what it takes to get 80% of the job done ;-)
Piers Cawley
Eggzackerly. I'm looking forward to getting the rules/grammar engine
up and running in Parrot. (Hell, getting a rules/grammer engine up and
running in pure perl5 would be a good start)
--
Piers
Simon Cozens
> My only dream is that by this time next year we have a fully-
> functional-people-can-use-it-in-production Perl6. It doesn't even
> have to be 100% complete; I think just 85% would be enough if it were
> the right 85%.
I've been using an 85%-complete Perl 6 in production for the past five
years. It's called Perl 5. ;)
--
Skud's Law: The surreality of the universe tends toward a maximum.
Gyan Kapur
> I've been using an 85%-complete Perl 6 in production for the past five
> years. It's called Perl 5. ;)
Unfortunately, although Perl 5 may be 85% of Perl 6, it is the 85% that has
been sliced up so many times that it's now looking like a sloppy Joe. The
trick with perl 6 is performing the miracle of reconstituting it into a nice
cheeseburger (no offense to the vegans/vegetarians out there.) Whereas the
Sloppy Joe is useful and tasty, the elegance of a good cheeseburger makes it
unbeatable! I Mr. Scott Duff may be speaking about 85% of the reconstituted
cheeseburger, if you know what I mean (wink.. wink), being completed.
Sincerely,
Gyan Kapur
Miko O Sullivan
>
> reconstituted cheeseburger
/me wonders if pitching Perl6 as a "reconstituted cheeseburger" is going to
sell it to the world. :-)
Jonadab The Unsightly One
> - I'm looking forward to more Pure Perl modules. I frankly admit
> that I don't like coding in C. Every time I download a module that
> has compiled C code I feel like I'm stuck in some place where I want
> to play baseball and everybody else wants to play cricket.
Amen to that. My dream is that Perl will become powerful enough that
XS will be totally unnecessary and can be dropped altogether in Perl7.
The feature I'm most looking forward to in Perl6 is the improved
object model. One of my first languages was Inform (which has a full
object forest model, classes and objects that inherit from multiple
classes, superclasses (so a class or a string or a routine is an
object (though it is not an Object because it is a Class or a String
or a Routine)), default values (set by the programmer) for common
properties, instance objects that can override the defaults and the
class values, an advanced concept of what objects are in scope from
the perspective of another object, the ability to invoke a given
property of a given object without knowing whether it is a routine (in
which case the return value is used) or a value, and assorted other
niceties), so I got spoiled early in terms of what objects are
supposed to be like. Perl6 promises abilities that will allow most of
this functionality (if not all of it) to be duplicated in Perl
relatively painlessly; doing some of it in Perl5 would require
horrible amounts of effort, to say nothing of the nasty
&{$obj->{prop}}() syntax it would lead to.
Iain Truskett
[...]
> The feature I'm most looking forward to in Perl6 is the improved
> object model. One of my first languages was Inform [...], so I got
> spoiled early in terms of what objects are supposed to be like.
Not the only one. And with Parrot being able to execute Z-code,
it might be sane to port Inform to Parrot!
cheers,
--
Iain.
Jonadab The Unsightly One
> Not the only one. And with Parrot being able to execute Z-code, it
> might be sane to port Inform to Parrot!
Did you mean port Inform to run on Parrot, or port Inform to compile
to parrot? If the former, that should be no problem. If the latter,
I'm not sure what the advantage would be. The z-machine is quite a
good deal more portable than Parrot, so Parrot could never replace it.
Parrot _could_ be used as a replacement for glulx, but I can't think
of any compelling reason to do that. Most of the capabilities that
Parrot has that glulx lacks are things that Inform wouldn't be able to
exploit anyway. (For those who don't know, the Inform language, due
to its focus on extreme portability, is unable to assume various
things, such as the existence of a filesystem, the ability to allocate
memory at runtime, and so forth. It's not a general-purpose language,
obviously.)
Iain Truskett
> Iain Truskett <pe...@dellah.anu.edu.au> writes:
> > Not the only one. And with Parrot being able to execute
> > Z-code, it might be sane to port Inform to Parrot!
> Did you mean port Inform to run on Parrot, or port Inform
> to compile to parrot?
The former. I was thinking more of Parrot being a portable
interactive fiction platform for reading and creating games.
cheers,
--
Iain.
Nicholas Clark
It's in the parrot plan. I keep asking on #parrot whether we can run
Z-code yet.
(Quite seriously. To run Z-code we need dynamic opcode loading, and
foreign bytecode conversion. Likewise, to run Python bytecode we need
dynamic opcode loading and bytecode conversion. Likewise Java and .NET
Although the danger is that once parrot gets Z-code everyone will
stop and play Zork until interrupted by incoming pie
(actually, I'm more likely to be playing The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, but that's not a material difference))
Nicholas Clark
Jonadab The Unsightly One
> * Jonadab the Unsightly One (jon...@bright.net) [01 Jul 2003 23:41]:
> > Iain Truskett <pe...@dellah.anu.edu.au> writes:
>
> > > Not the only one. And with Parrot being able to execute
> > > Z-code, it might be sane to port Inform to Parrot!
>
> > Did you mean port Inform to run on Parrot, or port Inform
> > to compile to parrot?
>
> The former.
That shouldn't be too hard, once Parrot is essentially complete.
Inform is _fairly_ portable. Not extremely portable like z-code, but
fairly portable.
> I was thinking more of Parrot being a portable interactive fiction
> platform for reading and creating games.
I can see the advantage in having Inform run on Parrot, so that games
could be created anywhere. Currently Inform only runs on a relative
handful of major platforms (RISC OS, most POSIX systems, Win32, DOS,
Mac classic, Amiga, OS/2, and a couple of others I think.) Various
people have expressed interest on getting it to run on various
handheld devices, but the only such effort I know about succeeding is
the Psion 5, though the folks in rec.arts.int-fiction would know
better; I've been out of touch with the IF community lately.
For reading/playing games, I don't think it makes sense to try to
compete with the existing, established virtual machines. The
z-machine is the veritable holy grail of portability. Every month it
seems somebody releases a new z-machine for Yet Another Obscure
Platform. z-code runs on everything from Gameboy to Emacs.