I understand why you want to use Perl to write Perl. But that's not the only path to "Christmas", and frankly, perhaps not even the most promising one (initially). Also, a non-bootstrapped implementation could be useful in either case, so why is there no alternative project to write a straight-forward interpreter in plain ANSI C? That's what Lua did; making especially sure that compiling Lua is as simple as "gcc *.c". And look at how popular it is, despite being such a poor language.

— monomorph, [Perl 6] Thoughts

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to create a family of languages through lexical grammar modifications. That is, programmers should be able to create their own local (and encapsulated) Perl 6 dialects by modifying the Perl 6 grammar by writing Perl 6 code.

I was worried about the perl compiler state after parts have been removed from CORE with 5.9.5.
Having patched parts of B::Generate and more packages for 5.10, I felt to give B::C and friends a try.

I also wanted to experiment with the GNU lightning library, which I also evaluate for a clisp bytecode compiler extension (done recently by Yann Nicolas Dauphin in parallel), and for another project of mine. The JIT compiler for clisp is now usable, but slow.

So I fixed the obvious compiler warnings with the changed structs, and packaged B::C, B::CC, ByteLoader and its helper packages for a forthcoming B-C-1.05 package.

I also had some thoughts on future optimizations
when a native code perl compiler backend is available. This is what JIT lightning does.
E.g. type checking and detecting IVonly or PVonly ints or strings, which could be optimized to smaller and faster ops in JIT assembler.
Thinking about new B::Asm and B::JIT backends, "PLJC" ByteLoader 4-byte magic header.
byterun.c => jitrun.c

Current state:
1.04_02 2008-01-22 rurban
        * removed from CORE, now on CPAN.
        * added byteorder to bytecode header.
        * added support for 5.10 (NOT YET WORKING!), 5.9.5 not tested.
            up to 5.8.x already in CORE, so disabled.
            add back support later, when C/CC is improved or more features
            are added.
        * added type hekindex
        * added c.t and cc.t tests
        * extended bytecode.pl format: added version logic
            to have strictly consecutive indices

All compile-time failures fixed, but still some run-time failures for bytecode XCV_STASH and PV handling.

http://rurban.xarch.at/cygr/perl/B-C-1.04_02.tar.gz

i want very much for rakudo to feel like perl, as soon as possible. therefore, i've been concentrating on adding command-line options and utilities that perl programmers expect. yesterday, i added a first approximation of 'perl6doc'.

view the patch here: http://perlsix.org/svn/parrot/revision/?rev=25389

it's far from complete. however, it should provide a start to folks interested in hacking the POD grammar. jeff horwitz would like to work on a pod2html mod_parrot handler. what would you like to see? we need your help.

you can create a perl6doc from a parrot working copy with the following commands, after compiling parrot:

    cd languages/perl6 && cd src/utils && make perl6doc
    # that's probably 'perl6doc.exe' if you're on windows

try running it on some of the files under languages/perl6. see what you find. ask questions. fix what's broken. get involved!

related links:

Synopsis 26 - Documentation:
http://perlcabal.org/syn/S26.html

Perl6::Perldoc on CPAN:
http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Perl6-Perldoc-v0.0.5/

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 30 January 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

This Week on perl5-porters - 20-26 January 2008

"Adding new lists of things [to remember] to a language is only a good idea if you're making money with certification." -- Juerd Waalboer, on why your program shouldn't have to plead to use new functionality.

Jan Dubois suggested that I upload my MiniCPAN aging data to "many eyes", a nifty IBM data visualization project. I upload the data, you make pretty pictures of it and embed it in websites.

I've created the MiniCPAN aging data set and created a "Perl" topic hub. I don't think I need to do any more for you to play with the data. If you have your own data about Perl things, add it to the topic hub.

To make the pretty pictures, you need some Java applet fu in your browser. That doesn't work for me right now and I'm not going to worry about it at the moment. There is a feature to "share" a visualization by embedding some special HTML if you find a picture that you like.

Good luck, :)

Brock Wilcox writes "We are having our first DC Perl Monger meeting of 2008! To kick off the year we'll present a beginner-level introduction to regular expressions titled "An Introduction to Perl Regular Expressions for Basic Practical Use" or "Munge It! 101".

Advanced users are welcome to attend and kibitz too, of course! There will be some discussion of new regex features in Perl 5.10.

Meetings of DC Perl Mongers are held at American Geophysical Union, 2000 Florida Avenue, NW, at 7:30 PM, a few blocks north of Dupont Circle. Further information can be found on the DC Perl Monger website, http://dc.pm.org/"

Escalation wars... you just have to love'em.

First, David came up with the über-cool CPAN deps page.

Then Andy comes up with a nifty Greasemonkey script to add it to the CPAN distributions main pages.

Then I add a small patch to the script to retrieve some information from the Deps page.

Then David creates an xml interface to CPAN deps, opening the door wide open for Web 2.0 goodiness.

Then (and this is where we are right now) I hack together a new CPAN_Dependencies monkeyscript to take advantage of said xml interface.

This, of course, is nowhere near the end of the story. My new script only scratches the surface of what can be done with the information contained in the xml. As soon as I have some tuits, I'll probably add a way to toggle between showing only the first-level dependencies and all dependencies, and have dependencies color-coded by degree of b0rkage, and whatever bell or whistle I can think of in the meantime.

hcchien writes "After two weeks, the call for papers of Open Source Decelopers' Conference Taiwan, 2008 will be end.
The OSDC.tw 2008 will be on 12th-13th, April. The subject is "Innovation and Implementation" in this year.
Please submit your papers with subject, extract and user profile. And the OSDC.tw will call for participation after we finalize the schedule. Just a reminder, please send your papers to hcchien@osdc.tw before 15th, February."

Renée Bäcker tells me that my copy of $foo Magazin #5 is in the mail. My article "Neue RegEx-Features in Perl 5.10" is in this issue, which means that I've now written articles for all three Perl print magazines. It looks like there is a review of Mastering Perl in there too. And, at only €6 it's quite the bargain. Too bad I don't read German!

In $foo #5:

• Vorwort
• Einiges zum Thema CGI-Sicherheit
• Größere Datenmengen in Bilder gepresst
• Rezension - Mastering Perl
• Interview - Richard Dice
• Neue RegEx-Features in Perl 5.10
• Rätselhaftes open
• Probleme mit base.pm
• Perl 6 Tutorial - Teil 2
• Winter of Code
• Charsets
• Tipps und Tricks: $/
• Date::Calc
• Usergruppen: Erlangen.pm
• CPAN-News