Day 3 – Perl 6 – jmp 2 it

jmp is a Perl 6 powered command-line program I use every day to navigate through piles of Perl and quickly jump into my $EDITOR. I try and stay in a state of flow while coding and the ability to quickly search files and then jump straight into an editor helps.

jmp is a simple terminal-based frontend to your favourite code searching tool (e.g., rgrep, ag, ack, git grep etc). It displays a list of search results you can quickly browse through before jumping in to edit your file (e.g., vim, nano, comma etc).

Day 07 – Bagging the changes in the Set specification

In 2012, colomon++ implemented most of the then Set / Bag specification in Niecza and Rakudo, and blogged about it last year.

Then in May this year, it became clear that there was a flaw in the implementation that prohibited creating Sets of Sets easily. In June, colomon++ re-implemented Sets and Bags in Niecza using the new views on the spec. And I took it upon myself to port these changes to Rakudo. And I was in for a treat (in the Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans kind of way).

Texan versus (non-ASCII) Unicode

Although the Set/Bag modules were written in Perl 6, there were some barriers to conquer: it was not as simple as a copy-paste operation. First of all, all Set operators were implemented in their Unicode form in Niecza foremost, with the non-Unicode (ASCII) versions (aka Texan versions) implemented as a dispatcher to the Unicode version. At the time, I was mostly developing in rakudo on Parrot. And Parrot has this performance issues with parsing code that contains non-ASCII characters (at any place in the code, even in comments). Therefore, the old implementation of Sets and Bags in Rakudo, only had the Texan versions of the operators. So I had to carefully figure out which Unicode operator in the Niecza code (e.g. ⊆) matched which Texan operator (namely (<=)) in the Rakudo code, and make the necessary changes.

Then I decided: well, why don’t we have Unicode operators for Sets and Bags in Rakudo either? I mentioned this on the #perl6 channel, and I think it was jnthn++ who pointed out that there should be a way to define Unicode operators without actually having to use Unicode characters. After trying this, and having jnthn++ fix some issues in that area, it was indeed possible.

So how does that look?

  # U+2286 SUBSET OF OR EQUAL TO
  only sub infix:<<"\x2286">>($a, $b --> Bool) {
      $a (<=) $b;
  }

One can only say: Yuck! But it gets the job done. So now one can write:

  $ perl6 -e 'say set( <a b c> ) ⊆ set( <a b c d> )'
  True

Note that Parcels (such as <a b c>) are automatically upgraded to Sets by the set operators. So one can shorten this similar statement to:

  $ perl6 -e 'say <a b c> ⊆ <a b d>'  # note missing c
  False

Of course, using the Unicode operator in Rakudo comes at the expense of an additional subroutine call. But that’s for some future optimizer to take care of.

Still no bliss

But alas, the job was still not done. The implementation using Hash in Rakudo, would not allow Sets within Sets yet still. It would look like it worked, but that was only because the stringification of a Set was used as a key in another set. So, when you asked for the elements of such a Set of Sets, you would get strings back, rather than Sets.

Rakudo allows objects to be used as keys (and still remain objects), by mixing in the TypedHash role into a Hash, so that .keys returns objects, rather than strings. Unfortunately, using the TypedHash role is only completely functional for user programs, not when building the Perl 6 internals using Perl 6, as is done in the core settings. Bummer.

However, the way TypedHash is implemented, could also be used for implementing Sets and Bags. For Sets, there is simply an underlying Hash, in which the key is the .WHICH value of the thing in the set, and the value is the thing. For Bags, that became a little more involved, but not a lot: again, the key is the .WHICH of the thing, and the value is a Pair with the thing as the key, and the count as the value. So, after refactoring the code to take this into account as well, it seemed I could finally consider this job finished (at least for now).

It’s all about values

Then, the nitty gritty of the Set spec struck again.

  "they are subject to === equality rather than eqv equality"

What does that mean?

  $ perl6 -e 'say <a b c> === <a b c>'
  False
  $ perl6 -e 'say <a b c> eqv <a b c>'
  True

In other words, because any Set consisting of <a b c> is identical to any other Set consisting of <a b c>, you would expect:

  $ perl6 -e 'say set(<a b c>) === set(<a b c>)'
  False

to return True (rather than False).

Fortunately, there is some specification that comes in aid. It’s just a matter of creating a .WHICH method for Sets and Bags, and we’re set. So now:

  $ perl6 -e 'say set(<a b c>) === set(<a b c>)’
  True

just works, because:

  $ perl6 -e 'say set(<a b c>).WHICH; say set(<a b c>).WHICH'
  Set|Str|a Str|b Str|c
  Set|Str|a Str|b Str|c

shows that both sets, although defined separately, are really the same.

Oh, and some other spec changes

In October, Larry invoked rule #2 again, but those changes were mostly just names. There’s a new immutable Mix and mutable MixHash, but you could consider those just as Bags with floating point weights, rather than unsigned integer weights. Creating Mix was mostly a Cat license job.

Conclusion

Sets, Bags, Mixes, and their mutable counterparts SetHash, BagHash and MixHash, are now first class citizens in Perl 6 Rakudo. So, have fun with them!

Day 05 – Changes in specification and operational fallout

Perl 6 has become much more stable in the past year. There have however been some potentially disrupting changes to the Perl 6 specification, followed by implementation changes to adhere to that new spec.

bless() changes

One of the most visible changes is the removal of an object candidate in bless(). If you wanted to call bless() yourself in your code, rather than supplying your own BUILD() method, you needed to provide an object candidate as the first parameter. Over the years, this turned out to basically always be * (as in Whatever). Which is pretty useless and an obstacle for future optimisations. So TimToady invoked rule #2 to remove that first parameter.

The changes to calls to bless() in the core setting were implemented by moritz++. For those Perl 6 modules in the wild, a warning was added:

 Passing an object candidate to Mu.bless is deprecated

The first parameter would then be removed and execution would continue.

This has the disadvantage of generating a warning every time you create an object of that class with the deprecated call to bless(). So there must be a better way to do this!

Enter “is DEPRECATED”

It turns out there is a better way. Already in June 2012, pmichaud++ added an “is DEPRECATED” routine trait that did nothing until earlier this year when I decided to add some functionality to it. Initially it was just a warn, but that just had the same annoying quality as the warning with bless().

Since the idea behind the “is DEPRECATED” trait was not specced yet, I figured I could turn it any way I wanted, unless I would not be forgiven by the #perl6 crowd. So I re-used an idea I had had at former $work, already years ago. Instead of warning at the moment a transgression is spotted, it feels better, especially for these types of deprecations, to just remember where these transgressions take place. Only when the program is finished, report the transgressions that were spotted (on STDERR).

One of the other standard methods that has been deprecated in Perl 6, is ucfirst(). One should use the tc() (for “title case”) method instead. So what happens if you do call ucfirst()? That is easily demonstrated with a one-liner:

$ perl6 -e 'say "foo".ucfirst; say "done"'
Foo
done
Saw 1 call to deprecated code during execution.
================================================================================
Method ucfirst (from Cool) called at:
  -e, line 1
Please use 'tc' instead.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please contact the author to have these calls to deprecated code adapted,
so that this message will disappear!

After this has been live in the repo for a while, and spectested, and since nobody on #perl6 complained, I decided to spec this behavior not only for routines, but also for attributes and classes. Unfortunately, the latter ones have not been implemented yet (although you can already specify the traits). But there is a patch -p1 coming up, which should give me some quality time to look at this.

So why is bless(*) not properly DEPRECATED

Indeed. Why? Simply because I missed it. So I just fixed this: nothing like blog-driven development! So this one-liner now says:

$ perl6-p -e 'class A { method new { self.bless(*) } }; say A.new'
A.new()
Saw 1 call to deprecated code during execution.
================================================================================
Method bless (from Mu) called at:
  -e, line 1
Please use a call to bless without initial * parameter instead.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please contact the author to have these calls to deprecated code adapted,
so that this message will disappear!

So how do you specify the text?

The “is DEPRECATED” trait currently takes one parameter: the string to be shown between Please use and instead. If you don’t specify anything, the text something else will be assumed. Since that is not entirely useful, it is advised to always specify a text that makes sense in that context. Additional parameters may be added in the future to allow for more customisation, but so far they have not been needed.

Conclusion

Perl 6 will continue to evolve. Changes will still be made. To not break early adopter’s code, any non-compatible changes in the implementation of Perl 6 can be marked as deprecated without interfering with the execution of existing programs much. Perl 6 module authors can do the same should they feel the need to change the API of their modules.