Status update - Poniedate #33

Things are starting to move again, I am now focusing hard on making my 
Array as PMC experiments working for real. After a hectic last month 
that included various non perl activities including a trip to 
Minneapolis, moving things form Sweden, settling in a new house and 
trying to hit a meaningless deadline at work, I am now back on ponie 
development again and should be so more actively over the next month.

Essentially I have a solution for using PMCs for arrays simply by 
hiding the XPVAV behind an interface, and have all the macros return 
pointers into the structure. Now this allows the perl internals only to 
function with perl5array pmcs and not general pmcs, but for the the 
time being there is not much to do about it. Most parts of the perl 
internals assume total access to the internals of an array, this 
includes pad and stack handling code, the correct solution is for them 
to use the official API and not hack things directly, the reason they 
are not doing so is of course 'speed' reasons (or in some cases, 
because they do really really evil things). So for the time being, you 
will only be able to use perl5array pmcs in there, further ahead we 
should be able to, at least for most operations, be able to use any 
Parrot PMC that works as a container. (The question on how much XS code 
depends on the internals of arrays/hashes need to be looked at too).

  Hopefully, by end of next week, arrays should be working fully again 
with tie calls going through a PMC switch and using a perl5tie pmc 
instead.

  sky