Re: First victim, er SV type

From the complete Warnocking of my email below, can I conclude that
no one has any idea what Ponie is for or how it will be implemented ????
(ducks).


On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 09:12:37PM +0100, Dave Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 01:50:32PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> (lots of stuff about morphing SVs into PMCs).
> 
> When I read this, and started to try and think about it and understand it,
> I realised that my current mental picture of Ponie wasn't good enough to
> be able to reply meaningfully. So if I might be permitted, I'd like to
> digress for a moment with some questions - not just addressed to Nick, but
> to the whole list.
> 
> My understanding is that in Perl5, "ops are smart, SVs are dumb", while
> in Perl6/Parrot, it's the reverse: "bytecode is dumb, PMCs are smart".
> For example in Perl5, an SV is really little more than a storage vessel
> that can hold various items of data such as an IV, an NV or a string,
> plus some flags that indiciate what's stored in it. On the other hand,
> the Perl5 'int' opcode 'knows' about all the possible things that could be
> stored in an SV, and has full responsibility for doing all the work
> involved in coercing the SV's value into an integer (such as converting a
> string into an int, or using the address of of the thing pointed to by an
> RV as as int). With parrot, the 'int' byte code just calls the get_int method
> on the PMC, and the PMC holds all the intelligence as to how to extract an
> integer value out of itself.  Actually I'm oversimplifiying slightly,
> since SVs can have magic attached, which is a half-assed attempt to make
> them intelligent like PMCs.
> 
> Anyway - what, philosophically speaking, is Ponie's intentions in this
> area? Does it just want to use PMCs as dumb storable vessels, or does it
> want to transfer the intelligence into them? And are we intending to use
> off-the-shelf parrot/Perl6 PMCs, or a whole bunch of Ponie-specific PMCs
> that ape all the Perl5 SV types?
> 
> Also, what actually is the final purpose of Ponie? Is it intended to be
> an integrated part of Perl6+Parrot, so that when someone compiles a Perl
> program, the parts of it that are Perl5 syntax get compiled using a bunch
> of Perl5 byte codes, but apart from that its one big happy executable,
> with perl5 bits of code calling into perl6 bits of code and vice-versa,
> with PMCs being happily passed between them? And running as least as fast
> as the current Perl 5 interpreter? Or is the goal less ambitious?
> 
> Dave.
> 
> -- 
> In my day, we used to edit the inodes by hand.  With magnets.

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