I wanted to note that I finally did manage to modify squaak subroutines (functions) to allow returns, something that I did previously in 2.8.0 but struggled with in 3.3.0. This brings up a point related to Andrew's post, below.
If I were being paid to work on this, I think that squaak and the associated tutorial is high-priority; people new to Parrot will almost certainly start here, and people developing a new language will rely heavily upon the tutorial. Over the last two years I've worked on a bare-bones grammar for the R language, several times. When new versions of Parrot evolved, my parser broke. Similarly, older versions of squaak were broken by Parrot updates. Frustrating, but absolutely necessary: the evolution of Parrot is far more important than maintaining backwards compatibility. At the same time, the fast evolution of Parrot risks alienating a group of potentially valuable contributors. If the process of updating squaak in parallel with the evolution of Parrot were documented, it would be a little friendlier for people like me. To this purpose, I hereby volunteer to document what I needed to do with function returns in 3.3.0, contrasting this to the previously-blogged solution that worked with 2.8.0. How this is used (other than a post to this list) is up to you guys. I'll try to do this in the next few days. Jay ----------------------------------------------------------- Howdy, At the Parrot/Perl 6 BOF at YAPC we are trying to figure out how we can focus more on the most important things that need to happen in Parrot. To facilitate this, please conduct this thought experiment: If you were being paid to hack on Parrot, which things would you be expected to work on? If you can formulate an answer to this, please respond to this email and let others know. You won't be held to this, and no one is going to tell anybody to stop working on their favorite pet project, but we feel that if Parrot hackers keep this in mind and communicate it, we can better focus our energies on the most important things that need to happen. Duke -- John W. Emerson (Jay) Associate Professor of Statistics Department of Statistics Yale University http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
