I'm back...

Been traveling a bit, so haven't updated lately, but I've not been entirely idle. Have recently added
docs for with/without, loop LINEs, next, last, redo, state, and while/until.

I'm considering trying to consolidate the documentation efforts into something more coherent than what we have presently. It would be very nice to actually have it all in order for the Christmas release of Perl 6. But that's an actual commitment, so I'm not fully convinced yet... Watch this space for something resembling a decision!

In the meantime, I have a question for Perl 5 programmers or anyone else who would like to render an opinion:

What makes for good documentation?

One of the things people have liked about Perl is that, for many years, it has had good, extensive documentation. I'm now wondering about what it is that appeals to people and how those qualities can be usefully applied to documenting Perl 6.

Your thoughts?

And we're off!

My Perl 5 to Perl 6 project has (to the extent that has so far been written) been merged into the main Perl 6 doc tree.

Hopefully, by tomorrow, you'll find four new "5to6" documents at http://doc.perl6.org/language.html

Whew.

Hopefully, some of you will find them useful.

Escape is imminent.

So I got a message the other day on #perl6 from someone asking about my Perl 5 to Perl 6 documentation. It seems that, despite my mentioning it constantly, someone missed the github link. :-)

Anyway, that gave me a shove to clean up the documents and bring them in line with the general guidelines for Perl 6 documentation. That is now mostly done. There's really just one more thing that needs to be done...

I need titles.

It's been suggested that the titles should have the form 5to6-[subject], and that seems reasonable to me. The question is what to use for the subjects. My current thought is to use the titles of the Perl 5 documents each of my documents is based on. E. g. 5to6-perlvar, 5to6-perlfunc, etc.

Time to hit up the Perl 6 people for suggestions as to what would be most acceptable.

Wish me luck...

An opportunity missed - but all is not lost!

Last Thursday, I had a couple of commitments that prevented me from going to the NY Perl Mongers tech meeting that evening. This was particularly unfortunate, as David Farrell gave a talk on parsing Perl 5 POD with Perl 6 grammars.

Fortunately, I happened to see David on Friday, and mentioned that I was sorry to have missed his talk. He was nice enough to not only send me a copy of his slides, but to send me links to some articles he's written for his Perl Tricks site (http://perltricks.com) and his github repositories for his Perl 5 POD parser and his Perl 6 One-Liners book. So, as most of this is publicly available, I figured I'd share.

Perl 5 Pod: https://github.com/dnmfarrell/Pod-Perl5

Perl 6 One-Liners: https://github.com/dnmfarrell/Perl6-One-Liners

Perl Tricks articles:
http://perltricks.com/article/136/2014/11/20/Get-started-with-Perl-6-one-liners
http://perltricks.com/article/144/2015/1/13/How-to-create-a-grammar-in-Perl-6
http://perltricks.com/article/170/2015/4/30/Parsing-Perl-5-pod-with-Perl-6

I'm planning on digging into the grammar features of Perl 6 in the near future, so this should all be helpful.

Thanks David!

And so we begin...

First attempt at writing a blog, diving into Perl 6.

Having looked at Perl 6 for the first time in quite a while and finding it interesting, I decided to take a shot at porting the Test::Simple distribution to Perl 6. This wound up being a bit more difficult than I expected, as I realized more and more that it wasn't as easy to find how things translated from Perl 5 to Perl 6 as I would have liked.

This, in turn, led to digging around for information and finally thinking "someone should write some documentation pointing the way from, for instance, caller() to callframe()... " And so I find myself down the rabbit hole. Fortunately, it's a relatively clean and comfortable rabbit hole so far.

You can find my efforts at https://github.com/dha/perl5-to-perl6-docs (and a simple implementation of an interpreter for HQ9+ in Perl 6 at https://github.com/dha/hq9plus-in-perl6).

Currently, I am working on ideas for two documents that may be of particular interest to people coming from Perl 5 to Perl 6: Essentials (for instance, you almost certainly need to know that the operator for method calls has changed from the arrow to the dot, but you probably don't have an immediate need to know that the bit shift operators have changed), and Interesting New Stuff in Perl 6 (typing, lazy lists, placeholder variables, etc). Certainly any suggestions as to what should go into these documents (i. e. what would actually be essential or interesting) will be appreciated. The lists of topics for those documents are currently in the github repository as SubjectsForEssentials.txt and SubjectsForNewStuffYouMayWant.txt

I'm going to try to blog about this process, and about Perl 6, regularly. Hopefully I will be successful.

*crosses fingers*