Mailman 3 January 2005 - pypy-dev

tests porting status
by Samuele Pedroni Jan. 10, 2005

Jan. 10, 2005

All tests apart appspace tests and some tests in tool/test are ported to py.test. The tool/test are easy to address. Given that appspace tests are currently run through CPython I wonder whether it would make sense to merge the branch, porting the few tests that were added to the head after the branch creation and think how to address exactly the appspace tests issue after that directly on the head. This would allow whatever work is going to happen on the head between now and the sprint to use py.test tests. Samuele.

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Re: [pypy-dev] Upcoming PyPy sprint
by Armin Rigo Jan. 10, 2005

Jan. 10, 2005

Hi Jacek, On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 07:41:08PM +0100, Jacek Generowicz wrote: > I would like to come, but the timing is rather unfortunate and it looks > like I would not be able to attend the whole event. However, I would be > able to commute (from Geneva) on a few of the days. > > Would I be able to pick up some knowledge of PyPy by attending a few > days, or would it be a complete waste of everybody's time? Would you be able to attend the beginning of the sprint? I fear that near the end we might all be in "quickly-hack-a-bit-more-we-want-this-to-work" mode... but the beginning should definitely be interesting, and you are most welcome! Armin

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Re: [pypy-svn] r8078 - pypy/trunk/src/pypy/interpreter
by hpk＠trillke.net Jan. 9, 2005

Jan. 9, 2005

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 17:35 +0100, tismer(a)codespeak.net wrote: > Author: tismer > Date: Wed Jan 5 17:35:47 2005 > New Revision: 8078 > > Modified: > pypy/trunk/src/pypy/interpreter/pyopcode.py > Log: > changed LOAD_GLOBAL to support the flow space better. > In case of a NameError, where the space does not define NameError, > we raise a real NameError with a message. > > Modified: pypy/trunk/src/pypy/interpreter/pyopcode.py > ============================================================================== > --- pypy/trunk/src/pypy/interpreter/pyopcode.py (original) > +++ pypy/trunk/src/pypy/interpreter/pyopcode.py Wed Jan 5 17:35:47 2005 > @@ -525,8 +525,13 @@ > if not e.match(f.space, f.space.w_KeyError): > raise > message = "global name '%s' is not defined" % varname > - w_exc_type = f.space.w_NameError > - w_exc_value = f.space.wrap(message) > + try: > + w_exc_type = f.space.w_NameError > + w_exc_value = f.space.wrap(message) > + except AttributeError: > + # object space does not support it, so crash really > + raise NameError, (message + > + ", but %s has no NameError!" % f.space) > raise OperationError(w_exc_type, w_exc_value) > f.valuestack.push(w_value) I don't understand this change. Why is raising a NameError for not finding space.w_NameError better than just an AttributeError? This seems to me like mixing different levels (application level and interpreter level). It seems the flow object space could easily provide its own w_NameError and then you can check the usual way, catching an OperationError and then for e.match(space, space.w_NameError) without changing the interpreter. cheers (and happy new year to you, christian!), holger

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Re: [pypy-dev] Upcoming PyPy sprint
by Armin Rigo Jan. 7, 2005

Jan. 7, 2005

Hi, On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 12:54:04PM +0100, Adrien Di Mascio wrote: > Ludovic and I won't be able to be there before the 24th. Is it be > possible for you (Pypy team) to keep some of the "Introducing PyPy" > part for Monday and Tuesday ? Yes, I guess so. Armin

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Running Python in reverse
by Alexander Schliep Jan. 7, 2005

Jan. 7, 2005

Hi everyone, Christian Tismer encouraged me to post the following directly to the pypy mailing list. My main Python project is Gato, a software for visualizing (or animating) graph algorithms; see http://gato.sourceforge.net/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Screenshots. The main ingredients of Gato are a debugger subclass, some GUI elements and code for drawing graphs. The goal is to have an interactive, dynamic version of the classical comp.sci. text book, where, typically, some graph algorithm is given as pseudo code and you see (at best) a before, during, and after snapshot picture of its working on some graph. Python is a perfectly fine replacement for pseudo code and the execution and directly coupled visualization, which you can control just like a debugger, convey much more than static pictures. Winfried Hochstaettler, some university colleagues, and myself have used this for teaching discrete math, combinatorial optimization and comp.sci.classes with quite favorable comments from everyone involved. The number one request was always the ability to track back. I started to implement an instant replay of the last visualization effect (change of color, blink etc.) and started to think about a proper way of supporting the ability to step back in time. This essentially boils down to implementing one of the classical design patterns for supporting unlimited undo (and redo), treating the visualization effects as commands. This decouples the state (values of all variables used) of the algorithm from the state of the visualization, hence running the algorithm after a couple of Undos is not possible (One could fake that by Redoing everything and then continuing execution). Supporting an update of all variables gets kind of messy in standard Python. A cleaner approach would be to have a Python interpreter which can run backwards. Christian thinks it would be feasible in PyPy. This actually would be extremely nice for a number of applications - teaching Python - teaching algorithms with Python - debugging in general I am somewhat embarrassed to ask for a feature without much to offer. But realistically, I cannot promise more than to be a tester and happy user. Best, Alexander PS: Gato is LGPL. The algorithms we have are copyright Springer, as we have a textbook & software package coming out this year. PPS: There is a C-syntax-based tool which can run backwards: http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~demetres/Leonardo/Leonardo.html -- schliep(a)molgen.mpg.de http://algorithmics.molgen.mpg.de

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Leysin sprint / Squeak / CCC conference
by hpk＠trillke.net Jan. 6, 2005

Jan. 6, 2005

Hi pypy-dev, on the last chaos communication congress (CCC 2004 in Berlin) i thankfully got to know Markus Denker from the University of Bern in Switzerland. He is involved with Squeak (http://www.squeak.org) and gave IMHO one of the most interesting "pypy-related" talks at the conference. He also saw my "getting EU funding for a FOSS project" talk and so we stood together a lot during the conference, talking about PyPy, Squeak, higher level languages being faster than C, EU funding and what not. (Btw, at http://codespeak.net/~hpk/2004-pypy-eu.pdf you'll find my Funding talk). However, Markus' talk was not only about Squeak, a smalltalk implementation written in a subset of smalltalk, but also about "Croquet" (http://www.opencroquet.org/) which is headed by Alan Kay, one of the fathers of object oriented programming. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay for more info). Many of the features of Squeak/Croquet have been discussed during PyPy development and i am sure both sides can and may want to learn from each other. So i asked Markus if he would like to come to the PyPy sprint in Leysin for an afternoon, as it is pretty close to where he lives and works. He does! So what do you (especially sprint attendants) think about inviting him and letting him redo the talk about Squeak/Croquet and then we can then go into some deeper discussion over a beer or so? I am sure you will enjoy it as it arguably presents a vision of programming that is something like 5 years ahead of the mainstream in some ways. I'd like to tell you not too much before the sprint to allow you the same kind of suprises i had during Markus' talk :-) It would be great though, to be able to have a beamer at least for that day. He would probably also go a bit into explaining "Seaside", a continuation based web-framework that received some publicity lately (also on c.l.py). OK, now i am going to tell a bit more about the CCC-2004 conference and my impressions, while i am at it. This is not directly pypy-related so you may stop reading here :-) *** personal impressions from the CCC 2004 conference *** This year's conference broke all records: around 300 talks plus all kinds of workshops and sessions and 3500 (!) attendants mostly from security/network/system related areas but also quite a number of people from FOSS-projects such as MySQL, Apache, PHP, Ruby and what not. (As always, not a lot from the Python world, though). Moreover, Wikipedia held their annual meeting at the conference and presented some nice background talks ("Scaling above 1 Million"). Various BSD and Linux communities gathered in the cellar, around 500 people with laptops, called the "tiger" room :-) The schedule. It usually started at 11am and went on to 4am (AM i say). Food, Drinks and network was there 24 hours. There were no real breaks whatsoever which made sense considering that having 3000 people going for lunch would presumably lead to race conditions. A central room with lots of video installations (done by "Video Jockeys" doing their own track) provided a nice meeting place. We also played the game of "Go" there. There were tons of interesting talks, here is a selection of the ones i visited: "Practical OSX insecurities", which presented some funny security holes. Apple mailed the speaker in the morning to prevent him to disclose the holes, but it was too late :-) The guy lastly presented the first workable Mail-Worm on OSX, fully equipped with a scripted SMTP-engine and hiding itself as quite regular PDF-document attachment. "Hacking embedded devices" dealt with reverse-engeneering a 3COM 3300 switch, which is 68020 based and has it's own custom scripting language (!), 4 MB of RAM, a small operating system and what not. A nice target for running PyPy in it :-) "OpenBGP / ntpd", Henning Brauer from OpenBSD-fame gave a very quick and thorough talk on how development of production-quality software in OpenBSD-land takes place. "Bluetooth hacks: full disclosure". Many of you may know that since a year or so Adam Laury and his co-hackers found glazing holes in bluetooth implementations in mobile phones. At the time, some 50-70 percent of mobile phones were completly hackable, including modifying the address book, making GPRS calls, listening to your calls and what not. At the conference Adam provided a full disclosure including source code. "Old Skewl Hacking: Infra Red". Adam Laury gave another talk about his experiences hacking infra-reds of garage door systems, hotel information/minbar/TV systems, cars and what not. Very simple, very effective, very funny. My favorite quote of his revealing talk was "presumably it's strange hearing the sound of a 100 cars opening at the same time". Meanwhile, the german championship in lock-picking took place and, along with the "physical security" talk, it became obvious that even a 2000 Euro lock is far from unbreakable. A 12 year old kid managed to visit his first lock-picking workshop and be so successfull that he directly participated in the championship :-) "High-Speed Computing & Co-Processing with FPGAs" dealt with how to dynamically program hardware to carry out specialized tasks, providing speedups of up to a 100-times of a modern PC. You can get simple programmable arrays as a PCMCIA card or a full-blown PCI card with multiple parallel engines. The talker, David Hulton, actually comes from a company that tries to connect OpenSource and FPGAs. Sure interesting stuff, maybe also as a target for PyPy. The chaos conference also saw a number of political talks, regarding e.g. biometry, software patents or general foreign politics. It was interesting to see that more and more geeks are becoming politically aware and active these days. Well, that's it for now. During January, the Chaos Computer Club intends to make all talks available as Video/Audio as all talks (not workshops, though) were filmed and recorded. have fun & a nice new year, holger

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[hpk@trillke.net: [codespeak-ann] server move - thursday (6th Jan. 2005)]
by holger krekel Jan. 6, 2005

Jan. 6, 2005

Hi pypy-dev, i figure that a number of maybe-interested people are not subscribed to the codespeak announce list, so here i forward an announcement which talks about server-moves/works later today. If you want to receive such news then subscribe to http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/codespeak-ann cheers, holger ----- Forwarded message from holger krekel <hpk(a)trillke.net> ----- Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 16:33:40 +0100 To: codespeak-ann(a)codespeak.net From: holger krekel <hpk(a)trillke.net> Subject: [codespeak-ann] server move - thursday (6th Jan. 2005) X-Spambayes-Classification: ham; 0.00 Hello codespeak developers and users, next thursday, 6th of January 2005, Jens-Uwe Mager and me plan to move over codespeak services to a new dual-amd64 more failsafe machine, largely donated by Infrae from the Netherlands. Thanks! Also thanks to Helios from Germany who will continue to provide us with free hosting in their computing center. With a gentoo-setup built from scratch with NPTL (New Posix Thread Library) and some other enhancements we hope that especially the subversion setup stabilizes some more. We are going to deploy the subversion 1.1 series but we'll stay with the bsd-db backend (for various reasons). Please note: - We are not going much at new features during this move but rather for consistently mirroring and upgrading the current setup. - ssh-logins will probably see a modified host-key and thus you may receive a warning from your ssh-client. - We don't expect any large downtime but your mileage may vary, especially with respect to DNS-caching. - we may miss small bits and pieces, please bear with us and tell admin(a)codespeak.net about problems! If we don't fully complete the move on thursday we are going to spend the sunday (9th January) as well. cheers, holger _______________________________________________ codespeak-ann(a)codespeak.net http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/codespeak-ann ----- End forwarded message -----

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Think we can stomach some Perl?
by Laura Creighton Jan. 3, 2005

Jan. 3, 2005

Jordan Hayes has hacked together SWISH-E and Mailman. The result is Mailman archives you can search. I like this very much. He mentioned this on another list. There doesn't seem to be a way, currently, to restrict your search to between certain dates, but it seems an improvement on hunting through the archives by hand. Laura oh, yes: start here: http://infothecary.org/jordan/mailman.html Laura

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