ASSOC on Windows 7

A while back I posted some suggestions for .bat files to run cmd.exe sessions for Python. I use these a lot for PHP and Perl as well. However there is an issue with them on Windows 7. "Out of the box", the ASSOC command gives "Access is denied", even though the user is an Administrator.

My first thought was to turn off the dreaded User Account Control settings, but that changed nothing. The eventual solution was to go into regedit and grant my user full control on registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, which is where the file associations are held. Fortunately Windows security for keys (and directories) is based on inheritence, and so keys within that hive will have the same permissions by default.

I can see why file association sould be seen as a security risk, so why don't Microsoft finally admit that the filename is not a good way to identify the file type, and use magic numbers like everyone else? Microsoft Office files, and other Microsoft proprietry formats, all contain magic numbers, and if you place one of these files onto Linux then it identifies them correctly without the need for file extensions.

UNIX's #! line for script files is a consequence of the magic number system. It is simple and incredibly flexible. When C# was developed the format of the .exe files (PE) had to change to support it. If they implemented #! then Microsoft would not have had that problem.

When I wrote the yash shell I simply read the commands from STDIN. On UNIX I needed no special code to support yash scripts - just the #! line. But on Windows I had to associate a file extension.

If I want to run Python 2 and Python 3 on the same machine on UNIX or Linux then I just have different #! lines at the top of the script. On Windows, because they have the same file extension, I have to redo the file associations every time I want to run one of them. Dire.

A winning feature of Perl 6

So what features do Python programmers love to say about their code? First off they like to crow about how clean their code looks without sigils, those nasty $, @, %, &, * that Perl programmers have to put up with. Ah, but that means you cannot do any interpolation in Python strings, because Python does not know the difference between bare text and a variable name.

Anyway, Python uses _ and __ (double underscore) to change the behaviour of variables, if these are not sigils then what is? Python uses an @ to prefix a decorator. Sounds like a sigil to me.

Perl 6 mandates that variables are declared using 'my' (or some other scope indicator), but Python does not require that. This means that in Python you cannot declare a variable for scope inside a local block, like an 'if' or loop.

Python does not use braces to delimit a block. Nice, unless you need to declare an empty block, so you need a 'pass' statement (reminds me of NEXT-SENTENCE).

Most of that is trivial to be honest, none is important enough to make a strong case either way.

So what is? Threading.

A recuring theme at the EuroPython conference was the fact that CPython is not truely multi-threaded because of the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). Ruby has the Global VM Lock. There are various implementations which bypass this issue, Jython and Iron Python do not have a problem with multi-threading but both are several versions behind and I won't be holding my breath for a Python 3 version. Google is apparently working on a CPython version which eliminates the GIL, but again that is some way off.

In a classic "sour grapes", the Python community say that threading is too difficult anyway, so use processes instead. Very few people at the conference were swallowing that line.

Multithreading should be a selling point of Perl 6 and Parrot, but unfortunately is not yet complete and will not be in Rakudo Star. That is a great pity.

Perl 6 gets a release date!

Big news from the current Perl conference YAPC Europe 2009 here in Lisbon is that Rakudo * (star) will be released in spring 2010. Rakudo is Perl 6 on Parrot, which is an equivalent to the JVM or CLI.

Is that an official Perl 6 release? Well, it is the nearest to official that you will see. The Perl 6 team are keen to point out that there will be no such thing as a official version, just different implementations. I guess they are looking at Python for their inspiration there.

This could be make-or-break for Perl. It shouldn't be, Perl 5 will continue no matter what, but the new stuff is what will make Perl cool again in the eyes of the fashion conscious. We all know that fashion is fickle, illogical, and driven more by hormones than intellect. We also know how important it is in decision making. Much as it would like to, the Perl community cannot pretend that Perl 6/Rakudo is too far away to worry about. It is six months away.

My worry is that expectations will be high - the release will be incomplete and they are very open about that. The Rakudo "pumpking" (project manager), Patrick Michaud, sees this as a test release to encourage people to write applications to find bugs and feed back into the development. Trouble is that companies have been burned too often in the past to invest in applications on an incomplete and possibly flaky platform.

The dilemma is that if something is not released soon then Perl will have missed the boat - which is already upping anchor and about to steam away.

Update: read the comments from Pm - they are very good.

Perl 6 Questions and further information

This is following a recent Perl 6 seminar I gave.

Perl 5 style is still supported.

Named parameters go into %_
Unnamed parameters go into @_

Subroutines can be predefined with:

sub foo {…}

… is known as the "yadayadayada" operator.

Lexically scoped subroutines:

my sub mysub () is context { …}

Optional parameters: ? now comes after the parameter name.

sub mysub ($value, @harry, %ash, $opt?) {…} 

Named parameters: prefix is now : , instead of + and are optional unless they have a ! suffix.

sub named ($value, :@harry!, :%ash, :$other) {…}

...

named(42, other = 'fred', harry = @files);

Slurpy parameters, like perl 5 lists and arrays, are prefixed *

C style prototypes
Are not supported. It appears that when a subroutine is called before it is defined the parameter resolution still works correctly. However a runtime error is reported, not a compile time error (as it would with Perl 5 prototypes).

Dynamic types
These are called "traits". See Synopsis 12: Objects.

Zip operator
Has changed, it is now 'Z'. Behaviour with different length arrays has also changed between pugs and Rakudo, the result uses the shortest:

my @array = qw(The quick brown fox);
my @brray = qw(Now is the time for all);

my @all = @array Z @brray;
say @all.elems();
say @all[];

@all = @brray Z @array;
say @all.elems();
say @all[];

Gives:

8
TheNowquickisbrownthefoxtime
8
NowTheisquickthebrowntimefox

Important further change

When testing these changes in Rakudo I ran up against a change I had almost forgotten. When calling a subroutine, no whitespace is allowed between the sub name and the open parentheses. That slowed me up until I remembered. A backward step IMHO.

MySQL VARCHAR limits

A delegate recently queried the size limit on a VARCHAR field in MySQL. Our course documentation states a maximum of 255 characters: that is correct. For larger fields use TEXT.

Perl 6 Questions

I recently gave a short talk on Perl 6, and a number of questions arose. I will answer those questions as soon as I can, but unfortunately other fires need fighting right now.

One of the reasons for the delay is that the syntax for subroutines for Perl 6 has changed again, and in fact my slides are now out of date. That also means that pugs and Rakudo are incompatible in a major way - they have always been out of step to some extent.

Moving into the light?

A long time since my last post. Aside from bread-and-butter stuff, my activity has been on Python. There have been various upheavals in the business, and we aquired a Python 2 course. It wasn't too hot, and needed updating. Around the end of 2008 Python 3 was released, so I decided it would make sense to create a new course based on Python 3.

That is almost finished, but it turns out that it might have been premature, since no one seems to be in a particular hurry to move to Py3. That's a shame, because I am quite impressed. There have been issues, performance has been one of them (although I can't say I noticed any problems). In June 2009 a new version, 3.1, should be released, and that has a number of new features. So, having done all that work on a new course, I will have to hack it again come June. That's the problem with the bleading edge.

I have read of Python's ease of use, and never really believed it. After all, there are so many vested interests and religious wars that it is difficult to get a balanced view. I have to say that, after a little practice, Python is very easy to pickup. I have found myself just coding. The number of times I have to look something up gets less and less. I'm not sure I am fluent yet, but I'm close, and I reckon that is the fastest I have ever picked up another language.

Will Perl 6 be as easy?

App::sh2p Version 0.05 now on CPAN

I always knew this would be a long project, although I'm heartened as to how far it has gone. It appears to have been useful to some people. It is a feature of Open Source that the only time I can be really sure it is being used is when I get bug reports - which could be rather off-putting to anyone without the skin of a rhino.

This latest release, version 0.05, fixes quite a few bugs, and adds support for things like trap (signal handling). In my defence, most of the bugs are missing support for certain features, and it is still in beta. I still have not got pipelines sorted out (that is a huge job), or $?, but they will come eventually. I only get to work on this in odd moments, evenings and so on, and it is difficult to find the time for development stints of more that two hours. I could really do with spending a couple of solid days on it.

One problem I had was in inserting a marker into a string which would indicate a token delimiter. Everything I tried clashed in someway with a real data item. I solved it eventually by using a gash reference, but I can't help thinking there must be a more elegant solution.

I have also started using OO techniques more - this product really does benefit from that.

I am now using the profiler and Coverage for my tests, but have not sorted out a good way to integrate my command-line tests. The "Perl Testing" book has ideas, but they require CPAN modules and I would rather not increase the number of dependencies. If you download this program and are dismayed at the tests (I basically check the thing will load) then be assured that I have a test suite of over 90 scripts, just one of which is my regression test script which currently has 55 test paragraphs within it. Each time I find a bug or add a feature I add a test, just like I should.