The time between posts should be smaler than this.

Ack, part one wrote itself

The source for my solution to part one of this week’s challenge looks pretty similar to the question.

This is because of Perl 6’s built in support for multi dispatch. 3 function definitions; one symbol; branching recursions; no ifs or switches.

So I thought, what can I do to make this more interesting?

Coincidentally, for large values of m and n (mostly m), A(m,n) can be quite slow. Also, it could be called many times for the same values of m and n.

So why not cache it?

# Anonymous cache handler. & A . wrap: -> $m , $n { . [ $m ; $n ] // = callsame } given Array . new ;

What this does:

Creates a new Array and sets it as the topic Wraps every symbol called A (there’s three of them)

Every time the wrapper is called, it retrieves the cached result for a given m and n, first setting them by calling the wrapped function only if no such value is defined.

Alternatively there’s built in behaviour for this if you mark the prototype as is cached , but then you (a) have to declare use experimental :cached and (b) get a caching mechanism that’s not quite so optimised for this use case.

Obligatory github link

Part two sort of wrote itself, too.

Okay, so not quite. However, there’s a BNF available for URI format (the example given isn’t a URL, or in fact a URI as jdbc:mysql is not a valid scheme owed to the colon, but it’s close to a URI than a URL).

Converting BNF to Perl 6 Grammar syntax is pretty straightforward. Mostly. Up to a point. I put dots in front of a lot of parts we don’t actually care about.

Anyway, I wanted to actually talk about action classes again, since last time I sort of glossed over time, but my blog post was referred to as though it was some kind of useful reference.

The Action class - actually an instance of it is generally more useful – is passed into the .parse method of a Grammar. Each method in the class is named corresponding to a rule, token, or regex in the Grammar you’re parsing that you want to perform an action with.

Each method is called immediately after its corresponding element is matched, and is passed the resulting Match when this happens. It’s convenient to use $/ as the name of the passed in Match parameter, as you can refer to sub-matches as $<sub-match> in your method.

This time our action class, A::URLish , has two methods, because on the whole we just want to stringify our matches directly.

TOP is run when the whole thing matches. This creates an object of type URL from (mostly) the strings that were matched by submatches of the Grammar as a whole. The exceptions are the .query property, which is built up into a hash from the <param> elements of the <query> submatch, and the .userinfo property, which is “made” by another method specially for it.

This is where things get cooler.

Grammars allow you to specify a prototype for a kind of multi-dispatch subexpression. In our case, the <userinfo> expression has been defined this way, so that we have a regex userinfo:sym<user-pass> that parses specifically a <user>:<password> style authentication string, but when we’re referring to it later, either in the Grammar or the Actions class, we only have to say <userinfo> . In this way, we could extend it later to accept a different style of authentication string.

In the action class, we just write a method userinfo:sym<user-pass> which makes a URL::UserInfo object (it would be better if this were a role our specific class does ), and when we call $<userinfo>.made in the TOP method, this is what we get back. Note how the calling function doesn’t need to know which particular userinfo symbol we’re calling, just that it was matched and made by some userinfo. Polymorphism in regular expression parsers.

Also you can find this on github

Apologies for the poor quality explanation.

‘til next time…