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Perl 6 Design Minutes for 09 May 2007

davorg on 2007-05-09T09:33:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 May 2007. Larry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

Allison:

  • have reduced my workload and am taking some time off
  • working on C patches to Parrot this week
  • spent some time on a big set of bugs on a little-used set of code paths
  • working on the PMC PDD; will check that in today

Larry:

  • thinking a lot about a few things
  • mostly to do with deep semantics of overloading
  • when you generate
  • how to specifiy that so as not to get infinite regress
  • ties into the notion of having a prelude which defines everything in terms of everything else
  • you need to break that circularity somehow
  • but you don't want incompatibility between different platforms which break that in different ways
  • also thinking about how ugly the chunky list syntax is
  • if you use something in a for loop, it does the right thing if you use a regular for loop but the wrong thing with a modifier
  • with one argument, you can't get a useful cross product out of it
  • something's a little screwy on the defaults there
  • maybe the default ought to be chunky and not flattened
  • or maybe the evil is deeper than that
  • the usual working with people to keep them moving along
  • also thinking ahead to what I'll say at the various conferences

c:

  • fixing a few bugs in Parrot
  • hope to implement more of PDD 15 before the release
  • looking for a few more testers, especially for some weird FreeBSD bugs

Nicholas:

  • Gerard Goosen is still playing around with MAD
  • he has a few questions
  • is anyone available to replace Ann as summarizer?

Jesse:

  • no one yet

Patrick:

  • looking at Larry's new grammar and the S05 changes
  • I think that means a substantial change to the current Perl 6 work
  • coming up with a small subset of Perl 6
  • now that I see how to fold it into the grammar, I can use that to do the PGE tree to PAST process for the Perl 6 compiler
  • that's a lot easier to hack on than using PIR in TGE
  • I did a simple of experiment with F and it looks nice
  • I went from 20 or 30 lines to 2 or 3 in spots
  • I can check that in tomorrow morning
  • I'm trying to figure out how to do that in the context of the bottom-up parser
  • I'll have to look at the standard Perl 6 grammar to figure that out
  • that's the remaining piece
  • I'll check that in tomorrow, even if it's not complete
  • it's a draft for comment
  • "Oh, I'm done! I think I want to do it this way!"
  • there are some syntax things to work out
  • trying to maintain a clean separation from the grammar and the parse specification is tricky
  • I want to keep those somewhat separate, or at least separable
  • as far as implementing it, I don't think it will take long at all
  • the Perl 6-like language I'm using almost all exists in the Perl 6 compiler right now
  • I can strip out big pieces to get that bootstrapping done
  • I plan to have a lot of that done in the next week and a half
  • I want to have it hackable by next 17th

Jesse:

  • what can help you out?

Patrick:

  • getting reactions when I post it tomorrow
  • you don't have to know a lot of Perl 6 to review it
  • ideas about syntax help
  • I'll write up what my thoughts are as prose

c:

  • the Perl 6 compiler list might be good
  • which parts of TGE did you replace?

Patrick:

  • from the parse to the AST, you don't use TGE at all
  • you use the mini-Perl 6

Allison:

  • from then on you use TGE
  • you can use mini-Perl 6 within TGE after that

Patrick:

  • yes
  • you build your mini-AST using the mini-language
  • then you use TGE
  • in the grammar, you build a bunch of objects with Perl 6 new statements
  • methods on a class
  • how Parrot will do things soon
  • I already have method indications working in the Perl 6 system now
  • the only tricky part is parsing parameters
  • after we play with this a bit, it'll give us more insights into how we want TGE transformations to look
  • I will want iterators and generators at some point
  • I need to look into that soon
  • maybe not by the 17th

Allison:

  • the syntax?

Patrick:

  • the implementation
  • the syntax will look like for
  • I'll ignore the Iterator class in Parrot

c:

  • we have an Iterator class in Parrot?

Allison:

  • write your iterator in PIR and we'll port it back to Parrot

Nicholas:

  • why don't you write most things in PIR and port them to C?

Allison:

  • we'd like to
  • the PMC PDD will help that

Patrick:

  • the Capture and CodeString PMCs would be good
  • they probably would speed up PGE substantially
  • you can replace 20 to 30 PIR operations for every line of code into the equivalent C code

c:

  • that could be an order-of-magnitude improvement

Patrick:

  • very possibly

I'm Getting Sick of These

Shlomi Fish on 2007-05-17T13:54:21

Maybe it's just me, but I find that these "Perl 6 Design Minutes" reduce the Signal-to-Noise Ratio of the use.perl.org RSS feed, and I'm tired of seeing them here again and again. They are of no interest to me, they are very cryptic, etc.

If chromatic wishes to publish them on his blog - it's his right to. But I don't see a point in putting each and every one of them here.

Re:I'm Getting Sick of These

fireartist on 2007-05-17T15:16:22

chromatic posted it to his journal and davorg front-paged it.
Not being subscribed to any p6 lists, I find the summaries very useful and agree it should be front-paged, so you're outvoted 2 to 1 :)

Re:I'm Getting Sick of These

Shlomi Fish on 2007-05-17T16:08:43

These are not the summaries - these are the Perl 6 design minutes. Minutes of phone calls between the "core Perl 6 team". The summaries are posted on OnLAMP.com and I don't mind them there. But the minutes here are annoying.

Re:I'm Getting Sick of These

chromatic on 2007-05-17T17:02:35

If seeing one uninteresting item a week in a syndication feed is the worst thing that happens to you in life, you're awfully well off.

Re:I'm Getting Sick of These

nicholas on 2007-05-21T08:27:00

Can't your RSS reader filter them out? I believe that chromatic is always consistent in the subject he uses.

Re:I’m Getting Sick of These

Aristotle on 2007-05-18T00:54:06

I read only 1 in 15 of these. But then, I didn’t read a single one of your updates about XML::RSS.

This is chromatic’s journal. Who are you, again?

Re:I’m Getting Sick of These

Shlomi Fish on 2007-05-18T07:39:54

This is chromatic’s journal.

Yes, but it's cross-posted to the use.perl.org front page and master feed. This is where I find it annoying.

Re:I’m Getting Sick of These

vek on 2007-05-24T00:19:43

Then just ignore it. My goodness.

Thanks chromatic

guinex on 2007-05-18T18:29:20

Thank you chromatic for publishing these minutes. I for one look forward to reading each one of them. Furthermore, I like having them linked to the use.perl.org frontpage.