The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 08 August 2007. Larry, Damian, Allison, Patrick, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.
c:
- I think I found the Tcl/Parrot problem
- unfortunately, I need either Leo or Jonathan to help
- otherwise it'll probably take another couple of weeks to track down
- fixed a couple of bugs found through Coverity scans
- looking for help from a NetBSD hacker to write a good Parrot pkgsrc package to pull and build from Subversion
- that'll get more frequent scans
Damian:
- a week away from my northern hemisphere speaking tour
- fairly focused on getting ready for that
- preparing for the YAPC::EU keynote
- thinking heavily about Perl 6 documentation features
- awful lot of effort to prepare for an eight-week tour
- I'll have a lovely uninterrupted 24 hour block of time in the air in which I hope to make documentation progress
Larry:
- did a major upgrade to the standard grammar to remove all obsolete special variables
- decent failures about what people ought to use instead
- made a language restriction: placeholder names cannot be single uppercase letters
- mostly otherwise working with Patrick about either the semantics of autoincrement or the interplay of blocks and semicolons
- we've made progress on both
- if you have any construct in the middle of a line, a construct that could terminate there, you need a semicolon if it doesn't look like there's a terminator
- partly for consistency
- mostly for visual reasons
- simplifies the grammar slightly
Nicholas:
- the grammar inferred semicolons there?
Larry:
- yes
- if you have two statements on a line, you have to terminate the first one well
- right brackets can count as termination
- makes list comprehensions easier (blocks can contain statements)
- that's occupied most of my time
Patrick:
- things are going well
- NQP is coming along nicely
- have a new contributor working on it (Colin Kuskie)
- I'm trying to make sure he's not bottlenecked
- that's part of the reason for me working with Larry this week
- the grammar doesn't always make it obvious how to accomplish certain things
c:
- how much work does NQP need before we can translate other languages?
Patrick:
- two or three ideal days
- not sure how many real days that is
- certainly hope it's before the next Parrot release
- I know people are waiting for it
- Larry's response time has been incredibly helpful on that too
Larry:
- I'm trying to look omniscient
Allison:
- implemented vtable overrides for the new object metamodel
- should be the last big thing Patrick needed before switching over PGE
- that has PDD 15 passing most of the old test suite
- only have about 70 tests failing there
- have a couple of final bits
- the new metamodel still doesn't allow you to do a vtable override on find_method
- the bulk are working
- that's a three line change
- after Patrick shifts PGE, we can remove most of the old system
- or at least shunt it away somewhere
Larry:
- how's the garbage collector coming along?
Patrick:
- we have a lot of people looking into the problem, but no real fixes yet
- it's difficult to diagnose....
