The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 12 September 2007. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.
Patrick:
- discussing various S05 changes with Larry
- implemented some of them to keep Parrot up to date
- I expect the new compiler tools to use updated S05 versions
- better to get the updates in before other people start using them
- the changes look really good
- they simplify things a lot
Larry:
- with carping in the backchannels
Patrick:
- all of my carping is in public on IRC
Larry:
Patrick:
- well yeah
- continuing to work on the revisions to namespace support in PCT
- I have a design laid out in my head
- hope to get it implemented this afternoon
- otherwise just watching the commit list
Jesse:
- how is the hacking of other people going?
Patrick:
- Colin has a commit bit and has already done a couple of commits
- there are other people doing documentation and checking out other features
- seems to be going well
Larry:
- mostly re-rationalizing the various tradeoffs in S05
- still ramifications of the decision to reserve all punctuation
- that changes the desirability of using puncutation in various ways
Patrick:
- it removes one of the constraints
- frees us to do things in nicer ways
Larry:
- we have to decide whether they're actually nicer or just look nicer
- may or may not end up with a shorter way of representing the whitespace rule
- don't have to put
.ws all over the place
- currently under discussion
- there are n different ways to do it
- on PerlMonks, someone pointed out that there's no good way of having a temporary binding that doesn't end up in the final match
- you could use it for repetitions
- perhaps a rule that begins with an underscore might end up not getting matchified
- if the whitespace rule ended up being underscore, it might not capture
- other than that, work's been fairly hairy
- still thinking belatedly about the questions for an interview
Allison:
- created a branch for new OO in Parrot
- lion-taming to try to get it to compile
- ran into one spot, getting PGE to compile
- had to fix the
subclass opcode
- currently looking at a problem in
GetOpt::Object
- can't find a method in that oddly-defined class
- just need to standardize its use of OO
- also spent some time creating a Parrot timeline
- want to make it public after we meet a few deadlines
- it's given me more concrete ideas of what I work on every weeek
Patrick:
- we should have five or six done by the end of October
Allison:
- basically one deadline every two weeks
- lots of them are parallelizable
c:
- found some bugs
- fixed some bugs
- having lots of trouble with platform-specific things
- mostly the unavailability of certain platforms I don't have access to
- if we had a smoke farm or something that we could get results from various platforms, we could get more results
Nicholas:
- sounds like a reasonably good cage-cleaner or newbie task
- someone popped up with a relatively unused IA-64 machine and offered to help with bleadperl
Jesse:
- working with Richard Dice to get the microgrants paid
- Adriano Ferreira has put in a proposal for a new grant
- we're talking about that
Patrick:
- feels like we ought to use lexicals for backrefs without captures
- whenever I've read S05, that seemed to be the natural way to capture something into a variable that doesn't end up into a match object
Larry:
- that's one way to work it
- seems like the default is backwards though
- usually the reason you bind something is because you already have the name somewhere, and you want to capture it
c:
- not sure I agree with that
- naming a thing gives you an abstraction, but doesn't necessarily imply that you want to use that abstraction elsewhere
- that's why we have lexicals and not just dynamic scope everywhere
Larry:
- almost wish I had a twigil that was shorter than greater-than/less-than
Patrick:
- maybe add it to everything else you're juggling at the moment
- seems straightforward and natural to me though
