The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 11 June 2008. Larry, Allison,
Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.
Larry:
- did YAPC
- some hackathoning on both ends
- gave a talk at Google Chicago
- specwise, mostly clarifications
- there's a new assertion in regexes in angle-brackets,
<...> and friends - same function as out of regexes: not defined yet
- a bare
... would match three characters in a row - renamed
samebase switch to sameaccent - on the way to YAPC, I hacked in lazy lists, then spent the rest of the time debugging them
- cleaning up the lazy switch languages and the memoization features which look for empty space and ends and such
- no longer depend on single variables
- an array checked by position within the current program
- that array can have multiple memos attached to it
- seems like it will work much better
- the
ws_ attributes are gone now - spits out a much cleaner tree
- other than that, just chasing down lots of little bugs
- added a Makefile
- added the ability to write a different grammar and use a different mechanism from STD5
- used to have to put derived grammars into STD5
- don't have to do that anymore
Allison:
- YAPC, hackathons
- meeting with people and getting things done
- back to debugging the PDD 25 branch
- haven't been doing as much on as I hoped
- spent the weekend with family though
- looks like chromatic fixed a couple of things there yesterday
- hoping to merge back in this week or next
- that'll give us enough time to make sure it's safe for the next release
Will:
- YAPC
- Jim Keenan ran a Perl 6 and Parrot workshop
- a lot of new people showed up and tried to build Parrot and the Rakudo binary
- had a lot of feedback
- had some patches
- hopefully get some repeat contributors from that
- we signed all of the paperwork for the Parrot Foundation last week
- so it's all official now
- no real coding
- taking a look at the branch, trying to make sure Tcl works there
- there are some PGE issues
Patrick:
- Rakudo's regression spectests have 73 files, 943 tests passing (increase of 14 files, 238 tests from two weeks ago)
- that's likely understating it
- we haven't removed skip markers from lots of little fixed bugs yet
- I have a tool which tells me what they are
- expect that we'll pass over 1000 tests by this time next week
- about 100 new passing tests every week
- that's a good rate for now
- YAPC was very productive
- the hackathon and workshop were very useful
- I have an impression of a lot more people starting to play with Perl 6
- that may not be to Pugsian levels yet, but a lot more people seem to be coming in and saying "This doesn't quite work"
- spent a lot of time this weekend looking at lexical handling
- looked at the source
- had to look at a lot of IMCC to figure out what's going on
- doing some big refactoring of base classes and things in Rakudo
- adding sanity, will help getting new features to work
- continuing to refactor Rakudo's grammar to look more like the standard grammar
- copying rule names and targets
- eager to look at Larry's memoization changes
- I had similar thoughts
- that'll be good for all of the languages on Parrot
- may be a standard part of the PCT grammar rules
- removed some obsolete rules
- the grammar can now process named zero-arity tokens
- protoregexes and LTM will fix that better
- more improvements to the test suite and the test harness for reporting progress
- patched HLLCompiler to transcode from UTF-8 into fixed 8 when possible
- it'll continue to use UTF-8 if it has to, but it'll take longer to parse
- tired of people saying that Rakudo had trouble with Unicode, even though the problem was in Parrot
- have a draft grant application for the Perl 6 grant, per the grant BOF at YAPC
- Richard can start to move on it
- will give other people an idea of how an application might look
- starting to look at more PGE changes and improvements
- want to add protoregexes and LTM
- also looking at changes in pdd25cx branch
- in particular, the new opcodes (peanut butter and bad beer)
-
local_branch and local_branch_return are okay - I might prefer
local_return
Allison:
- I figured something longer than three characters might work
Patrick:
- there was some talk about people sticking invalid integers in the array
- they think it's exploitable
Allison:
- other places which do this check that the target is within the current segment
c:
Patrick:
- when I redo PGE, I might not even need these opcodes
- they'll be useful now
- but I don't want to invest too much time in them right now
- the lexicals bug is slowing down Rakudo's progress
- I have plenty to keep me busy
- but fixing some of the underlying features in Rakudo depends on getting lexicals fixed
- I can get some features to work by doing things one way
- other features to work by doing it another way
- but not simultaneously
c:
- I can take a look at that
Patrick:
- Jonathan said he'd look at that too
- you two can coordinate on that
c:
- applying patches
- cleaning up IMCC
- not sure it's worth much time revising it -- needs a lot of work
- I'll spend more time applying patches, cleaning up code
- going to branch for the Strings PDD soon
- NotFound sent in a couple of patches
- also mentoring Andrew and his GC work
- he's mostly debugging now
- I'm going to go through and clean up his code a bit
- likely we can merge it back in soon
Patrick:
- there's still a nasty design issue in lexicals and closures
- it'll take me some time to describe it well
- it's when we have a non-closure sub embedded inside a closure
- if we do
newclosure on something with an inner scope which does not do C, the pointers are all messed up
