Perl 6 Design Minutes for 10 September 2008

brian_d_foy on 2008-10-10T12:52:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 September 2008. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Patrick, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

  • debugging the MMD branch
  • we've dgone from 900 failing tests to 47 in the past two days
  • working my way through failing tests has had a compounding effect
  • chromatic has been helping
  • I shifted the nastiest failure from a termination in the middle of nasty code with no warnings to a segfault
  • and he fixed that
  • we're very close to merging the branch

c:

  • probably after the next release

Allison:

  • yes, probably

Jerry:

  • a segfault is better?

c:

  • much easier to fix

Allison:

  • this was a PGE problem
  • it pretended it was successful
  • it output nothing
  • it was so much easier to debug then

Nicholas:

  • die early, die often

Patrick:

  • I can't tell you how many times I had PGE output nothing
  • zero?!

Allison:

  • we're having a Parrot developer day in November in Moutain View

Jerry:

  • finally had time to do a little development this week
  • then I had hardware trouble, and couldn't commit anything

Larry:

  • between my day job and my grandson visiting over the last week, not a lot of spare time
  • took several hundred Parrot-specific tests that Moritz put into t/spec
  • fudged them all
  • went through several permutations of how to write the tests
  • realized that there was a missing operator
  • no way to do a pattern object for smart matching that's equivalent to a junctional and but guarantees the order of evaluation
  • that's almost exactly what a where infix operator would do
  • a type on the left and a constraint on the right of it
  • you want to test against a subtype name and a constraint in order
  • lots of places want that sort of pattern
  • we had no easy way to express that short of defining a subset type, which is hard to use for one op
  • or 700 ops in that file
  • there's now a where operator that parses just like the junctional &, but in guaranteed order
  • otherwise just random spec cleanups
  • answering questions
  • lots of people thinking about the nature of lists and iterations now
  • did a little catchup on email on p6l
  • woefully behind on my own personal email
  • doubtless there are bugs in that
  • oh, ended up adding a Perl 5 grammar to STD
  • copied and pasted the Perl 6 regex rules and cut out two thirds of them
  • maybe just need to borrow a test from the Perl 5 suite

Patrick:

  • PGE uses one
  • just uses the test file directly

Larry:

  • not fudgeable

Patrick:

  • it doesn't use the perl5: flag
  • PGE doesn't understand that flag
  • it'll fail miserably

Patrick:

  • added code to Rakudo to go to standalone PIR
  • generates PIR that you can run directly from Parrot

c:

  • that should help you help me

Patrick:

  • that should help a lot of people help you help me
  • updated the Failure type in Parrot
  • warns if you use it while undefined
  • originally I put it in to die fatally
  • that broke the test suite
  • a few people are going through the test suite to fix the evaluation of undef Failures
  • created a couple of functions in Rakudo to make it easier
  • finished my final report for the Mozilla Foundation
  • Richard and Jesse are happy with that
  • I'll publish that later today or early tomorrow
  • that grant is over now
  • trying to figure out list interpolation and how things fit together
  • Rakudo has some nasty bugs there
  • I feel like I'm missing something there
  • it seems like there's another type in there

c:

  • added a new feature to Rakudo last week
  • fixed a couple of bugs to get a lot more tests passing
  • keeping up with the incoming patch and bug queue
  • Christoph is good at helping
  • also trying to fix bugs and help the MMD branch along