The Perl 6 Design team met on 06 September 2006. The attendees were Allison, Nicholas, Jesse, Damian, and chromatic. These are the notes.
Allison:
- small hardware glitches here
- still working on the IO PDD
- big thing at the moment
- it hasn't congealed into releasing a new version yet
- needs to happen soon
- I just need to give it an entire morning by itself
- or a whole day
Damian:
- things in POD land are dry
- flying out for Europe on Sunday
- imagine the usual frenzy I'm experiencing
- working on the perldoc parser for new POD
- I don't want to put things in the spec that I can't actually
parse
- think that's very insightful of me
- hope to send out another draft to the list later today
- I've specced out what tables do and have written a parser for
it
- you can get most of the things that most people want
- it turns out to be incredibly useful to have tables
- I think they should be in the core
Allison:
Damian:
- I think people will be pretty happy with what you can do with
these things
Jesse:
- but people will use them for layout, not semantic markup
c:
- have you seen MSA? We have bigger problems
Allison:
- does your Text::AutoFormat handle tables?
Damian:
- I've been working on Text::AutoTable for the past year
- it figures things out based on what you've written
Allison:
- has to be nroff/troff-able
Damian:
- you can do any kind of table you want
- it turns out to be fairly straightforward
- you can get a lot of power out of it
- still parseable
- the trickiest part is that if you want to have asymmetrical
tables, you end up with a recursive decomposition of the table
- you only get to have square tables
- within any square of the table, you can have another square
table
- you can break it down irregularly as well
- easier to show than to demonstrate
c:
Damian:
- I'll send the description today
- the supporting code needs a little cleanup
- not releasing anything I don't know how to parse
- I've incorporated a lot of Hugo's suggestions and
observations
- otherwise, just preparing to be away for four weeks
Nicholas:
- clkao pestered me and Rafael about doing read-only aliases
- think it's Data::Bind
- it uses magic, which is not a perfect solution
- Rafael and I are stuck on the core changes
- we could free up an SV type... and make it a proxy type (Rafael
later noted that he suggested adding an SV type)
- it's just not compatible with XS code
- not sure what to do
- not expecting anyone to have a suggestion immediately
Jesse:
- maybe another wizard on p5p will have an idea
Nicholas:
- that's a good idea
- Simon Cozens was trying to work on continuations
- seemed promising for a bit
- he and chromatic thought maybe about using ithreads code
- think you need to work on the stack and context code
- I'm not going to work on this
- Simon has gone quiet
- we talked about it, but it doesn't seem impossible
- finally, Rafael suggested that he'd like to get 5.10 out in six
months
- the 6 on 5 changes may not be done and probably won't be
releasable by then (Rafael says that there is no full specification
and thus no concrete plan for the changes)
- might take a 5.12, with binary incompatibility
- not clear how that might happen
- Rafael suggested considering compile-time flags in to enable
these things
- I've considered that for 5.8, but it's a maintenance
nightmare
c:
- will be deploying Parrot in production hopefully in the next
week
- hope to have more information there
- also will try to have more external API thoughts in public this
week
Damian:
- think it's important for 5.10 promptly
- there's an enormous amount of new features there
- delaying it for continuations (which would be great) seems like
a mistake
- a lot of organizations only upgrade on major upgrades
- I'm leery of having binary incompatibility within one upgrade
number
Nicholas:
- the default build would be binary compatible
- the architecture name *could* changes
- you can build without PerlIO for example
- Rafael seems keen to get 5.10 out
- there are a couple of little features related to
prototypes
- but 6 on 5 shouldn't hold up 5.10
Jesse:
- I'll be traveling next week
- Allison, can you run things if I'm not here?
- EuroOSCON is the following week
- who'll be there?
- Allison, Damian, no Larry
- chromatic, can you do that one?
c:
Jesse:
- I'll e-mail Patrick and keep him up to date
Damian:
- I would like feedback on the Perldoc 6 draft if possible
Nicholas:
- if tables work, I could see people using it in Perl 5
Allison:
- it wouldn't be difficult to add that into Pod::Simple
Damian:
- especially if you use my parsing code
Nicholas:
- how backwards compatible is it?
Damian:
- it doesn't like
=cut
, because it doesn't exist in
Perldoc 6
- that causes problems
- the new perldoc works differenly from POD 5
- you fall back into ambient code as soon as you get out of a POD
construct
- that is,
=begin something -> =end something
or
just =for something
take you back to code
Allison:
Damian:
- say
=begin pod -> =end pod
- I plan to make a filtering module that allows you to use
perldoc;
- then you can document your Perl 5 code and the filter will
strip it out
- once I get the parser stable, I'll run lots of Perl 5 docs
through it to see how badly it mangles it
- most won't be too bad
- it'll have extra
=cut
blocks that don't do anything
- but it'll fall out of POD too often