The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 04 October 2006. Larry, Allison, Nicholas, Patrick, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.
Larry:
- getting caught up with work after my Europe trip
- attempting to use Perl 6 for some of that
- Pugs is not terribly fast at that, so it's not entirely practical
- getting some experience with programming Perl 6
- it's kinda cool
- but in spots I think "who thought up this?"
- overall happy with the feel and texture of the language
- the mix of identifiers and non-identifiers seems to be pleasing
- also helping with the test suite
- participating in ongoing design and meta discussions
Jesse:
- any particularly fun ratholes of late?
Larry:
- the discussion of what Perl should allow you to do or not seems a little
silly
- you ought to have the ability to ask Perl to tell you not to do things
- by and large, these things have to be culturally determined, not
technically
- the specs don't actually talk about this yet
- probably should be a note saying that it is culturally unacceptable to
have stealth policy modules
- ought to make a distinction between policy-influencing modules and
modules that add features
- if the feature being added requires a policy, that's part of the
contract and that's fine
- but adding riders to an unrelated bill is wrong
Jesse:
- someone quoted you on a list saying that we need to focus on 6.0 and not
on mumble after it
Larry:
- I don't remember saying that or what I said it in contrast to
- might have been on IRC
- maybe discussing something with a conservative decision now that let us
defer that decision
- maybe we should defer those decisions these days, unless there's an easy
way to go
- sort of the flip side of Allison's moment of Zen moment
- just a request for convergence, not immediate freeze
- we should all be aiming to converge on something we can get out
eventually
Allison:
- reviewing proposals this week
- doing my bit so other people can get on with their bits
- making good progress with Leo and Jonathan Worthington
- need to add a couple of things to the IO PDD
- my next PDD to write is either events or threads
Jesse:
- threads will be interesting
Allison:
- maybe I'll do events first
- not in avoiding the hard work things
- but just to get things done
Jesse:
- maybe worth doing a two-hour pass at threads to add interesting
questions
- try to get people having heated debates in public to get interesting
source material
Allison:
- I can spend two hours and see if it's then a horrible idea
Jesse:
- Liz M. worked on Perl 6 thread semantics for quite a while
- she's learned a lot by doing horrible things with Perl 5 ithreads
- Audrey convinced her to do a draft concurrency synopsis for Perl 6
Allison:
- I actually like that
- started talking about concurrency in the IO PDD
Nicholas:
- think that's a better way of talking about it
- threads is just one way to do concurrency
- I thought that Parrot internals used the ithreads model
- separate interpreters
- as far as I can tell with STM, you have to create cheap new concurrency
Allison:
- Chip and I will meet and prioritize this afternoon
- hopefully we can do that regularly when I'm in town
c:
- talking to some projects about embedding Parrot
- mostly research now
- doing some research into other embedding languages: Lua, Tcl, Ruby,
Python
Jesse:
- look at MzScheme
- designed for embedding
- don't know if it's worth talking to CLKao about embedding SpiderMonkey
- Claes Jacobson did the initial work
Nicholas:
- Yves Orton is adding features to the Perl 5 regex engine that come from
PCRE
- see Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd ed
- proposing to adding more other features
- includes named capture groups -- two alternate syntaxes in the wild
- it's not clear what the best syntax is to represent the named capture, a
reference to the current named capture (
\1 versus
$1), and the effective hash lookup on the capture group
(%+ perhaps)
- it would be really useful to have syntax review
- also consideration for Perl 6 and 6 on 5
Larry:
- maybe the people putting 6 on 5 should drive this
Jesse:
- also with regard to the semantics of Perl 6
Patrick:
- blocking on real-world stuff this past week
- over deadline on a work project
- still following on the lists
Jesse:
- haven't heard from Damian regarding his 6doc spec
- he has responded to mailing list posts
