The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 11 October 2006. The attendees were Larry, Damian, Allison, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic. These are the minutes.
Damian:
- some response to the POD spec
- mainly the silence was a good response
- either it's totally wrong or totally right
- don't think it matters, as long as they're happy
- the major response was a private one
- "I wish there were full semantic markup"
- all of the upper-case stuff is semantic though
Larry:
Damian:
- mostly otherwise just nits on the spelling in other cases
- some have the desire for an entirely different markup language
- I've referred them to kwid for that
- a couple of issues have arisen
- how can you collect a lot of
=CONFIGs into a stylesheet to include them?
- I assume that there can be an
=USE or similar construct
- will be releasing an alpha of the parser probably next week
- probably to the CPAN
- need a namespace for it, maybe initially Perl6::
Allison:
- worked on the threads PDD
- pulled in the documentation Nicholas found
- haven't checked it in yet, but might do it later today
- expect to have some discussion on it after this
Larry:
- only redesigning the basic syntax of the language
- other than that...
- substitution operators and hyperoperators are now different
- several other various design things
- working to help get the next Pugs release out
- think my current smoke test will be clean
- we'll probably see a release this weekend
Jesse:
Larry:
- not a major digit release
- but it is getting more usable
- I'm using a Perl 6 program in my work
- I upgraded to GHC 6.6 and my program ran 60 times faster
- can't share the code, but I wish I could
c:
- worked on an experimental new object library for Parrot
- noticed a fair bit of unimplemented stuff in the PDDs
- seems like a good task for the CAGE cleaners
- also thought you could embed Perl 5 in Parrot
Larry:
- and get continuations with the runloop
c:
- and control the runloop from Parrot... hmm...
Damian:
- with the new POD format, how can you do stylesheet-style things?
- how can I pull in many
=CONFIG blocks and have them affect?
- do we just use
=USE?
- how does it know that you're pulling in some Perl 6 code to change how
the parser works
- or how you're telling it to pull up some POD to change how the POD
works?
Jesse:
- I assume it would load a piece of code and POD that affects the current
unit
Damian:
- if there's POD in the file being used, that becomes part of the POD
- if there's code, that code gets passed on to the parser
- that makes it impossible to document your modules that add behavior
Larry:
- you probably want some way of importing that
- might not want to be the default
- might want to import or not import various things
- import some streams of POD and not others
Jesse:
- it'd be neat to use the POD from within code
c:
- it'd be nice to pull in bits of documentation in class hierarchies
Damian:
- we definitely want to flatten documentation
- competing things
- who is the POD for?
- is it documentation for the current code?
- does it supply documentation to something else?
- sounds like we need at least one more directive to handle this somewhere
Larry:
- why wouldn't it be more options on
=USE?
- we're shoving a lot more through that mechanism in Perl 6
- seems to be holding up
Damian:
- there are two different kinds of things
- one is a collection of code and possibly documentation of that code
- that should change how the parser works
- the second is a collection of effectively just POD
- includes that POD into the current POD
c:
- parse and execute versus just insert
Damian:
- having to specify between those two every time seems difficult
Jesse:
- does Perl 6 still have
require?
- feels very
use versus require
Damian:
Jesse:
- it's just a naïve opinion, based on what I've heard
Larry:
- Perl has never really had a textual include
Damian:
- POD already has it for Perl 6
- we don't have a block form of that, effectively
- I'll play with it a little bit
- I'll try to come up with something
Larry:
- I think the
=USE should be the active stuff
- that'll be the expectation from the Perl people
- I noticed that you had the ability to change the encoding on the fly
- the encoding of the source text ought to be unified with the Perl 6
parsing
- there shouldn't be two different directives: POD is in Big-5, Perl is
something else
- maybe you should use the POD directive to change the encoding of the
Perl code too
Damian:
- sounds the right way around
- I'll change the description of the encoding
