The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 28 March 2007. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Nicholas, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.
Larry:
- madly simplifying things
- made the big shift over to consider all punctuation in regexes as metasyntax
- modifying the test suites and standard grammar to look for that
- figuring out how to do what Damian asked for
- simplifying the binding of topicalizers
- there's no longer any implicit binding of the first arrow of a pointy
- you must bind
$_ either explicitly or implicitly, in the case of no arguments at all
- thought I might not be able to exit the current topicalizer
- those semantics are unclear
- I have a checkin with a new tweak
- it exits the innermost block which uses
$_ as one of its formal parameters
- that captures the notion of what a user expects to be treated as the topicalizer
- ignores the fact that you can change the value of
$_ on the fly
- no one will expect a
when statement to exit from an assignment statement
- Damian should be happy
- finally decided I liked Juerd's double-pointy block
- it makes it easy to write a
for loop with a bunch of variables and have them all default to read-write
- treats the default like a
my declaration
- flips the default back over to the
my view of reality
- it's visually mnemonic
- Damian's changes to simplify the semantics of arrow also helped make that reasonable
- part of my test changes meant that I changed the regex tester to use a platform-neutral mechanism of specifying TODOs
- just put a comment before the line in the data file there
- adverbs let you specify what the status on each platform is
- keeps them more-or-less inline and still easy to ignore
- we'll have to line up the tests from the Pugs directory to get it and Parrot in line
Patrick:
- my immediate plan is to implement the regex changes and migrate things over
- I really want to get the sanity test done
- that appears to be this weekend's test
c:
- fixing minor memory leaks and frees at Parrot interpreter end
- this makes Valgrind reports much more useful for tracing actual leaks
- willing to work on just about anything else though
Patrick:
- how about the SDL bindings?
- could use those within Perl 6 soon
c:
Allison:
- trying to finish the Objects PDD this week
- Jonathan is implementing it this week
Nicholas:
- the regex expression talks about metacharacters in terms of graphemes
- does a grapheme contain combining characters?
Larry:
- yes
- it's alphanumeric if its base character is alphanumeric
- an accented a is alphanumeric because a is alphanumeric
Nicholas:
- the accent isn't though
- a backslashed, accented a is a metacharacter, right?
Larry:
- yes
- a grapheme is a continuous unit, and we treat them that way
- at some point, we have to say "don't be stupid"
Nicholas:
- when the GC collects, is there an option to have it scribble over memory?
0xFEFEFEFE?- could be a nice way to make it segfault much easier
- Perl 5 uses something called PERL_POISON when you call
free() or realloc()
