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Perl 6 Design Minutes for 30 January 2008

chromatic on 2008-01-31T21:13:51

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 30 January 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • double-booked at work, so I'm kinda busy there
  • still doing Perl 6 clarifications as requested
  • starting firestorms that I've subsequently ignored on p6l
  • some of the $work I'm doing is in the same mindspace as the longest token matcher
  • might bootstrap me back into that

c:

  • still working on the PMC PDD branch with Allison
  • have a couple of bugs to fix there
  • a couple of cleanups
  • one minor optimization that will reduce (generated) code size somewhat
  • another similar optimization to look at, should be more valuable

Patrick:

  • unexpected family and house issues came up
  • I'm back now
  • the plan is to continue on last week's work
  • mostly conversions to Rakudo to make it fit what Parrot expects (namspaces and the like)

Jerry:

  • made some more spec tests pass with Rakudo
  • added type constraint parsing
  • thinking about a lot of things
  • list context, return exceptions, Perl 6 docs
  • very close to committing perl6doc executable for Rakudo

Jesse:

  • according to Damian's spec?

Jerry:

  • according to Larry's grammar to POD6
  • it's small
  • it's a start for people who want to hack on the POD6 grammar
  • had a discussion with Alias with respect to deterministic parsing
  • there's a small patch to prevent Rakudo from running BEGIN blocks
  • not sure it's worth applying

Larry:

  • see my latest diatribe on p6c

Patrick:

  • grammar changes aren't implemented with BEGIN blocks

Larry:

  • I don't care if you add the switch

Jerry:

  • is it worth adding something to prevent BEGIN blocks from running

Larry:

  • I don't see its value, but it shouldn't hurt anything

Patrick:

  • just derive a new grammar that disables BEGIN blocks and use that
  • shouldn't have to do anything in the compiler to make that happen

Allison:

  • spent some time on Mac OS X compilation problems
  • seem to have a solution for that
  • still working on the PMC implementation
  • giving a talk at Linux.conf.au on the Pynie implementation
  • it's interesting poking in the guts of NQP and PCT and comparing that to the old PGE/TGE approach

Will:

  • my RT viewer is pretty much done
  • just need to get an RT instance to play with extracting data in a timely fashion
  • working on the Mac port for Parrot, hope to get 0.5.2 in MacPorts in a couple of weeks
  • should be simple to keep it updated from then on

Nicholas:

  • Rafael wants a lot more test cases for switch in 5.10.1

Patrick:

  • we're looking for hints about how to do list context parsing in STD.pm

Larry:

  • particle and I talked about that the other day

Patrick:

  • that's the next big thing we're missing
  • I don't want to hack something together if there's something better in STD.pm

Jesse:

  • any blocking?

c:

  • I really would love more platform coverage
  • a few patches lately that need attention on something more than 32-bit Linux with GCC
  • any version of OpenSolaris, just about any BSD would be good, Mac OS X, Windows

Patrick:

  • we can set up VMs
  • ask people to create their own VM images

c:

  • that would work
  • ask for freely-redistributable VM images
  • and then get non-redistributable OSes to submit to the smoke farm

Patrick:

  • I can post that in my journal
  • or post a request on Perlbuzz