The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 06 February 2008. Larry, Jerry, Will, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.
c:
- fixed a couple of bugs in Parrot
- still have a few more to investigate (hopefully will get to Tcl and Lua)
- spent a lot of time fixing memory leaks in IMCC
- lots of refactoring there with Andy, lots to go
- hopeful we can explore a switch to PIRC in the near future
- a little bit of work left on the PMC PDD
- promised to review the GC PDD; some concerns there
Larry:
- spent most of the week contemplating and implementing changes to the way assignment decides whether it's item or list assignment
- the old method was quite insane in various ways
- if you're assigning to a scalar, it's an item
- assignment otherwise parses as list assignment
- users and parsers should be able to keep easy track of
- also actually edited Pugs, in Haskell, to change the determination semantics
- it actually recompiled successfully
Nicholas:
- I didn't know it compiled at all these days
Larry:
- I'm still on GHC 6.6.1, and that works
- someone proposed named placeholders
- very handy for certain database problems
- there are various contexts where that would be useful
- you could do that by dereferencing the same hash...
- because
$:foo is still available and :foo looks like a named variable, I made that the named version of $^a
Jesse:
- how similar does that end up looking to named captures?
- is the syntax similar?
- in my head, named captures and named placeholders...
Larry:
- named captures end up in a hash
- never get bound to variables
- this actually creates variables
- also if you refer to
@_ or %_ in one of these subs, it automatically adds that as a slurpy on the end
- you can get control of unrecognized placeholders there
- for a better error message, for example
- just filling out named placeholders
- not sure how generally useful it will be
- it felt more orthogonal for me
- created another twigil
- filling out the twigil set... the more twigils we have, the more it justifies the twigil design
- not a very strong razor, but it's a razor
- it doesn't interfere with the other colon declarative "make this a pair" argument in signatures
- hanging out, answering questions, tweaking F where it's unclear or people notice a fix
- putter's working on yet another F analyzer
- intended for use in backends other than Pugs
- whether we use that for anything, he's discovering various infelicities in the standard grammar
- TPF turned down ruoso for a grant to work on SMOP
- discouraged him some
- his work has helped me understand the ramifications of things like captures at a very fundamental level
Jerry:
- worked with Andy a bit this week to wrap
snprintf() and get it working on Windows
- it's not C89
- glad to see Larry's work on list and item assignment
- looking forward to implementing that with Patrick
- submitted OSCON talks for Patrick and myself
- falling behind on development due to real life
- hope to pick up next week sometime
- I don't want the pace to slow too much, with Patrick unavailable this week
- also committed a first pass at
perl6doc for Rakudo this week
- it's not much, but it's a place where people can start hacking on the POD grammar
- I know people have held back from implementing things because the spec isn't finished
- I don't see any point in waiting for implementing things here
Will:
- I agree
- we'll have to cut a release at some point
- #parrot is now logged
- hopefully that'll help people get up to speed
- going through and trying to clean up some old RT tickets
- trying to get movement on things that are a simple matter of cleanup
- oh, and I'm on TPF's grant committee now as a Perl 6 person
Nicholas:
- brian d foy raised a bug about the issue of
when with hashes and arrays in 5.10
- he's trying to teach the stuff and work out examples
- I haven't looked at it, because I'm focusing on 5.8.9
