The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 27 February 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.
Larry:
- very busy with my day job right now
- clarified that multis and protos are automatically exported by default
- assumed that there's
is export on them
- you have to declare them with
my to get non-exported versions
- made some changes and defined something called interface versions
- subset of the version number
- the patchlevel doesn't matter when you require something with language tweaks
- only the interface version
- doing a lot of cleanup of STD.pm
- dekludging various things
- made a separate regular expression grammar
- derived from the Perl grammar
- allows us to override things like whitespace rules
- we use derivation for its original intent
- did a lot of work on the
gimme program that translate that
- cleanups came from noticing badness when I tried to run the Perl 5
- plenty of feedback from Patrick, Jonathan, and the rest of the gang
- added some rules to STD.pm to add hooks for having an interactive parser that knows when you're done with user input
- the
vws rule for vertical whitespace
Patrick:
- the Parrot release went very smoothly
- compliments to everyone who put together release notes and updated things for me
- spent the weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM 2008
- my Perl 6 talk seems to have been well received
- lots of compliments and comments and renewed enthusiasm
- spent some time on the plane looking into getting Rakudo to use Parrot's HLL directives
- it'll take some refactoring to get some of the classes working there
- just methods and the way things get stored in namespaces
Jerry:
- let's create a branch for that
Patrick:
- that's a good idea
- probably just a branch to play in, then switch over in the trunk
- probably doable incrementally
- did some work on trying to improve the state of Unicode in Parrot
- want to use more Unicode in Rakudo
- get string tests passing, use French quotes
- I'm a little concerned that applying the patch will slow things down until we can do things in something other than UTF-8
- otherwise applying patches and keeping up with the excellent work done by Jonathan, Jerry, and others
- all of the STD.pm changes have been really nice lately
Allison:
- working on the security PDD
- have a long list of features that we I include
- working on deciding a necessary and sufficient set of security features for the 1.0 release
- need the most useful features for our target contexts and target languages
- otherwise we could spend three years implementing security features
Jerry:
- enjoying some peanut chocolate-coated candies
- updated p6doc before the release
- I don't think anyone's really using it yet though
- removed some deprecated compiler directives from Rakudo's grammar
- now that we have
fudge working
- working on a patch to allow you to write Rakudo runtime libraries in Perl 6
- Zev Benjamin sent the patch to the list
- it had some bugs, but most of those are fixed
- there seems to be one cross-compiler problem remaining
- made some progress on a YAML dumper to use for dumping AST match objects
- committed a config patch to detect
gettext so we can work toward internationalizing Parrot
Jesse:
- talked to Mitchell Charity about the state of Pugs
- he's looking into a way to extract a standardized AST for all of the various Pugsian implementations for anyone to play with different backends
- a little glue around the kp6 AST to target from either end
- hopefully let the various folks in the Pugs community actually interoperate
- instead of having a half-dozen half-implemented full stacks hanging around
c:
- working on GC problems
- have a workaround I think fixes things
- sort of expensive, but we need to rethink part of our strategy
- workaround will probably stick around until we revise the GC in a couple of months
- did some profiling; think I'll tackle PIR profiling next
Nicholas:
- found a bug in Perl 1 configure and patched it
Jerry:
- do you have someone to bounce your security ideas off of?
- it would help me to have this more visible
- I don't want it to slow you down
Allison:
- this is just the initial draft
- the whole list will get to see and review the draft
- or do you want to see the mental process of what I consider and discard?
Jerry:
- I just wonder if you would have an easier time deciding what we need for 1.0 if you could discuss pros and cons with someone
Allison:
- I've been trying to write the PDD as a single coherent set of things
- haven't written pros and cons within the PDD
- otherwise it'll end up about 20 pages long
- so many different approaches for the same thing
Jerry:
- years ago, docs/dev/ was the place for those
Allison:
- I'll probably push the current document out today or tomorrow
- we'll start a series of discussions about various different topics
- a lot of it depends on what language implementors and application designers want
- the biggest thing I want is people asking for missing features and telling me they don't want other features
- what I'm doing is the core seed of that process
Jerry:
- hopefully interested people will read these minutes or a weblog post
Allison:
- I'll do my usual post to the mailing list
c:
- maybe you could post it to your journal
Allison:
- which journal?
- I've been thinking of setting up a dedicated Parrot blog
