The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 05 March 2008. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.
Larry:
- very little official work appeared to get done this week
- corresponded with Simon, Allison, and Patrick on a possible implementation of grapheme-oriented encoding
- looks good there
- no real spec work thanks to health issues, day job, and my daughter and son in law visiting
- working on the
gimme5 translation of the standard grammar
- working on the correct way to extract matches, given a current match state
- how to present them to the user
- ... through the constraints of the Perl 5 type system which really dislikes having capture objects...
- went down one dead end
- digging my way out of that
- also working with putter, who's trying to pull together threads around the concept of a unified AST
- that's a valuable work
- trying to encourage him in that
Allison:
- launched the security PDD
- reviewed Simon's first draft of the character sets PDD
- includes an interesting new way of representing graphemes
- we've gone through various names
- UCS-4/NFG seems to be the most comprehensive name
- finalizing a few details now on the PMC branch
- we plan to merge that in on Saturday
- tracking down one segfault on Windows
- prevents PGE from compiling to bytecode
Jerry:
- focusing on Summer of Code applications
- I volunteered to manage Parrot and Rakudo projects
- submitted as part of TPF
- working with Eric Wilhelm, who really has his act together
- Will will be my backup
- good to have backups for all of our positions
- trying to offload some of my tasks to other willing hackers
- one of those is the YAML serialization
- hope to give that over to Will or Stephen Weeks this week
- spending the rest of my time debugging PDD 17 branch on Windows with Allison
Will:
- working on Tcl on the PDD 17 branch
- nothing particularly Perl 6-y
c:
- fixed the HLL segfaults
- fixed a segfault in the copy opcode
- this seems to have fixed most of Tcl and Lua
- did more work on the PDD 17 PMC update
- made a list of potential tasks for sponsored development
Jerry:
- does Moose buy you anything on Perl 5, Larry?
Larry:
- possibly
- can it easily produce an object which has all of hash, scalar, and array interfaces simultaneously?
Jerry:
- I don't know that offhand
- I know someone who does though
Larry:
- my problems are not so much the implementation as on the conceptual end
- getting my brain around what a match object is
- when you say
make something or other, how much that replaces what's there and how much that augments the scalar part of what's there
- trying to think through that
- the main issue that I have is confusing the harvesting of subnodes with the stacking up of subnodes at the same level
- the latter should make lists of matches rather than embedding them
- just a matter of getting a translation to Perl that will do that once I've thought it through
- maybe Moose will help me there
- it's a good idea
- it might run slower
- my purpose in translating to Perl 5 is not to get a perfect translation but just to get one that will run the standard grammar
- doesn't have to be pretty
- only correct enough in the areas that matter to get it to run
- if correctness were a bigger goal, I'd certainly use Moose
