The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 July 2008. Larry, Allison, Jesse, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.
Larry:
- standard grammar parses itself 100%
- thinking about refactoring
- how do we distinguish the use of grammars from grammars used as the current language
- refactoring top level namespaces
- whether STD is part of that name
- meddling in everyone else's discussions
- upgraded the spec on transliteration
- in denial about all of the conferences coming up
Allison:
- absorbed by OSCON and travel for the next couple of weeks
- after that, things will pick up
- working on one (hopefully) final patch to the concurrency branch
- I know it'll resolve one failing test
- hope it'll resolve several PGE failures on the branch
- I'm an hour away from committing that (ideal minutes, but probably an actual hour)
- we're talking about having a hackathon the Saturday after OSCON
Jesse:
Allison:
- nothing set up yet, but we do have a default
Jesse:
Allison:
- probably about ten
- Portland State University worked out pretty well for us
- I'll look for contact information
Patrick:
- last week, we passed 1365 tests
- now we're passing 1677, 312 more
- from the last Friday of June to the first Friday of July, we had an increase of 500 tests
- almost 50% more than we were
Jesse:
- how many are newly ported tests and how many used to fail?
Patrick:
- probably an equal mix of both
- a big part of that is getting implicit lexicals working,
$_
, $!
, and $/
- implicit method calls too are working now
- lots of refactoring, especially for builtins
- they now seem to work better in the
Any
class
- removed a lot of inline PIR code and stuff like that
- spent an hour on the phone with the Houston Perl Mongers last night
- they want to work on the test suite as part of their meetings for a while
- I walked them through building Rakudo, checking out the Pugs repo and test suite, explaining how we do testing
- they plan to have meetings where someone gives a topic, presents how they think it should work, and then they review or create tests for that feature
- they'll either move tests from Pugs into spectests, or add tests to spectests
- I'll try to write that into an article for use Perl or other places
- a step by step guide for contributing tests
- haven't started writing my "This Week in Perl 6 Articles" yet
- should have one by this time next week
Jerry:
- haven't been able to produce much code
- participating in code reviews and design discussions
- this is the mid-term evaluation period for Google Summer of Code
- all of the mentors and students have submitted their mid-term evaluations
- it's all gone smoothly
- all three are going ahead
- the Parrot Foundation is in process of taking over the NLNet grant from TPF
- working with the OSU open source labs to host the website
- expect more on that soon
Allison:
- because we need SSL certificates, they were going to set us up with our own virtual machine
- we'll need to purchase the certificate
Jerry:
- and finalize the purchase of parrot.org
c:
- applied some patches, fixed a couple of bugs
- closed some tickets, but a lot more came in
- worked with Andrew some on fixing bugs in his GC
- getting closer to the point of merge
- approved his milestone, setting some priorities for the second half of the work
- probably won't have much time to work in the next week
- thinking about Closures, not sure Parrot's approach is entirely right
Patrick:
- did you see my note about the PGE bugs in the branch?
- I ran PGE in the concurrency branch yesterday, and get an odd result
- if you run it by using prove, it gives errors
- if you run the PIR directly, it works just fine
c:
- I don't think
Parrot::Test
adds any flags when it invokes Parrot
- but t/harness does
Patrick:
- it's in the operator precedence parser
- you can specify a particular stop token
- nothing uses that anywhere anymore, but the test tests it
- I don't think anything that uses it
Allison:
- does it throw an exception?
Patrick:
- it just stops parsing at that point
- the caller decides what to do
- it's not detecting that token when it's parsing
- I pass a string with a stop token in the middle
- it's supposed to parse only the first part
- but it doesn't stop at the stop token
- it's just a simple comparison of some sort
- seems kinda weird
Allison:
- maybe it is detecting it, but isn't working right
- but if you're not using exceptions, there's no old exception handler lying around
- so it's not that
Patrick:
- I gave instructions on how to reproduce in my message
Allison:
- my current patch probably won't fix that
- it sounds unrelated
Patrick:
- I might put some tracing in and run it through the harness
- figure out why it's failing to detect that stop token
- also a question for Larry
- do we have an official leaning on method fallback?
- are they in or out?
Larry:
- assume they're out for now
Patrick:
- I'm happy
- I don't have to rewrite my dispatcher
- can I start telling people to organize the test suite that way?
Larry:
Patrick:
- for the
eval
built-in, can someone take String.eval
and have it do what you expect?
Larry:
Patrick:
- a method that's exported
- great!
Jerry:
- STD.pm parses itself
- that's fantastic
- is the LTM implementable now in Rakudo or elsewhere?
Larry:
Jerry:
- is anything blocking that?
Patrick:
- just time
- but I plan to develop that under the grant
- I think it'll be a significant chunk of code and research
- don't want to do a bunch of PGE refactoring until the concurrency branch is back in trunk though
Jerry:
- I want to get that merged as soon as possible
- it won't make a lot of progress until we do
- hope we can get it before OSCON, even though Allison will be busy
Allison:
- there are only three failing tests
Jerry:
Patrick:
- I don't want to go into OSCON without languages working on trunk
Larry:
Allison:
c:
- I just don't want to block everyone from doing anything until the code gets fixed
Patrick:
- just about everyone who can fix it is on this call
Allison:
- we're almost to the point where it's time for HLL implementors to work on it
c:
- seems like we can pick the top three HLLs that need to work (Rakudo, Pheme, Punie)
- make them pass
- give the other HLL implementors a week to fix their stuff
- then do the merge
Patrick:
- just don't want to show off all of this nice stuff at OSCON, then say "Don't download trunk, it doesn't work"
- but show off the new stuff in Rakudo that's not in the new release
- a week makes a big difference, the way things are moving
c:
Patrick:
- thanks to Larry for jumping in on the design discussions
- hope you're not frustrated
Larry:
- it's all part of the job
- I'd rather see progress than vice versa