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Perl 6 Design Minutes for 27 May 2009

chromatic on 2009-07-02T23:03:51

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 27 May 2009. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • changed the time function to return a Rat
  • thinking about the traits that have been bothering Jonathan and others
  • have some changes to check into the spec when I'm happy with them
  • thinking about the primitives we use to define use
  • breaks down into load and import
  • thinking of establishing compile-time keywords for both concepts
  • intended so that I can import from anything acting like a module -- an inlined role, for example
  • otherwise trying to keep up with the flow of IRC

Allison:

  • working on the Parrot book
  • changed its focus to a small, 100-page PIR book from a monolithic Parrot book
  • the intent is to get something out for YAPC and OSCON
  • will send out a draft for review
  • will merge my changes into the repo later this week

Patrick:

  • released Rakudo #17 last week
  • was easy again
  • 875 more tests since #16, so we pass 68% of the spectest suite
  • finished implementing the root_new opcode in Parrot
  • cleans up a lot of the PMCProxy issues from moving Rakudo to its own HLL
  • gained half of the speed we lost from the migration
  • we'll get more back as we update more places that need it
  • NQP never expected anything like that
  • I have to rework some it and PCT
  • haven't quite figured out how to do that
  • refactoring use and import in Rakudo
  • the current implementation doesn't work
  • will hopefully match with what Larry's putting in the spec
  • it seems like the logical way to do things
  • updated Rakudo's ROADMAP in docs/ROADMAP
  • gives us an idea of dependencies and next tasks
  • may also help people understand what blocks features they want

Jerry:

  • the bonding period has ended for GSoC
  • time for students to start coding
  • everyone on the Perl 6 and Parrot projects is ready

c:

  • fixed some memory leaks in Parrot and Rakudo
  • there are still some in Rakudo, but the web examples should be able to live longer
  • did more profiling
  • think NFG is important for Parrot in the near term
  • have some documentation to write
  • have been editing the Parrot book

Patrick:

  • how's the command line for Rakudo coming?

Jerry:

  • I expect to get back to that

Patrick:

  • the "parens build captures" decision surprised me
  • what's the rationale?
  • I really liked "parens mean grouping"
  • maybe I haven't reconfigured my worldview yet, but it feels messy

Larry:

  • when used in an argument list, it has the same effect as a capture

Patrick:

  • it even works when they're used as a term

Larry:

  • they still mean that you have to look at what you're binding to and decide
  • am I binding this to a scalar or to an array?
  • (1, 2, 3) bound to an array...

Patrick:

  • I'm going to have to think about that
  • the zip operator in slice context....
  • is this three or one positional arguments? zip($a,$b,$c)
  • how many positional arguments are in this case? zip($a,$b,$c;$d)

Larry:

  • one slice
  • you wouldn't want to write that

Patrick:

  • what in the arg list distinguishes the use of the semicolon versus the comma
  • inside of an argument list we have to recognize a variety of syntactic things
  • comma, semicolon, colon, array or hash sigil, named parameters
  • seems like captures need more information than just positional
  • they need to store metadata about positional arguments
  • I like the syntactic stuff showing up in the argument list
  • but I don't want to handle them in three different ways

Larry:

  • I'll have to think about that

Patrick:

  • haven't figured out how to deal with slice context either

Larry:

  • might say that the presence of a semicolon implies the presence of other parens
  • the comma implies...
  • that might be more consistent binding for a top-level list

Patrick:

  • I half expected that answer
  • I can see the semicolon as just a lower precedence grouping operator

Larry:

  • otherwise you have a semicolon that's just not there in every other argument list

Patrick:

  • assuming that, the other commas form an argument list through the infix semicolon
  • an array in there means Capture of Capture of Capture
  • we were about to refactor List and Array in Rakudo anyway
  • the question is "Do we really have a List type now?"
  • Rakudo assumes that

Larry:

  • if we can unify args list with List, that's probably healthy

Patrick:

  • I'd really like that
  • that makes things a lot cleaner
  • infix comma and infix semis now just create arglists

Larry:

  • or Lists
  • if you define List as "something that has out of band metadata"

Patrick:

  • any more decisions that you can make about that will help our implementation
  • I probably won't get around to that this week

Larry:

  • we make syntactic distinctions
  • we know that this is an arg list
  • we treat pairs as named arguments
  • we don't do that if we know it's not an argument list
  • it stays positional
  • that's the only distinction between an arg list and a List
  • purely syntactic

Patrick:

  • to summarize
  • zip($a, $b, $c) has three positional arguments
  • zip($a, $b, $c; $d) has two, the first of which is itself a list/capture

27 May, perhaps?

spinclad on 2009-07-03T02:57:32

seeing another log for 20 May just below this one, just wondering if this is the next week's log?

Re:27 May, perhaps?

spinclad on 2009-07-03T04:59:24

answer: yes, from clues within the text.