Perl 6 Design Minutes for 17 February 2010

chromatic on 2010-02-25T00:27:32

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • much work clarifying relationship of parcels to everything else (<a b>, assignment, arguments, captures, parameters, signatures, gather/take, and loop returns)
  • we now list all scope declarators in one spot
  • conjectured some ideas on how to handle the allomorphism of literals more dwimmily
  • had already specced some of this behavior for literals found inside qw angles.
  • literals that exceed a Rat64's denominator automatically keep the string form around for coercion to other types
  • clarified that anon declarator allows a name but simply doesn't install it in the symbol table
  • respecced the trig functions to use a pragma to imported fast curried functions
  • still uses enum second argument for the general case (rakudo is still stuck on slow strings there)
  • on iterators, renamed .getobj to .getarg since arguments are the typical positional/slicey usage
  • signatures are never bound against parcels anymore, only against captures
  • we now use "argument" as a technical term meaning either a real parcel or an object that can be used independent of context as an argument
  • anything that would stay discrete when bound to a positional, basically
  • return, take, and loop return objects are also arguments in that sense
  • they all return either a parcel or anything that can stand on its own as an argument
  • STD now adds a shortname alias on adverbialized names, ignores collisions on the shortname for now, which is okay for multis
  • STD now complains about longname (adverbialized) collisions
  • STD no longer carps about duplicate anonymous routine declarations
  • made the undeclared type message the same for parameters as for other declarations
  • clarify the error message about anonymous variables
  • no longer report a $) variable error where ) is the $*GOAL
  • add WHAT etc. to list of functions that require an argument

Allison:

  • working on two HLL implementations
  • one is Pynie, the other is Camle
  • nothing to do with Caml or ML
  • I've noticed huge improvements in NQP-rx from the previous NQP
  • can't say which feature improvements make the most difference, but I'll migrate Pynie pretty soon to take advantage of the new version
  • continuing to shepherd Debian and Ubuntu packages

Patrick:

  • essentially all I did was unify things
  • previously it had been two or three tools
  • it's just one

Allison:

  • even the syntax seems more regular

Patrick:

  • there are more pieces available in NQP-rx
  • Rakudo's -ng is now master
  • the old master is now -alpha
  • we took a big hit on spectests, but they seem to be coming back quickly
  • 5000 tests pass on trunk now
  • we have 16k or 17k we haven't re-enabled; they make the spectest slower
  • Jonathan thinks we may pass 25,000 tests now
  • that's great, considering where we were a week ago
  • I redid Rakudo's container, value, and assignment module
  • previously variables held values directly
  • now they contain reference PMCs
  • that cleaned up many things
  • we use more PMCs, but now we don't clone and copy as much
  • we move references around more
  • seems closer to how Perl 6 handles things
  • was much easier than I expected
  • updated the NQP-rx regex engine and built in constant types
  • handles Unicode character names
  • reclaims plenty of tests
  • answered lots of questions for people adding things into Rakudo
  • prioritizing other people writing code over writing code
  • increases our developer pool; seems to be working well
  • new release of Rakudo planned for tomorrow
  • don't know how many tests we'll pass, but it should go well
  • plan to put in a few things like sort and grammars over the next week
  • then I'll review the RT queue to find bugs and (hopefully) closeable bugs

c:

  • working on GC tuning
  • also working on String PMC tuning
  • working on built-in types and their behavior as classes and parent classes
  • the multidispatch bugs in particular I hope to solve


Thank you - i'll buy the book ...

thickas on 2010-02-25T06:38:37

The P6 summaries or'design minutes' are the highlight of my reading week.

Thank you very much for them.

I am looking forward to buying Perl 6 books eventually.