Damian:
- things are looking up
- I took a break, which helps
- first week back at work from the near year
- lots of mail
- I'll be in Asia and Tokyo in March
- otherwise enjoying the holidays
- I've been tracking Larry's updates
- intend to send more feedback soon
- I'll be at a Linux conference in New Zealand the week after next
- I'll have time then
Patrick:
- lots of non-Perl busy-ness here
- will pick up on PGE again tomorrow
- another project moved up a deadline, so that was busy
- should free up some time tonight
Jesse:
- what's the next checkpoint there?
Patrick:
- actually writing a parser for Perl 6 code
- I have the various pieces in the constellation to bring them together
- figuring out what to do with the parse trees comes after that
- but we can generate parse trees
- I'll also be on #parrot again
Allison:
- working on extending Punie still
- Patrick, I mailed a question about the operator precedence parser
- working on comma-separated expressions
- discovered an interesting thing
- you can set up a PGE grammar to make it easier or harder to write tree
transformations
- the Perl 1 style of recursive rules makes trees harder
- at least, harder than repetition within the rule
Luke:
- what are you turning things into?
Allison:
- some things need flat lists
- some things don't, but flat lists are easier to iterate over
Patrick:
- it can make a huge difference
- it's nice to have both options with a nice syntax
- is there a reason not to treat comma as an operator?
Allison:
- not sure
- I'll decide which way works best later
- but I suspect repetition may be simpler
Patrick:
- my plans for operator precedence allow list-associativity
- so it may work easier
Larry:
- Perl 1 had a lot of hard-wired things in its grammar
- Perl 5 was more flexible
Allison:
- definitely interesting and informative
Larry:
- various bad luck
- desperately trying to follow along on everything at once
- not really responding
- my day job is really busy for the next couple of weeks
- haven't done anything on the translator
- I'm letting that gurgle in the background
Jesse:
- what's your goal for the translator?
- 100% test suite?
Larry:
- I don't know that it can ever get entirely there
- but it's effectively there already
- I don't know how much I'll have to warp it
- I'm pretty confident I'm getting all of the information out
- I don't know if I'm getting it all out in the most convenient form for
the translator
- it'd be good if someone could merge it back in to the Perl 5 mainline
at some point
- my impression is that Perl 5 is not mutating rapidly at this point
- not a big rush
Luke:
- what are its effects on parsing speeds?
Larry:
- very little
- only a few conditional tests if you don't want the extra information
- a separate grammar file with extra goodies
- just a wrapper around yyparse mostly
- that was part of my original spec
- do need some stuff in the tokenizer, but they're guarded by conditionals
Luke:
- not much this week
- thinking about generalizing the design of Parse::Rule into useful
language constructs
- I had to pull some dirty design tricks
- talked a bit on p6l about composable modules
- now thinking about building an object and type system out of them
- haven't had much time to work on it
- but it looks promising
- my final project for cognitive science was on tree adjoining grammars
- they seem appropriate for our metaoperators
- instead of building a separate operator for each metaoperator-operator combination, you
could set that up as an auxiliary tree in that theory
- you can parse them top-down
- as long as you have parameterized rules
- I wonder if I can massage that into a grammar that actually works
- does PGE do parameterized rules?
Patrick:
- it only understands strings so far
- subrule name, colon, space -- everything else is an argument
- from Apocalypse 5
- maybe never blessed into a Synopsis
- official syntax is subrule( list )
- PGE doesn't understand that yet
Jesse:
- spent two weeks mostly not working
- ended up writing some code, which was weird
- heard from Chip on Monday; he's back now
- have had some interest in Ponie pumpkining
- is anyone blocking on anything external?
c:
- what's the legal documents status?
Allison:
- it's probably time for the public review
Luke:
- Audrey is prodding us to come up with tagged unions
- the theory.pod syntax isn't very nice
- can't put my finger on why
- I looked at OCaml's tag types
- put a tag on a type and get a new type
- then create unions of types and get a tagged union
- but I've never seen them used in practice
- I wonder how well they fit common uses
Larry:
- the type becomes a value bit of the new tag
- used as a discriminant at runtime, if not earlier?
Luke:
- I think so
- Perl has scalars where they are kind of deranged tagged unions with more
than one tag at once
- but ignoring that...
Larry:
- I'm agreeable to the idea that unions should be discriminated
- the C idea of unions is a complete botch
- there has to be some way of telling them apart
- if they're objects, they have their own built-in identity
- but I'm not a great type theoretician
