Another fruitful day of hacking.
The big change for the day is that explanatory comments were added to abc's src/grammar-actions.pl file; hopefully this will help people understand how it all works and fits together. I also added a couple of notes to the grammar ( src/grammar.pg ), but we obviously need to explain that one a bit better as well.
In fact, now that the compiler tools are nearing completion it's a great time to write a "compiler tutorial" that describes the process of building a compiler for Parrot (using abc as the canonical example, of course). But I think that will have to wait a week or so, as there's other code (perl6!) that needs developing.
More improvements to the compiler toolkit today; completed the implementation of 'while', 'repeat_while' and 'try' nodes in PAST, and a couple of minor optimizations and improvements were made to the code generation. Tonight I spent a couple of hours playing with some possible optimizations for better variable handling in the generated code. The basics of what I tried worked nicely, but overall it's a very tricky problem in a dynamic system like Parrot, where some other subroutine or opcode can re-bind your symbols when you're not looking. So, we'll leave this for a later optimization or something that someone else can attempt. At this stage, working stable code definitely trumps fast and possibly unstable code.
NQP also got while/until/repeat_while/repeat_until statements added, in order to provide tests for PCT. NQP doesn't have 'try' blocks yet... we may just save that for perl6 to test. I also figured out how to finish out an implementation of class declarations in NQP, so that will be exciting.
Today on irc:#parrot Coke and others spent some very useful effort cleaning up outdated stuff in the Parrot repository and closing out obsolete RT tickets. As for me, I think that I opened as many new tickets as I closed today. :-|
This is a good place to mention that the Parrot developers hold weekly "status report" meetings on irc.perl.org/#parrotsketch every Tuesday at 18:30 UTC. The meetings are archived at http://www.parrotcode.org/misc/parrotsketch-logs.
Andy Lester posted a nice article on PerlBuzz about the ROADMAP that was published for perl6 -- thanks Andy!
Now to see how well these shiny new tools perform in building a real compiler, like, say, perl6. :-)
Pm
