Older blog entries for chromatic (starting at number 461)

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 27 January 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 27 January 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • tweaked definition of when a series operator is considered infinite
  • nailed down more list assignment semantics with respect to interators
  • clarified how ($a, $b, @a) = 1..* works
  • KeyWeight deletion criterion kept consistent with other KeyHash types
  • negative keyweights are allowed to fail at pick time
  • "mostly eager" now assumes unknown closure generators are probably infinite
  • random whackage on List, Seq, Parcel, Capture, Iterator, Nil etc.
  • List is now simply the iterator role, and doesn't do Positional
  • Seq takes over Positional duties for reified (or reifiable) value lists
  • think of Seq now as a constant Array (but also lazy like Array)
  • Iterable now means you can ask for an iterator, but doesn't do List
  • Array, Seq, etc do Iterable, but not List
  • only actual iterators do List
  • Nil is defined as a suitable sentinel for both list and slice iterators
  • continued to rethink that with pmichaud++ et al
  • we'll probably end up with an EMPTY special exception object to be the iterator sentinal
  • proposed an E operator to go with it to make testing for EMPTY across multiple iterators very fast
  • other than that, mostly just bug whacking, no major refactors
  • still thinking about doing real LTM for STD
  • did lazify Cursor's fnum->fate translations for shorter LTM candidates in preparation for smarter LTM
  • we don't need special objects for the items that get matches
  • we do need to think more about the hyper cases
  • how to do list processing using balanced trees of delegated sub refs
  • don't want to build in serial assumptions where we don't need them

Patrick:

  • made the Rakudo #25 release last week
  • it was much easier to make the release than explain what we were planning to do instead
  • also working on iterators and lists
  • NG branch is blocking on that
  • worked on the design in my head for three weeks
  • realized that we were doing iterators completely wrong the other night
  • Larry's making some useful changes to the spec in response
  • there are still some unclear spots in the spec
  • we need an implementation to figure those out
  • my biggest question is the relationship between List, Parcel, Itertor, and array
  • as of this morning, I think I have it
  • that code seems to be working and efficient
  • so far it's working well
  • continuing with that
  • wrote a very short range iterator prototype that colomon has used
  • also write a map iterator that works
  • coming up with examples for the zip operator was nice
  • good ideas for what we need to be able to do
  • objects that can iterate have a.iterator() method
  • to interpolate that into a list,.list() returns a flat Parcel for that iterator
  • Parcels know how to generate Iterators
  • those know how to handle Iterators of Iterators
  • I suspect that's how we do hyper iteration
  • change Parcels to understand that
  • adding pieces back into the ng branch
  • next I have to fix slurpy parameters
  • many of our builtins need that
  • need to figure out Jonathan's code to do that
  • after that, I'll do arrays
  • that should remove the blockers on the ng branch

Allison:

  • working on Pynie
  • Francois has helped greatly to update it for Plumage

c:

  • still working on the TT #389 fix
  • think I have the right design, just need time to implement it
  • working on a potential new time for #parrotsketch

Allison:

  • thinking about hackathons
  • would be nice to have a Rakudo hackathon at YAPC::NA

c:

  • Parrot will come up; didn't it come up about half the time last year?

Patrick:

  • it was all Parrot

Allison:

  • you'll have an influx of Rakudo interest two months after Rakudo Star

Patrick:

  • probably will have one before then
  • but can tell people "Go to YAPC; we'll show you how to help in person there"

Syndicated 2010-01-29 21:00:38 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 20 January 2010

The Perl 6 design team meet by phone on 20 January 2010. Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

  • did distro testing on Ubuntu and the Mac
  • set up a Hardy chroot; Parrot works just fine there
  • have a feeling we missed some deprecations, but we have a lot in there
  • enough to work on for three months

c:

  • I added the STRING idea, to give us the possibility of the value semantics change

Allison:

  • less stressful to have three months at a time
  • otherwise working on class assignments

Patrick:

  • family illness knocked me out for a few days
  • we'll postspone the January release for up to a week
  • going to make the Rakudo-ng branch the master branch
  • that won't take more than a week
  • we'll release by Thursday of next week
  • also need to make the -ng branch build with Parrot 2.0.0
  • need to merge some outstanding patches to make that work

c:

  • are you going to stick with 2.0.0?

Patrick:

  • unless we need a change in Parrot that we can't live without, yes

Will:

  • we could do a point release if you need one

Patrick:

  • that's up to Parrot
  • from Rakudo's perspective, that's not terribly important
  • we're shifting everything around for the -ng branch
  • we'll definitely stick the February release to Parrot 2.1
  • I'll post messages to the list about the new release plan shortly

Will:

  • working on the one_make branch in Parrot
  • trying to mark dependencies properly in a single Makefile
  • get some of that out of the configure system
  • we should be able to merge to trunk in a day or two
  • there's still more work to do, but we're at a merge point soon

c:

  • released Parrot 2.0.0 yesterday
  • sending out release announcements soon, but the code is out
  • Stephen Weeks helped me fix up PGE not to fetch methods from namespaces
  • should be able to merge the TT #389 fix branch to trunk very soon
  • will take a look at other Rakudo blockers after that

Syndicated 2010-01-28 00:10:27 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 13 January 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 13 January 2010. Larry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • made constant declarations more consistent with type declaration syntax
  • removed various spec fossils regarding the old:by modifier
  • reworked KeyHash docs to make the semantics clearer
  • refactored regex AST methods out of Cursor
  • symbol table files are now compiled into their own subdirectory
  • STD can now use modules defined in the test suite
  • testing STD against the test suite now produces many fewer warnings about missing modules
  • STD now specifically disallows forms like:!foo(0) and:5bar[42] that supply unexpected args
  • STD now tracks 'of' types in declarations and prevents spurious 'of' types
  • STD treats anon enums, subsets, and constants etc more consistently
  • removed old type slot from constant declarator, now uses more standard type slots
  • random bug fixing
  • errors with expectation lists are less noisy, no longer reporting lookaheads and whitespace

Patrick:

  • lots of thinking
  • looking at Rakudo-ng today
  • plan to do lists tomorrow
  • want to get those out of the way
  • Jonathan and I think we can merge it for the January release
  • should know more after the weekend

c:

  • working on TT #389
  • :method should not add entries to NameSpace
  • PGE/TGE have problems
  • will not land for 2.0
  • may add (and immediately deprecate) an experimental op to help migration

Syndicated 2010-01-26 22:54:19 from pudge

Perl 5 Design Minutes for 06 January 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 06 January 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • in Spec Land, renamed p{} to qp{} to avoid using up another common single letter
  • bare say/print is now just a warning
  • Carl Mäsak dug up fossilized restriction on hash literals, which I removed
  • since the insides of blocks are now parsed as statements, there is no longer an inconsistency in line-ending curlies
  • refined the picking vs grabbing semantics with respect to immutable vs mutable bags and such
  • to avoid legacy confusion, renamed break/continue to succeed/proceed
  • clarified that an implicit succeed returns the value of the whole when block
  • it is not somehow magically inserted around the last statement
  • renamed true to so to avoid confusion of the predicate with the True enum value
  • at the suggestion of moritz++, split Any up into Any and Cool types
  • Cool stands for Convenient OO Loopbacks, or any other acronym you'd like
  • the built-in types derived from Cool are the ones that do Perlish dwimmy coercions
  • user types still derive from Any by default, so aren't born with gazillions of methods
  • conjecturally, also keep "last-resort" multis in Cool package
  • responded non-explosively to a potentially explosive rant/twitter
  • clarified various things in response
  • it is not necessary that all implementations be equally good at everything
  • there will be a minimal Perl 5ish grammar alongside STD that any VM can support as a well-behaved subset
  • it is also acceptable to support bug-for-bug compatibility with Perl 5
  • the language designer is neither omniscient nor omnipotent
  • the design process is therefore convergent on the part of all parties involved
  • the rate of convergence is an emergent property, and is to be forced
  • convergence is deemed to be positive as long as anyone is still working on Perl 6
  • the solidification of the spec is also part of the convergence, and depends on proven implementation
  • unproven parts of the spec are to be considered implicitly conjectural
  • as implementations converge on specs, we can throw out or delay parts of the spec that as yet unproven
  • everyone is allowed to panic once.
  • on to implementation, found fencepost precedence error inside list prefix
  • moved the default initparse method from STD into Curso so other grammars don't have to define it
  • added quote modifier:p (aka:path) so we can form the qp{} path literal
  • installed better warnings about bare say/print
  • generalized the say/print warning to anything a p5er might try that might be in p6 without the defaulting
  • STD and CORE now support recent renamings to so, succeed, and proceed
  • no longer reports "Bogus statement" when "Missing term" is more accurate
  • now catches/\b/ and advises to use an appropriate p6 word boundary assertion instead
  • emits better message when an intended reduce is interpreted as composer
  • detects most attempts to use postfix after whitespace, and suggests omitting whitespace
  • now parses tick-less embedded comment syntax as line-end comment (but still warns for now)

Patrick:

  • took the last couple of weeks off
  • keeping up with things, but not much writing code
  • read the S01 changes with great interest
  • glad to see them
  • answered some PGE questions for Carl

Larry:

  • we've talked about them all along
  • they weren't written down in an obvious place

Will:

  • working on Parrot
  • trying to move as much out of the configure process into a Makefile as possible
  • intended to improve the build
  • attempting to remove recursive makes
  • avoid unnecessary rebuilds
  • improve dependency tracking in the build
  • probably ready after 2.0

Patrick:

  • I'm impressed
  • thanks for taking that on; we needed it

Allison:

  • working on deprecation notices
  • we've talked about a lot of things over the past six months
  • not sure they're all in the file appropriately

c:

  • working on bugfixes
  • also working on deprecations

Patrick:

  • I intend to merge the ng branch before the January release
  • some people are antsy, but I have a lot of confidence
  • we'll probably pass about 70% of the test suite
  • it looks like a regression, but we have different features added now
  • lazy lists work, for example
  • lots of things fudged in the previous version work now

Syndicated 2010-01-23 00:12:46 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 16 December 2009

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 16 December 2009. Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Patrick:

  • finished my Hague Grant
  • sent the final report to Jesse to wild approval
  • drafted a new version of PDD 31 on HLL interop
  • write some code to implement part of that in NQP's HLLCompiler
  • added various tests
  • need to get languages using that now
  • Rakudo will use that
  • it's the basis for Rakudo's use and import
  • if it works for Rakudo, it should follow for other languages which use HLLCmpiler
  • had a few comments about missing pieces and corrections
  • it's still a draft spec, but we need iteration to finish the spec
  • working on little bits of code here and there
  • adding features for projects which use NQP
  • trying to return to using Rakudo and updating the -ng branch

Allison:

  • working on the Pynie refresh this week
  • started over with the Python 3 grammar
  • have that translated into NQP-rx
  • it compiles and can parse a few things
  • working my way through the grammar
  • no actions set up yet

Patrick:

  • there is a.DEBUG rule
  • call it on a subrule to turn on tracing from that rule down
  • that saves you from having to put in panic statements

Allison:

  • is there a good NQP-rx tutorial for actions?

Patrick:

  • working on it
  • is your work in the Pynie repo?

Allison:

  • it's in Mercurial on bitbucket.org under project pynie
  • that's what Python 3 uses
  • also the Parrot roadmap session went very well

Jerry:

  • we still have some actions to take based on that work
  • need to convert our priority list into Trac tickets and wiki items
  • Parrot's goal for every month until Rakudo * is to support Rakudo * and HLLs in general

Allison:

  • that's valuable
  • it changes our priorities in the next year
  • it moves things between "would be nice" and "necessary"

c:

  • worked on the roadmap session
  • helping with the Context/CallSignature merge
  • will do a dry run of the Rakudo release today

Syndicated 2010-01-22 01:52:43 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 09 December 2009

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 December 2009. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Will:

  • some work on NQP port of Partcl
  • Patrick has been very helpful
  • sent a message to the Parrot list about the planning meeting this Sunday
  • initiated a community document to discuss those plans

Allison:

  • implemented large chunks of obscure C code to perform fast string matching using the FFT
  • wondering if that'd be useful in Parrot
  • maybe we do our indexing operations by character set in the NFG form
  • also does very basic pattern matching by leaving out optional characters
  • could be useable in the core tests, where it's tricky to depend on PGE
  • this was my final assignment before the Christmas break
  • have a month off to work on Parrot stuff then
  • I'll show off my assignment when I submit it

Patrick:

  • finished my final report for my Hague grant
  • haven't quite finished the grant, but left TODO items
  • rather than trying to finish everything and then write the report, I'd draft the report and keep notes on what I needed to finish
  • need to work on HLL interop
  • enable Perl 6 and other Parrot languages to load libraries from other HLLs
  • will work on that over the next few days
  • had several coversations about optimizations, constants, and inferior runloops
  • made minor PAST improvements
  • integer constants can automatically promote to num constants without going through a PMC
  • updated NQP to make it easier to write custom operator subs, if you're using the operator precedence parser
  • implemented the beginnings of smart matching
  • not full Perl 6 smart match
  • makes sense in the Parrot context
  • can match against regexes, tokens, rules, and any types with protoobjects
  • code looks more like Perl 6
  • not much on Rakudo besides answering questions
  • will get back to the Rakudo-ng merge after finishing my grant work
  • also worked on Partcl
  • updated its regex syntax, particularly for enumerated character classes
  • fixed it to handle unquoted, non-word characters in regexes
  • previously it only handled barewords as literal matches
  • it's closer to the Perl 5 syntax now

Larry:

  • didn't like the name PairValSet, renamed it EnumMap
  • likewise PairSet is now PairMap, and PairVal is just Enum
  • so individual constant pairs now called "enums"
  • we distinguish pairs, which have read-write values, from enums, which are constant in the value
  • you can now do.enums on hashes and arrays as well as enumerations
  • differs from.pairs, which give reference semantics into the values of the original data structure
  • .enums gives you a constant snapshot
  • David Green suggested renaming Enum.name to Enum.key, and he was right, since they're constant pairs
  • trying to be consistent about calling the whole type an "enumeration" and referring to the bits as "enums", even though the keyword is enum
  • thought people would rebel at typing the long name
  • clarified that the anonymous enum is compile-time evaluated as an anonymous list of constants
  • you can always cast to an EnumMap at run time for the other behavior
  • simplifying conditional semantics
  • STD parser now parses a WHENCE closure as part of the typename, rather than relying on subscript parse
  • block escape within a closure within a string used to parse as a normal block by responding to comments outside of the block
  • already fixed the embedded block in the regex syntax
  • made that usable by strings and regexes now
  • blocks in regular code try to figure out if they're at the end of a statement
  • look for the trailing curly
  • inside a string or regex, there are no statements
  • it makes no sense to look for the end of the statement there
  • the obsolescence messages were still in the old framework that upsets some Perl 5 people
  • changed the wording to "Unsupported use of..."
  • #perl6 found a precedence inconsistency in parsing of list prefixes vs list infixes in NG
  • turned out to be wrong in STD first, and NG copied it
  • I fixed it in STD, Patrick fixed it in NG
  • otherwise last week was rather too ADD-ish, so mostly did Q&A on IRC

c:

  • fixed some bugs
  • made some optimizations
  • think I've fixed most constant PMCs in PBC now, which should help NQP and Rakudo

Patrick:

  • it'll take a while before Jonathan and I can take advantage of that
  • Allison, when you push_eh an ExceptionHandler onto an array in a context, it creates an RPA
  • does that hold other things besides an EH?

Allison:

  • potentially
  • events get stored in the scheduler
  • only EHs are scoped to a context
  • the old pushmark/popmark stuff to do actions used that same global array
  • it may have changed to use the same array
  • that's deprecated though
  • they won't use that array for long

Patrick:

  • I need something to replace pushaction and popaction before they go away
  • when we handle LEAVE semantics, we want to avoid generating an exception to leave that scope for caching
  • I don't want to generate and rethrow actions to go up the stack
  • those ops let me do that without generating exceptions

Allison:

  • we do need singleton exception objects for FAIL and RETURN
  • no extra information needed
  • right now, you can insert anything you want in that array
  • the local_branch and local_return uses that array

Patrick:

  • it shouldn't
  • bsr and ret may have
  • I provide my own there

Allison:

  • oh right
  • I might not have checked in that code

Patrick:

  • by the way, NQP doesn't use local_branch or local_return

Syndicated 2010-01-21 04:41:19 from pudge

Announce: Parrot 2.0.0 "Inevitable" Released!

The Beyond and below are like a deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far down that the beings on the surface superior though they are can't effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper levels with points we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a relatively safe place.

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.0.0 "Inevitable." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 2.0.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 2.0.0 News:

  • Features

    • Context PMCs now support attribute-based introspection
    • Context and CallSignature PMCs merged into CallContext
    • .lex directive throws exceptions when used with incorrect register types
  • Platforms

    • Packaging improved for free OS distributions
    • PPC, PPC64, and ARM now tested when running Linux
  • Performance

    • Minor improvements to the profiling runcore
    • Improvements from the CallContext PMC merge
  • New deprecations

    • In/out parameters in STRING modification functions
    • Void handling in NCI signatures
    • Parameter passing opcodes order in PBC
  • Tests

    • Continued migration of core tests from Perl 5 to PIR
  • Tools

    • dependency checker improved
  • Miscellaneous

    • Deprecation cycle length changed to three months from six
    • GC accuracy improved
    • PMC freeze improvements; much more reliable
    • Makefile improvements for dependency handling

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 16 February 2010.

Enjoy!

Syndicated 2010-01-21 04:37:49 from pudge

Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #24 ("Seoul")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the December 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #24 "Seoul". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine. The tarball for the December 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads.

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo from the latest source, available from the main repository at github. More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo.

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. The December 2009 release is code named "Seoul" for Seoul.pm, who hosted Jonathan so well recently, and because they have a cake duck.

Shortly after the October 2009 (#22) release, the Rakudo team began a new branch of Rakudo development ("ng") that refactors the grammar to much more closely align with STD.pm as well as update some core features that have been difficult to achieve in the master branch. Most of our effort for the past month has been in this new branch, but as of the release date the new version had not sufficiently progressed to be the release copy. We expect to have the new version in place in the January 2010 release, but may elect to have an interim release from the new branch before then.

This release of Rakudo requires Parrot 1.9.0. One must still perform make install in the Rakudo directory before the perl6 executable will run anywhere other than the Rakudo build directory. For the latest information on building and using Rakudo Perl, see the readme file section titled "Building and invoking Rakudo".

Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this release include:

  • Rakudo is now passing 32,192 spectests, a "decrease" of 561 passing tests since the November 2009 release. We pass fewer tests now because specification changes caused many obsolete (but passing) tests to be removed from the suite -- from 38,318 in November to 37,376 now. The percentage of passing tests has increased, from 85.5% in November to 86.1% today.
  • More improvements to the Rat type and related math functions to remain aligned with the specification.

The Perl 6 language specification is still in flux. Please take note of the following changes, which might affect your existing programs. In the next release of Rakudo, the deprecated features will likely be gone.

  • The root of the object hierarchy has been changed from Object to Mu. The type Object goes away.
  • The term undef is gone. You can replace it with other constructs, depending on context:

    • Nil is undefined in item context, and the empty list in list context
    • Mu is the most general undefined value which does not flatten in list context
    • as a smart matching target, you can replace $obj ~~ undef by $obj ~~ *.notdef

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#25) is scheduled for January 21, 2010. A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2010 is available in the docs/release_guide.pod file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!

Syndicated 2009-12-18 08:14:37 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 02 December 2009

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 02 December 2009. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

  • mostly mailing list talk
  • finishing up course work before the break

Larry:

  • renamed void context to sink context
  • appears to have worked
  • working out the semantics of higher-level abstract conversions with the lower-level ones
  • the method conversions.Num,.Str,.Bool are low-level
  • the abstract ones are conversions to roles, like + to Numeric
  • the generic role is in charge of which conversion to use
  • seems to map better to what people expect
  • started to straighten out.true versus.Bool
  • renamed is ref to is parcel
  • made it synonymous with backslash
  • did more work on the Rat semantics to separate out what we originally called Ratio
  • now called FatRat
  • looked at all of the mentions of context in the spec
  • removed overloaded meanings
  • dynamic contexts are now call frames
  • contextual variables are now dynamic variables
  • context means two things now, the old list versus scalar notion and some notion of a thread's context (left those alone)

Allison:

  • "call frame" makes a lot of sense
  • we may kidnap that

Larry:

  • Damian has sent in various spec tweaks, as we gear up to do a Perl 6 book
  • kicked the p5=> out of the core into something supplied as a macro by a translator
  • ranges now preserve interval semantics when you do math on ranges
  • renamed blorst to blast so we can talk about phaser blasts
  • worked on the nature of constants
  • constant declaration is now in the same category as the subset keyword and othe declarators
  • now have an anon declarator
  • it confused people to misuse my or our in a situation without a name
  • had added an else to go with also, as Damian suggested
  • removed both of those in favor of a new metaoperator which guarantees sequential evaluation of the arguments
  • the S metaoperator
  • after deciding that undef is a lousy concept in Perl 6 -- it turns out to mean five or six different things -- we decided to untangle all of them
  • temporarily renamed Object to U, for the most generic undefined
  • then revised, per Damian's suggestion, to Mu
  • that represents the most generic undefined value and the type from which all other classes derive
  • one use of undef was in smart matching
  • added a.notdef method for the convenience of testing definedness
  • possible to write longer versions which work with smart match
  • a convenience method felt nicer
  • used heavily in the test suite
  • can test something directly with the method without having to use smartmatch
  • worked on the Rats of unusual precision (not ROUSes)
  • some confusion as to when things get limited to 64-bit denominators
  • clarified that only the user-visible results use that limit
  • intermediate calculations performed by an operator which can and must exceed that limit temporarily
  • added a scaling option to the round function
  • easy to round to a particular rational value
  • after lots of carping about how ill-defined enums are, I rewrote that spec
  • they're no longer roles
  • the but and does infix operators still can intuit an attribute property mixin
  • that's a function of operator DWIMmery though
  • enums, to the first approximation, are simply collections of constants
  • they also supply a method,.mapping, which returns a hashlike mapping
  • that takes care of most of the special cases
  • STD now forces the symbols it matches into strings
  • lots of hacking to track spec changes, such as renames
  • complex number literals now parse the initial plus or minus as part of the complex
  • prevents tragedy in negating the wrong part of the number
  • need to nail down pure versus impure ideas to move that into constant folding
  • infix operators couldn't accept assignment operator forms for baseops with square bracket or hyperoperator forms; fixed that
  • worked on error messages, especially the Borg forms
  • removed some redundant rules and the term lexer decreased in size by two-thirds
  • added a warning about the use of undef; gives a long list of things you might mean instead
  • if you use ** in a range in a regex, but you mess it up where it parses.. as matching anything, you now get a malformed range warning
  • added a few missing things to the CORE setting, such as range iterator
  • now trims pi and e to fit in to a Rat64
  • tweaked viv to support code production of infix operators
  • don't have to grovel around to find the operator

Patrick:

  • not a lot of direct Rakudo coding
  • working in the ng branch
  • have eval working; it doesn't poke in the middle of the compiler guts
  • also provides a cleaner interface that other HLLs can reuse from PCT
  • added regular expression matching
  • still needs some work
  • added array push and unshift
  • fixed a few bugs
  • otherwise working on some design issues, such as lazy lists
  • answering questions for the branch
  • lots of syntax improvements in NQP
  • improved error messages
  • adding a few features
  • added:c($x) (continue) and:p($x) (position) options for regex matching in NQP and ng
  • those didn't exist in PGE or the previous Rakudo
  • cleaned up the abstract match handling (.ast) to match the new spec
  • reviewed Stephen Weeks's work to add try and catch blocks, and it was fine
  • updated a few things in NQP to make it easier to write built-in operators
  • enables the Perl 6 operator syntax directly
  • also working on Partcl
  • handles quite a bit already, but not enough
  • keep plugging away
  • the parsing works closely to what the language spec requires
  • I like that
  • throughout the implementation, we've focused on doing most of it in NQP itself, not PIR
  • seems to work out fine
  • adding lots of different commands
  • that's fed back into improvements for NQP
  • working out very well
  • started a regex syntax for Partcl which matches what Tcl requires
  • previously used the P5 syntax, which isn't an exact match
  • an example for other people of how to do it
  • mostly doing Parrot fixes to support the other tasks
  • a few small updates to PAST
  • improving code generation
  • enabling features that other languages need
  • bugfix for handling self attribute access in method calls
  • adding methods and interfaces for the compiler objects
  • will refocus on Rakudo's ng branch
  • lots of work fleshing out HLL interop interfaces
  • necessary to handle module imports
  • also a roadmap item and the last piece on my Hague grant
  • posted an interim report recently
  • that report marks the halfway point, but I'm much further than that
  • should finish the grant this week

Will:

  • have a version of Partcl mostly written in NQP
  • putting some energy into a discussion about reexamining our roadmap priorities
  • been doing that incrementally, but never had a specific meeting just to talk about that
  • trying to focus some energy on the list

c:

  • fixed a bug or two
  • profiled and optimized a bit

Allison:

  • how long would it take to migrate Pynie to the new NQP?

Patrick:

  • shouldn't take too long at all

Allison:

  • have a month off between classes starting in a week
  • might work on that

Patrick:

  • glad to help wherever I can
  • might be an area where you run into a problem and I need to write documentation

Will:

  • you can look at the NQP version of Partcl to start

Allison:

  • examples have been most helpful in the past

Will:

  • Stephen's also converting Squaak and abc to NQP
  • might be helpful to look at those too

Syndicated 2009-12-09 23:57:09 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 18 November 2009

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 18 November 2009. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Patrick:

  • adding new features to NQP
  • checked in a copy to the Parrot repository
  • added the ability to create empty lists and hashes
  • added floating point constants
  • added array flattening into positional arguments
  • added statement modifiers
  • S05 changed with regard to subrule aliasing; updated NQP for that
  • so glad I created a new regex engine for this
  • that would have been difficult to do in PGE while maintaining backward compatibility
  • moved expression parsing closer to Perl 6
  • cleaned up literal handling
  • added the ability to have contextual variables look in global namespace and dynamic caller stack
  • simplified ability to set variables in other namespaces
  • continuing to bring Rakudo-ng branch up to feature parity with master
  • we'll release the Rakudo master tomorrow
  • mostly the same as October, but it uses the new Parrot calling conventions
  • spent my time working on the Rakudo-ng branch
  • we now have pointy blocks
  • updated to S05 interpretation
  • can parse numbers with decimal points
  • they produce Rats, not Floats, but I'm waiting for the spec to settle there
  • needs some cleaning anyway
  • statement modifiers now work
  • implemented Nil, after extensive discussion with Larry
  • works really well as an empty Parcel
  • implemented the.map method for lists
  • this version is lazy and can handle lazy lists
  • Jonathan and I updated dotty method operators to work correctly
  • still more to do there
  • worked on getting exported methods into a place where they're globally visible
  • currently they export themselves into the global namespace
  • works out pretty well
  • wrote a milestone report; completed the first half of my Hague grant milestones
  • should finish the rest of the grant by the end of the year
  • Jonathan's doing his amazing work on getting Rakudo pieces back in place
  • concentrating on method calls and class handling
  • we'll work on that through the next week
  • we'll pass a lot of the spectest suite in the branch by then
  • it's easy to get things to work
  • very few blockers in the new branch
  • most of the slowdowns are places where we were cheating but don't want to cheat anymore
  • have to do some work to figure out what the right approach is
  • started working on a new version of Partcl based on NQP
  • it's in the early stages, but it's worth trying to help Will there
  • so far it looks very promising

Allison:

  • working on tickets and small tasks this week
  • have no RT tickets left in my name
  • there are no RT tickets left at all
  • Will did a lot of fantastic work closing, rejecting, and migrating them
  • next week, I may work more on Pynie

Larry:

  • a bit under the weather this week
  • clarified the Nil semantics of empty blocks and missing branches
  • straightened up the Nil semantics for Patrick, as to what it actually is
  • the spec allowed a few of the phaser blocks to be statements instead
  • we opened that up to be almost all of them
  • they're now blorst -- block-or statements
  • Damian suggested we find some way of renaming those to blast, so we can have phaser blasts
  • unfortunately, they're block-or, not block-and
  • but maybe we can force that anyway
  • hankered for several months on this next one
  • when you alias a rule in the grammar, it does not suppress the original capture
  • people who wanted to give multiple aliases to an existing rule had to repeat it
  • that made sense in the original rule capture conception
  • after we added the dot form to suppress capture, it became easy to suppress a capture and alias a the same time
  • foo=bar in an assertion gives you both foo and bar in a capture
  • you say foo=.bar to suppress the capture
  • removed:panic last week
  • turned out to please the crowd
  • decided to execute:keepall this week
  • it's not very powerful, and it duplicates the semantics of.caps and.chunks
  • thinking a lot about Rats, as Patrick mentioned
  • design-wise, they consisted of a numerator and denominator of the same type
  • frequently you want a larger numerator than a denominator
  • settled on that as a normal thing
  • the default Rat type, even though it still has a 64-bit denominator, is just an Int on top
  • added a FatRat, a Rational with arbitrary precision on both numerator and denominator
  • easy to get in trouble that way, performance-wise
  • as Moritz suggested, Rat types are instantiations of the Rational role with the two types in question
  • Damian pointed out that STASH was the only type in all caps
  • changed that to Stash for consistency
  • Damian also pointed out that the CONTEXT pseudo-package was confusing
  • a singular noun implies one thing, even though it searches upward the dynamic stack
  • it's now DYNAMIC
  • individual frames are now Context; we distinguished them
  • worked on Rat normalization
  • they do not have negatives in the denominator
  • conversion to String now looks to see if the denominator is factorable into only twos and fives
  • if so, converts to straight decimal output
  • if not, it converts to a Numeric form in the String case
  • in the.perl case, it converts to the slash form
  • if it can convert conveniently into a decimal form, it does so directly
  • unbroke the check yada (bitrotted)
  • thus STD now allows forward-declaration of classes and subs
  • rearranged integer capture for Patrick, but he said he didn't need it
  • improved consistency of literal rules
  • changed to the new capturing/aliasing notation
  • fixed up the new blorsts
  • added a new Parcel type to CORE
  • thinking about the literal formats
  • a bad problem turned up with negated complex literals
  • they had a different meaning than if they weren't literals, in terms of negating the imaginary part
  • prototyped adding the pluses and minuses into the literal parts
  • thinking of going the other way
  • there is no literal form of complexes; always formed by constant folding
  • with recent changes to the semantics of angle brackets, a single literal inside angle brackets would recognize the literal forms we're getting away from
  • we could use angle brackets to emphasize the literalness of these forms
  • some performance ramifications to putting signs in literal rules
  • interactions with different sets of rules to apply to user input is questionable
  • that could run things you don't want to run in a tainting fashion
  • may be wise to separate literal parsing from the grammar's notion of literals
  • beyond that, working out the semantics of numification and stringification
  • when we want a basic version of those (give me this type) and otherwise (give me something that does this role)
  • the + operators probably do abstract numification, where it picks the type you want
  • if you say.Num, you get a Num
  • if you say.Rat, you get a Rat
  • Moritz pointed out inconsistent specs with regard to stringification and type objects
  • we expected them to stringify to the name, with parentheses, but other places expected them to stringify to nothing
  • if the internal uses of.str are low-level, inside say or print, we can make that one print the actual name
  • say Type.WHAT will give you the name so you can see it
  • most of the places we do abstract strings, we want to stringify
  • if ~ does the concatenation, we can have it check for undef, return null string, and give a warning
  • that maps to the use cases pretty well
  • most coercion operations probably want to use the abstract coercion
  • maybe
  • also probably removing is ref in favor of backslash
  • haven't specced that yet
  • want to play with the importation syntax
  • tag set notation is clunky
  • thinking about how to track foldability
  • what can you consider a literal, from a grammar point of view
  • otherwise, bug fixes

Will:

  • talked with Patrick about converting Partcl to NQP-rx
  • answering questions about that
  • hopefully Patrick will do all of the work
  • pushing people to close old tickets from RT
  • we can finally use Trac for everything now
  • now we have 600 Trac tickets to close

c:

  • fixed some bugs
  • working on medium term planning

Jerry:

  • are you releasing NQP-rx regularly?

Patrick:

  • I planned to make a new release a week before the Parrot release
  • didn't work out this way this week
  • it's evolving too quickly
  • but that's still the plan

Jerry:

  • will Parrot get a new NQP release in the Parrot releases?
  • sounds like yes, unless a language on Parrot needs a critical bugfix between the merge and the release

Patrick:

  • right
  • NQP will be very stable in the next month or two
  • already has most of the features I ever want to add
  • still has a couple of regex features I need to add
  • expect it to be stable before Parrot 2.0
  • could be wrong, as people jump to use it
  • but that was the point, and we'll see

Jerry:

  • blast could be BLocks, Alternatively STatements

Patrick:

  • blast is far less ugly than blorst

Syndicated 2009-12-04 01:20:53 from pudge

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