23 Jan 2010 chromatic   » (Master)

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

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