use Perl

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 12 August 2009. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

• have time again
• restarting the PCC refactoring branch
• doing the function conversions
• now working on little details
• working on something in PGE's second stage
• a thrown but uncaught exception doesn't get caught at the top level runloop
• reports the exception
• dumps the error message
• goes into an infinite loop and never quits
• tracking that now
• also catching up on tickets, trying to resolve blockers for deprecated tickets

Larry:

• went to YAPC::EU
• revised my "Nothing Can Go Wrong" talk yet again and presented it
• had many good discussions with many people about many subjects
• talked about POD with Damian
• hopefully we can get progress there at some point
• people are starting to block on that a little
• in S06 we only add @_ and %_ to a sub if they use them in the body
• that helps multidispatch work properly
• if you don't use either, you get an empty signature
• monitored the bikeshed about embedded comments
• stepped in with my decision when the time is right
• we've slightly dehuffmanized that syntax in a way that simplifies things and is highly unlikely to comment out more or less than people expect
• added in a new statement prefix, void
• in response to YAPC discussions about putting an else on loop statements
• if you have a way of casting an expression to return Nil, it falls out of existing syntax
• originally I used a Nil cast, but Damian pointed out that we couldn't put multiple statements as an argument
• the void prefix is more readable and allows the block form for multiple statements
• the more statement prefixes we add, the more it justifies having that syntaxtic device
• started the transition in the specs from Captures to Parcels
• still a lot of work in that regard
• still thinking about the module loading algorithm, at Daniel's request
• waiting on my prototyping in STD
• thinking about Moritz's question about string typology
• the notion of polymorphic literals
• to what extend do literals allow themselves to behave as multiple types, depending on their use
• if a string literal is decomposed characters, can you get at the decomposed meaning?
• does it turn into graphemes?
• what happens?
• if you have some form of number, which numeric types does it turn into?
• that ties into the mystery of multiple dispatch, of course
• in STD, I fixed a bogus error message on malformed parameters
• especially for using a malformed type
• now it complains about an undeclared type
• used to allow sub() at the front of an anonymous sub declaration
• disallowed that for consistency with the "If it looks like a function..." rule
• switching the assertion that it does, after the keyword
• the nofun assertion has a problem
• wasn't checking the same thing as the other assertions
• didn't check if the identifier was followed by a single quote, hyphen, or an alphanumeric
• added that check
• added the defines infix specced for importation without loading
• stole Rakudo's colon as a delimiter error message
• also added an error for using a closer as a delimiter
• many error messages were misleading due to a phantom semicolon added as a stopper
• I tried to chop that string off as the first attempt
• now it turns into a space, but they don't show the bogus semicolon
• hacked in the new embedded comment syntax
• temporary deprecation of old syntax which should go away rapidly
• now detects #` without opening bracket and complains
• continued converting viv and gimme5 to converge to the same output
• can emit nested grammars correctly
• chopped out a lot of useless boilerplate

Patrick:

• YAPC::EU was very productive
• met a lot of Rakudo hackers at the Rakudo BOF
• very helpful for discussing a "usable version of Rakudo"
• I have a list of those wants
• all but four were already in our ROADMAP
• gives me confidence in our plan so far
• announced Rakudo Star, "a usable release of Perl 6" in the lightning talks
• very positive reception there
• most of the buzz is the right kind of buzz I'd like to see at this point
• had a hackathon on Thursday
• also went very well
• new people started to hack
• adding features into the Setting, cleaning things up, etc
• Jonathan and I had a detailed ROADMAP discussion
• we put priorities on each item
• will put expected dates and such on the list
• only 24 items in the must-have category
• most of those relate to parsing and STD convergence
• expect that to land sometime by December, if not sooner
• it's necessary by January for us to reach our April target
• we have a good plan in place
• merged the Rakudo installation branch into trunk
• builds against an installed Parrot instead of the build tree
• fixing a few minor bugs there, but it mostly works
• cleaned up some of the C code, especially in multidispatch
• parameter types defaulted to Any instead of Object, and I fixed that
• moved print and say from PIR into the Setting
• making good progress writing things in Perl 6 instead of PIR
• worked on changing the angle brackets that created lists of strings
• previously they were part of the quote rule, but now they're circumfix
• necessary to get colon rules working
• will be more work to get that right
• may hold that off to see how the Parcel design works in the spec
• added the whatever forms of prefix operators
• made the embedded comment change from yesterday; Rakudo now follows the spec there

Nicholas:

• Jonathan asked about a minimal integration of Perl 5 with Rakudo Star
• had a long discussion about how to look up lexicals in Rakudo from an embedded Perl 5
• I fully support that work, as long as I don't have to do it

c:

• still refactoring runcores
• hope to check it back in very soon
• blocking on lack of encapsulation and weirdness of the code

Patrick:

• haven't seen Parcel changes in the spec so far
• when will it be worth doing in Rakudo?
• should I wait for more to land?
• would it help if I played with it now?

Larry:

• wait a little more
• have the definition in there
• starting to put ramifications in there