use Perl

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 March 2010. Larry, Allison, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• documented which ops don't autoclose with *, including assignment
• conjectured a generalization of the closure-calling context (value-only lists) that subscripts enforce
• this generalization might allow the autoclosing of some of the current exceptions such as 1..*
• added Z to go with X metaop; documented that X and Z desugar to higher-order methods, crosswith and zipwith
• speculate about how to zip/cross dwimmily with non-identical ops; possibly creating a real use case for surreal precedence
• however, for now sticking with conservative approach of requiring parens on differing list infixes
• hacking on viv again
• trying to get that bootstrapped, so I don't have to use gimme5
• unbitrotted viv --p6 so it exactly reproduces STD.pm again
• various developments with viv --p5 toward replacing gimme5
• should make it easier to emit other parsers eventually
• may emit Rakudo code someday
• it's a race to see whether STD can do that before the current Rakudo parser resyncs with STD
• anyone who wants to bootstrap on some other VM might want to use that
• mostly tired of writing in the subset of Perl 6 that gimme5 understands
• mostly hacking on better error messages, as always
• catches use of non-$ hard reference
• STD now read minds of people who forget that ".meth I" is a two-terms-in-a-row error
• now produces good messages on attempts to use y/// or tr/a-z/A-Z/ syntax
• now reports "previous line missing its semicolon" in the unexpected block checker
• ambiguous use of . probably indicates p5-think, not missing method parens
• STD now has in a q-like sublanguage for tr/// string parsing
• implements the MONKEY_TYPING constraint on augment and supersede declarators
• various random cleanups and bugfixes
• added Z metaoperator
• lots of works on regex flags to unify them into a single %*RX structure at parse time
• makes it easier to do all of the lexical scoping in parallel
• can now remap run-time's $?FOO variables to parser's $*FOO dynamic variables
• otherwise, bugfixes, spec cleanup, and test cleanup

Allison:

• working on tickets
• updating the Parrot roadmap to match our Rakudo Star support plan
• working on the mini-language in NQP for a class assignment
• found a new Pynie developer who saw my talk at Pycon
• may be doing a Summer of Code project in it
• answering lots of questions on IRC and helping out with ideas

c:

• working on lots of little bugs for Parrot
• should have the method namespace bug fixed, with help from Andrew
• exploring some optimization possibilities
• should be able to merge the PCC refactor shortly
• Allison, see TT #1511

Allison:

• we need to add a new opcode, something like set_want
• call it to update the CallContext with expected return information

c:

• works a bit like Perl 5 there
• we could use that information for MMD, that'd be interesting