use Perl

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 21 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• been under the weather, so didn't get much done other than keeping up with questions
• S05 now allows negative quantifier ranges on reversible patterns
• S02 now defines the term now to return the current instant
• like rand and self, it does not parse as a function, since it never takes arguments
• we now specify what kinds of math are allowed on instants and durations
• improved error message on attempt to use old-school backreferences in regexes
• STD now implements the now term and several other time-related names
• we now allow enum names to be "constant variables" so that a class enum can declare an accessor
• thinking alot about a better unification of the semantics of protos
• this may also solve the current ambiguity in the meaning of postfix parens
• in any case, this is for post Rakudo *

Allison:

• mainly worked on packaging for Debian and Ubuntu before the release
• closed TT #389, no methods in namespaces
• collecting thoughts on what we need next from the GC
• we've done a lot of small cleanups
• now we need to solve some persistent problems
• might need to make some fundamental changes, like reducing copying
• coming up on my final week of classes, so lots of work there coming up

Will:

• updated a spectest
• minor ticket wrangling in Rakudo's RT queue

Jerry:

• GSoC will make its acceptance announcements soon
• expect TPF will get 10 slots

Patrick:

• reviewing Rakudo's current state
• made a couple of minor NQP patches
• reviewing patches, especially from Moritz and Bruce Keeler
• should check them in, probably with some refactorings
• hope to work on the List implementation, especially laziness and context

c:

• fixed as much of line numbering as I found broken
• working on branch merges
• still looking at optimizations
• will focus most energy this month on the sweep-free GC
• hope to encourage other people to work on identified optimizations
• will review Solomon Foster's Mandlebrot example, especially with regard to performance

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 14 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• on p6l, did a bit of bikeshed paint removal with regard to hyphens vs underscores
• S02 now explicitly disallows both whitespace and unspace in top level of an interpolation
• per spec change, when STD is parsing an interpolation inside quotes and looking for a possible postfix, we now presume that a backslash belongs to the quotes and is not an unspace
• in the src/perl6 directory, renamed all Perl 6 .pm files to .pm6 to avoid confusion
• this was necessary because the implementation of STD translates Perl 6 back to the corresponding Perl 5
• the ambiguity was causing problems with tools such as NYTProf
• Cursor.pmc now prefers .pm6 over .pm in any particular directory when searching for Perl 6 code
• as usual lately, most of my hacking work was in improving the human interface of the parser
• STD now distinguishes two final messages: "Parse failed" vs "Check failed"
• STD now warns on attempts to smartmatch with True or False
• STD now distinguishes continuable-but-fatal "sorry" messages from immediately fatal "panic" messages
• sorry messages will eventually fail at check time
• changed many of STD's semantic errors to use sorry messages when the parse state is not affected
• modified moritz++'s conflict marker patch to be more like the Clang compiler's behavior
• conflict markers now emit a "sorry" message and continues parsing one side of the conflict
• also fixed a buglet that prevented it from processing the conflict marker if first thing in the file
• while fixing the vws (vertical white space) rule for that, also changed it so that extra lines are now eaten with \V*\v for consistency
• it had be using \N*\v
• gimme5 now supports pointing to both ends of missing goal message
• STD's "Couldn't find final ..." messages now use that capability to point to both ends of the error
• standard quotes now also use the ~ compositor to set the goal and get that behavior
• STD will now dwim <<op>> ("Texas hypers") better even if op contains angles
• suppressed confusing backtracking on ~<< that produced a misleading quotewords error
• some other patches
• CORE.setting now recognizes the 'note' function
• gimme5 now translates note to print STDERR
• cleaned up some unneeded locmesses
• Actions.pm now handles prefix metaops without spewing spurious yaml dumps

Allison:

• worked on TT #389
• the actual fix was about two lines
• spent a lot of time fixing tests around it
• didn't like the original two-line fix
• fixed it in IMCC by passing along the :nsentry flag
• NQP-rx still depends on that feature
• I understood from Patrick that NQP-rx doesn't need that feature
• don't want to launch that before the 2.3 release
• worked on a lot of smaller issues
• worked on the Parrot Developer Virtual Summit
• will talk about some process changes more, as there are details to work out
• will work on GC as the next priority
• useful for Rakudo in general and Parrot concurrency

Patrick:

• catching up on mail and tickets
• should get back to coding in the next couple of days

c:

• worked on the immutable strings branch
• need a couple of changes in the Rakudo binder
• now it's time to convince everyone else it's a worthwhile design change
• going to work on bugfixes
• will try to land the constant string cache
• otherwise, added some optimizations

Will:

• worked on Partcl
• fixed a Parrot bug that broke Rakudo
• does Rakudo need TT #389 in 2.3?

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 07 April 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• clarified that object identity from WHICH may not be a mundane value type
• instead object id's are of type ObjAt to avoid type name collisions.
• rewrote misleading description of "thunk"
• made some clarifications of the desired semantics of buffers
• Buf is primarily a role for dealing compact, unsigned integer arrays in a stringy way
• but a Buf may be instantiated with other numeric types as well.
• removed bogus mentions of Buf8, Buf16, Buf32; only the native buf types are sized that way
• STD now actually parses the insides of tr/// and carps about malformed ranges
• labels are now stored symbolically as constants rather than types
• so no coercion routine is added for the name, so it doesn't collide with the function namespace
• labels are now constants with a unique label type to prevent confusion with ordinary constants
• module subcompilation now reports the name of the file it's compiling
• improved various error messages regarding foreach, !!op, $!{}, EOF, and missing punctuation after blocks

Allison:

• worked on line number reporting in HLLs
• no ticket to go on, no good examples
• didn't make much progress, but didn't have much time
• sounds like Christoph and chromatic are working on it
• might look at TT #389

c:

• you're welcome to it!
• let me know if you have questions; it's close

Allison:

• no travel plans for the next couple of months
• should have a lot more Parrot time
• probably time to consider another big project
• probably GC related

Patrick:

• updated the progress graph last night
• up to date as of yesterday
• Rakudo's passing over 30,000 tests, which is great

Jerry:

• we have 27 mentors signed up for GSoC
• a dozen student proposals have come in
• the admission period ends Friday, so I expect at least a handful more
• looks like a good year for proposals
• trying to keep on track of Rakudo development
• trying to be a go-between for Rakudo and Parrot
• seems like it's helping Rakudo as Parrot addresses issues that come up

c:

• Vasily and I fixed the Rakudo performance regression
• we're going to experiment with immutable strings in a branch
• expect some notable performance improvements there
• also worked on the plan to fix line number reporting
• need a test harness to help identify problems and avoid regressions
• learned my lesson last time I worked on that....

Larry:

• I cringe every time I hear "line numbers"
• I like what Clang does about highlighting the arguments to functions
• it'd be nice if we can do similar

c:

• that'd require more changes to Parrot, but it's doable

Larry:

• I just want people to bear it in mind

Allison:

• there's no reason we can't have richer annotations
• our first step is making sure the information we provide them (or they ask for) is accurate
• is it time to have another big development meeting for Parrot?
• the release is coming up

Jerry:

• sounds good

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 31 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• in SpecLand, made it clear that the brackets in pairs are not related to subscripts, but follow the corresponding fatarrow semantics
• in particular, name extenders are just strings or list of strings, properly indicated by : or :() in most cases (this includes all operator names).
• we now forbid name extension using the :{} keyless adverbial syntax
• we don't need that because name extensions are really only supposed to use values, not closures
• if we really, really, need to supply a closure as part of a name extension, we can put it in parens, as in :({}).
• we can use that notation for supplying a closure as a first argument to a method without requiring a space between the colon and the curly, as in .map:{...}
• people keep writing that and expecting it to work, so I thought it would be good to make it work
• the colon is still require before the curlies, or it's a hash subscript
• we now capitalize the Junction type again because I couldn't get people to stop capitalizing it
• also, the native aspect of junctions is not their most salient difference from normal types
• conjectured an Each type that autothreads lists like junctions, but is serial and lazy, and is used for its values in list context, not boolean context
• in S05, did much cleanup of cursor semantics to reflect what STD and Rakudo actually do these days
• retargeted the <&foo> regex assertion form to explicitly call a routine, just like <.foo> always calls a method
• a bare <foo> assertion now prefers to call a lexical function if visible, or calls as a method in current grammar if not
• this is a compile-time distinction, not a fallback at run time
• in code hacking, continued debugging of the backtracking transactions I added last week
• gimme5 now sets the correct xact on || alternations
• deleted more of the transactions that are no longer needed when building match results that are no longer hypothetical
• a LazyMap now always passes through the first result regardless of its associated commit transaction state
• that's because the first cursor in a lazy list always represents the current match hypothesis, not a future hypothesis that needs pruning
• STD now parses to the new specs regarding name extensions not including :{}
• now allow colon form of method arguments to omit the space if the next char is a left curly, which is what people seem to expect anyway
• note that this makes the closure the first argument, not the only argument
• STD now gives more useful error messages when user says things like 'if' as a function call (if(...) {...}), or a statement control like 'given' where one isn't expected ($x = given {...})
• STD now properly objects to unrecognized internal regex modifiers such as :has
• improved the message on adverbs with empty angles (:foo<>) to list some better options
• the problem arises when people think that the angles produce a null string, when in fact they produce a Nil list
• other malformed pairs are also better diagnosed, such as :! not followed by an identifier, or pairs with duplicate arguments
• added a new rule that traps all warnings and errors
• STD now uses suppose in place of custom try blocks in diagnosing such things as two terms in a row, or unexpected infixes
• also uses suppose to soften the warning about backtick-less embedded comments by not complaining if the supposed comment eats the whole line anyway
• put in some code to de-dup identical warnings
• STD now includes the signature's return type (after -->) in the check for redundant 'of' types
• did various tiny speed tweaks, fossil removals
• started playing with how to mark sink context and pure operations
• split out Actions.pm from viv so that it can be used by other STD-based AST builders
• this is in preparation for propagating attributes up and down the AST such as sink context and purity
• eventually this will result in "Useless use of" messages where appropriate, not to mention the ability to do constant folding

Allison:

• worked on the compact_pool() function
• split it into a series of smaller functions
• it could use more work, but it's an improvement
• found one possible bug
• worked on some documentation, especially for PMC attributes

Patrick:

• reviewed some patches to add variable handling in regexes
• they need some changes, but the overall concept is good
• reviewed a few other messages
• most of my time is going toward my family
• hope to get more time to be more active in the next couple of days, but I can't promise that yet

Will:

• talked to Jonathan about Rakudo Star priorities
• he's very pleased with the memory fixes
• the next thing on his list is getting good line numbers in reported errors
• closing tickets
• working to get rid of the last recursive Makefile
• may wait until after the new release, when we remove a lot of deprecated things
• practicing my NQP skills by working on Tcl again

c:

• worked on the Rakudo memory problems
• Vasily and I fixed the big memory use problem
• still some performance tuning to do there
• wrote up tasklists for two other important performance pieces
• will work on line numbers after we get performance back

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• clarified that nearly all normal operators autothread, including === and eqv
• specced the \| parcel parameter syntax
• documented that R metaoperator does not change associativity
• clarified that trusts traits do not extend to child classes, and moritz++ specced it
• in STD, we now suppress spurious errors from badinfix lookahead (and react more accurately to bogus terms)
• now put the error location pointer before a bad infix, not after
• we no longer assume missing block punctuation is always semi or comma, but keep them as a suggestion
• missing punctuation message now points before any whitespace
• awesomified error message about no unspace in regexes to explain how to quote space or #
• pass single coeff to radcalc to make :16<.BABEFACE> easier to allow
• gives better message on missing ** part of radix literals
• worked around fact that :: doesn't correctly suppress relexing of multi tokens
• scrapped the workaround and did a complete refactor of commit point transactions; no longer uses exceptions to commit
• instead, it walks the current commit chain to the proper commit target to disable choosers that should not choose any more options
• commit chain aliasing and forking to make a cactus stack is now managed by cursors, mostly transparently
• weighed in on the subject of stability domains (or lack thereof) in Rakudo *

Patrick:

• still working on personal issues, but hope to have some resolution by Saturday
• haven't had much time to work on Rakudo, but show up on #perl6 to give advice sometimes
• read Larry's email to the list; it was very helpful

Allison:

• met some interesting people at SxSW doing open source education technology
• reviewing the roadmap
• the GC sounds like the most important thing to work on next
• trying to catch up from having spotty network access lately

Jerry:

• the other Rakudo developers have started weekly planning meetings
• Jonathan has taken the lead
• plenty of contributors are in the meeting and offered to take on new tasks
• Rakudo Star may have a smaller scope, but it'll still come out in Q2
• it's nice to see that the Rakudo community continues even as Patrick has an extended absence
• still some Parrot issues affecting Rakudo
• PaFo hopes to have its 501(c)3 application done by summer

c:

• bugfixes
• minor optimizations
• helped merge the PCC refactor branch
• working on Rakudo memory issues (long analysis follows, partly Parrot GC and partly NQP behavior)

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

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• scrapped @array[%100_000] modular subscript notation in favor of a more general mapping closure
• put back :s file test, removed :z, :T, :B, :M, :A, :C
• clarified that these are defined on IO, not on strings
• deprecated the {*} and #= reduction stub notations in grammars
• attributive parameters now default to is copy binding; but easy for an attribute to override this with is ref
• tried to move operator definitions to CORE; found one approach that doesn't work and abandoned it
• STD now allows _ in numeric variable names like $10_000.
• factored out curlycheck so we can use it on any trailing curly
• postcircumfix:<{ }> now uses curlycheck for consistency
• STD now speculates missing semicolon when two terms in a row are separated by at least one newline
• removed mention of *.notdef in favor of :!defined
• still need to remove it from the spec though
• ambiguously rebound outer lexicals now detected even if ambiguity propagates from an inner scope
• reports more pertinent information in that case so the difficulty can be understood by the user
• various random debugger refactorings
• properly scope dynamic package names for block-oriented packages to include name declaration
• package_def of ; packages now eats statementlist itself to stay inside proper scope
• much work on package qualified names
• correctly parse <$x> part of FOO::<$x> as part of variable name
• correctly follow symbolically indirected OUTER:: links
• find_top_pkg no longer cares if name ends in ::
• STD now figures out whether initial components lead to package or lexical scope
• no longer scans outer scopes on qualified names
• now handles FOO::<$x> form in check_variable
• no longer checks for @/% mistakes on qualified names

Patrick:

• haven't had much hacking time lately due to personal demands
• should be able to hack again later today and the rest of the week

Allison:

• worked on the PCC refactor
• that went well; the hackathon was good
• it didn't pull in a lot of people, but me dedicating the weekend to it was helpful
• also pulled in a few other people willing to try things out
• we made good progress
• our initial task is over
• we're in the nebulous stage of debugging
• need to review a change in optional return values
• also worked on Ubuntu and Debian packaging
• Parrot 2.0 is in both
• it'll be in April's Lucid Lynx Ubuntu

Jerry:

• Google Summer of Code is starting
• TPF and PaFo are teaming up this year
• we're working on the organization application
• Jonathan Leto is leading things and I'm backing him up
• we're looking for mentors and ideas; see the TPF GSoC wiki page

Will:

• started going through Rakudo's RT queue
• did more Parrot building and cleanup work
• no longer invoking Perl to invoke the C compiler for each build file
• shaved some time off the build
• eliminated one recursive make, leaving two
• then I can remove more things from config

c:

• worked on a bunch of branches
• fixed a couple of bugs
• hope to get more bug fixing time in

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• noted how lastcall allows nextsame control of nested dispatchers
• reserved the final paren-based shape declaration syntax without committing to it meaning anything
• clarified that Nil itself is defined but likes to produce undefined values when indexed
• added some clarifications of how the series operator deals with type information
• clarified that Pair.ACCEPTS uses "so" and "not" semantics so :s returns True or False
• removed the 1/2 and +2-3i literal forms, now rely on angle forms <1/2> and <+2-3i> for literals, and the bare forms now rely on constant folding rather than a fragile special syntax
• in STD, made undeclared variables more fatal
• STD now tries to be helpful if the user makes the typical P5-ish variant-sigil mistake on arrays and hashes
• also improved error message on the -{}> kind of mistake that P5 programmers will make
• my $a, $b now gives better message
• STD now reserves the () shape syntax per current spec
• fixed regression on indirect method knowing that method name is not bound early
• moved unexpected-!! panic from infixstoppers to infix:<!!> for better extensibility
• so a user's infix definition isn't ignored if it starts with !!
• you can define user operators starting with that, and it only complains for the right reasons now
• STD now gives an accurate message when a prefix is missing its term
• removed deprecated rational and complex literal forms from STD
• much preliminary work for moving operator defs to CORE.setting, not yet checked in
• only blocker is not being in Copenhagen

Patrick:

• Jonathan, Carl, Moritz, and Martin will be there
• I proposed a panel discussion instead of my talk on Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm
• I'll be online then
• can't make it due to sudden personal reasons
• will be online quite a bit the next few days though
• can participate in the hackathon remotely
• worked mostly on helping other people get their tasks done
• updated the parser to handle more operator conditions
• working toward enabling user-defined operators
• quite a few new people submitted patches
• several were non-trivial
• one patch put grammars, regexes, and tokens back in Rakudo
• that's not trivial and it worked pretty well
• I'm reviewing patches and making comments
• lots of good progress
• expect lots more during the hackathon

Allison:

• going to work on code stuff this weekend instead of traveling
• had a very productive trip
• glad to be home to get work done
• working on the PCC branch this week
• should be, fingers crossed, small and easy to get done
• want to avoid creature feeping
• get the re-ordering through and move on

Jerry:

• having trouble building Rakudo on Windows
• have time to debug with people online
• this is preventing me from talking to Patrick about and working on S19

Patrick:

• we can work on that tomorrow

Will:

• saw that problem on p6c as well
• fixed a Parrot bug for Patrick related to STRING indices
• we have some speed fixes on top of that
• still working on the build cleanup
• hope to merge to trunk in the next two or three days

c:

• haven't had and won't have much time
• fixed a few bugs
• working on helping other people get stuff done

Jerry:

• is there a hackathon or meeting time available after OSCON?

Allison:

• recommend the weekend after

Patrick:

• there'd have to be a hackathon for me to get TPF sponsorship

Jerry:

• the pace of spec changes has picked up
• any ideas what's driving that?
• is it different from before?
• was the end-of-year lull the same as before?

Larry:

• everyone did take a break over Christmas
• most of the changes are still simplifications
• or responses to implementation issues
• dealing with inconsistencies

Patrick:

• a lot of implementation issues have come up over the past three weeks

Larry:

• ng has flushed out a lot of design issues

Jerry:

• that's great!

Patrick:

• that's great for Larry, but I have a deadline!

Allison:

• remember, it's a stake in the ground
• "This is a release of Perl 6 you can use NOW!"

Patrick:

• we're driving the spec with regard to lists and arrays

Larry:

• they essentially have the same structure
• they need separate typology
• you need to know whether to clone an iterator
• that's the only reason you have to know

Patrick:

• did you see my comment about binding being the distinguishing feature?

Larry:

• I think about that in inside out terms
• not sure I can put that in words yet
• had a conversation with Solomon about the FP view of iterators and arrays
• that's some of my thinking
• do we promise to hold a pointer fixed, or go on to the next thing?
• whether that thing is persistent is mostly the bailiwick of the GC, from the standpoint of the language

Patrick:

• I wasn't sure how that applied to my specific context
• maybe I should work up a description of words or implementation
• some lists I want to keep around reified elements
• some lists I don't
• the distinction is whether it's bound to any variable

Larry:

• may depend on what it's bound to
• we might make the keeparound promise only for binding to @

Patrick:

• I came up with binding to $ examples
• we can get laziness but eat up a ton of memory
• if we throw things away when iterating, we get more things wrong

Larry:

• it's a matter of tracking
• are we bound to something that tells the GC to keep the rest of the list around?
• that's the FP view

Patrick:

• that's not just a GC view
• it's how people refer to them
• my GC is taken care of by my virtual machine anyway
• it's about reachability from the HLL
• or did you see it disappear

Larry:

• that's whether you have a reference to it

Patrick:

• how do you know whether to keep a reference to it?
• I've produced this element
• can I send it back to the caller
• or do I need to keep it around so something else can get to it
• if the iterator itself is bound, you keep the reference
• if it's not bound, you can return it but not keep the reference around
• I'll write up my thoughts

Jerry:

• will these changes settle down after Rakudo *?
• are they a precursor to that release?
• will they continue afterward?
• will Rakudo * go stale?
• that's a tough one to answer

Patrick:

• I can't guarantee stability at this point
• we want a useful release
• we'd like not to have any deprecations after that point
• given how implementations and applications drive implementations
• Rakudo * exists to encourage people to develop applications
• we've never made that stability an explicit goal for Rakudo *
• we'll probably institute deprecation cycles when it comes out
• we don't want to change the world out from under people
• it doesn't represent a spec freeze
• thinking of a separate distribution release from the compiler release
• a three month stability cycle of releases for Rakudo *
• a different point of view
• any distribution release doesn't have to be tied to the newest compiler release
• I see Rakudo * as a series of releases, not a single release

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• my work last week was almost entirely responsive to various discussions on irc and p6l, even when it doesn't seem like it
• clarified that LEAVE-style phasers do not trip till after an exception is handled (and not resumed)
• the implementation of take is specifically before unwinding even if implemented with a control exception
• simplified series operator by moving generator function to the left side (any function on right side will now be a limiting conditional)
• a * is no longer required to intuit the series on the left; the absence of generator before the ... operator is sufficient
• first argument on the right of ... is now always a limiter argument
• for convenience and consistency, added a new ...^ form to exclude a literal limiter from the generated series
• unlike ranges, however, there is no leading exclusion ^... or ^...^
• series is a list associative list infix, and each ... pays attention only the portion of the list immediately to its left (plus the limit from the right)
• an "impossible" limit can terminate a monotonic intuited series even if the limit can never match exactly
• variables now default to a type of Any, and must explicitly declare Mu or Junction type to hold junctions
• this is to reduce pressure to duplicate many functions like == with Mu arguments; most of our failure values should be derived from Any in any case
• a Mu result is more indicative of a major malfunction now, and is caught at first assignment to an Any variable
• Instant/Duration types are biased away from Num and towards Rat/FatRat semantics
• Instant is now completely opaque; we no longer pretend to be the same as TAI, numerically speaking
• Instants are now considered a more basic type than epochs, which are just particular named instants
• all culturally aware time can be based on calculations involving instants and durations
• list associative operators now treat non-matching op names as non-associative rather than right-associative, forcing parens
• Whatever semantics now autocurry any prefix, postfix, or infix operator that doesn't explicitly declare that it handles whateverness itself
• WhateverCode objects now take a signature to keep clear how many args are not yet curried
• so *+* is now more like WhateverCode:($x,$y)
• autocurrying is still transitive so multiple ops can curry themselves around a *
• added semilists as Slicel type to go with Parcel
• this allows us to bind @array[1,2,3] differently from @array[1,2,3;4,5,6], for instance
• the Matcher type now excludes Bool arguments to prevent accidental binding to outer $_ when closure is needed
• when and ~~ will now warn of always/never matching on direct use of True or False names as matcher
• STD generalizes \w lookahead to all twigils now
• STD now treats non-matching list associatives as non-associative
• things like 1 min 2 max 3 are now illegal, and require parenthesization for clarity
• STD now treat invocant colon as just a comma variant so it does not fall afoul of the list associativity change
• CORE now recognizes the TrigBase enumeration

Patrick:

• first release of the new branch of Rakudo last week
• passing ~25,000 tests at the release
• thanks to optimizations from chromatic, Jonathan, and Vasily, Rakudo has a lot of speed improvements
• in particular, it can run those tests in under 10 minutes, non-parallel, depending on your hardware
• older releases took 25 minutes and more
• the regex tests will slow things down
• ultimately, we're seeing a big speed improvement over the past releases
• cleaned up lists and slices, now they work pretty well
• worked with Solomon Foster and others to speed up trig operations
• fixed a bug related to lexicals declared in classes
• fixed the long-standing and often recurring problem with curlies ending a line/statement causing the next statement to be a statement modifier
• easy to fix in the new grammar
• that was nice
• made an initial implementation of the sort method
• it's very short, because Parrot provides one
• there are a few bugs in Rakudo there still, but I'll get them
• planning for the Copenhagen hackathon on March 5 - 9
• Jonathan and I have been updating the Rakudo roadmap
• will check that in in the next couple of hours
• so far, every time we review it, we surprise ourselves at how much we've accomplished
• we're meeting all of the top priority goals without making any heroic efforts
• we'll put those goals in as well as timelines
• most of the major tasks from previous roadmaps have happened

Allison:

• working on Python this week
• attended Python VM summit, Python language summit, and PyCon
• Parrot's on good track to support what Python needs
• useful to make community connections
• when I reviewed Pynie, I was surprised to see how close it is to supporting the whole Python syntax
• some of those features are big, like objects
• but we should support them soon
• Debian packages delayed by the absence of a sponsor
• they should go into Debian soon though
• I put in a request for feature-freeze exception for Ubuntu 10.4
• Parrot 2.0 should go in
• haven't made any commits to the PCC branch
• that'll be a top priority for next week

c:

• fixed a Parrot GC bug for last week's Rakudo release
• made some optimizations in Rakudo and Parrot
• helped Jonathan find a few more
• fixed a long-standing math MMD bug
• still working on HLL subclassing; more tricky than you think
• may be some conflicting design goals about vtable overriding and MMD

Allison:

• Patrick, do we need an explicit deprecation for old PGE and NQP?

Patrick:

• I think Will already added one for NQP
• we can add one for PGE if we need
• they don't necessarily have to disappear at the next release
• but no one's planning to maintain them

Allison:

• no reason not to put in the notice now
• we don't have to remove them at the earliest possible date

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

Larry:

• much work clarifying relationship of parcels to everything else (<a b>, assignment, arguments, captures, parameters, signatures, gather/take, and loop returns)
• we now list all scope declarators in one spot
• conjectured some ideas on how to handle the allomorphism of literals more dwimmily
• had already specced some of this behavior for literals found inside qw angles.
• literals that exceed a Rat64's denominator automatically keep the string form around for coercion to other types
• clarified that anon declarator allows a name but simply doesn't install it in the symbol table
• respecced the trig functions to use a pragma to imported fast curried functions
• still uses enum second argument for the general case (rakudo is still stuck on slow strings there)
• on iterators, renamed .getobj to .getarg since arguments are the typical positional/slicey usage
• signatures are never bound against parcels anymore, only against captures
• we now use "argument" as a technical term meaning either a real parcel or an object that can be used independent of context as an argument
• anything that would stay discrete when bound to a positional, basically
• return, take, and loop return objects are also arguments in that sense
• they all return either a parcel or anything that can stand on its own as an argument
• STD now adds a shortname alias on adverbialized names, ignores collisions on the shortname for now, which is okay for multis
• STD now complains about longname (adverbialized) collisions
• STD no longer carps about duplicate anonymous routine declarations
• made the undeclared type message the same for parameters as for other declarations
• clarify the error message about anonymous variables
• no longer report a $) variable error where ) is the $*GOAL
• add WHAT etc. to list of functions that require an argument

Allison:

• working on two HLL implementations
• one is Pynie, the other is Camle
• nothing to do with Caml or ML
• I've noticed huge improvements in NQP-rx from the previous NQP
• can't say which feature improvements make the most difference, but I'll migrate Pynie pretty soon to take advantage of the new version
• continuing to shepherd Debian and Ubuntu packages

Patrick:

• essentially all I did was unify things
• previously it had been two or three tools
• it's just one

Allison:

• even the syntax seems more regular

Patrick:

• there are more pieces available in NQP-rx
• Rakudo's -ng is now master
• the old master is now -alpha
• we took a big hit on spectests, but they seem to be coming back quickly
• 5000 tests pass on trunk now
• we have 16k or 17k we haven't re-enabled; they make the spectest slower
• Jonathan thinks we may pass 25,000 tests now
• that's great, considering where we were a week ago
• I redid Rakudo's container, value, and assignment module
• previously variables held values directly
• now they contain reference PMCs
• that cleaned up many things
• we use more PMCs, but now we don't clone and copy as much
• we move references around more
• seems closer to how Perl 6 handles things
• was much easier than I expected
• updated the NQP-rx regex engine and built in constant types
• handles Unicode character names
• reclaims plenty of tests
• answered lots of questions for people adding things into Rakudo
• prioritizing other people writing code over writing code
• increases our developer pool; seems to be working well
• new release of Rakudo planned for tomorrow
• don't know how many tests we'll pass, but it should go well
• plan to put in a few things like sort and grammars over the next week
• then I'll review the RT queue to find bugs and (hopefully) closeable bugs

c:

• working on GC tuning
• also working on String PMC tuning
• working on built-in types and their behavior as classes and parent classes
• the multidispatch bugs in particular I hope to solve