use Perl

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 25 October 2006. The attendees were Larry, Nicholas, and chromatic. Damian sent in his notes later. Here are the minutes.

Larry:

• have decided not to go to Brazil
• looking for someone who can fly to Brazil on short notice and give a keynote
• nothing much in the way of design work this week

c:

• any sense if Pugs will hit 6.28 soon?

Larry:

• depends on how the Brazil hackathon goes
• could be a couple of weeks if they're careful

c:

• I finished up the basic proof of concept of Parrot::Embed
• GC/refcounting was a little hairy
• I think I have it correct
• still have the temptation to create a vtable pointer for magic on SVs in Perl 5

Nicholas:

• have you had any more time to work on your Perl 6 program at work?
• how is it going?

Larry:

• it seems like it refactors nicely
• I've mutated it around changing specs
• it seems like a language that's easy to refactor
• I like that

c:

• what style is it?

Larry:

• an OO tree
• doing recursive visitation

c:

• roles make the Visitor pattern almost unnecessary
• especially runtime roles

Nicholas:

• I was just thinking the Parrot tree grammar thing

c:

• me too
• seems like getting a better language for within TGE rules is the near term goal
• that probably means getting enough of objects and classes specified so Parrot can support this easily
• there's currently a big question about how to instantiate objects based on class names
• there's a namespace issue regarding that
• that might let us bootstrap Perl 6 or a similar language to that point
• that might let us make implementing other languages easier too
• that might push Parrot to fix things that we need

Damian:

• Just finished the last of my scheduled training events for 2006
• Taking a few days off after the hectic last three months
• Should have more time hereafter
• Still reworking the documentation synopsis and accompanying Perl 5 parser implementation
• Will raise one or two minor issues on the sixperl list in the next day or two
• Once those are ironed out, will post a second draft which can probably go in the repository
• Will also upload the prototype parser to CPAN
• Thereafter, may work on a Perl 6 implementation as well