The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 July 2008. Larry, Allison, Jesse, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

• standard grammar parses itself 100%
• thinking about refactoring
• how do we distinguish the use of grammars from grammars used as the current language
• refactoring top level namespaces
• whether STD is part of that name
• meddling in everyone else's discussions
• upgraded the spec on transliteration
• in denial about all of the conferences coming up

Allison:

• absorbed by OSCON and travel for the next couple of weeks
• after that, things will pick up
• working on one (hopefully) final patch to the concurrency branch
• I know it'll resolve one failing test
• hope it'll resolve several PGE failures on the branch
• I'm an hour away from committing that (ideal minutes, but probably an actual hour)
• we're talking about having a hackathon the Saturday after OSCON

Jesse:

• is there a venue?

Allison:

• nothing set up yet, but we do have a default

Jesse:

• how many people?

Allison:

• probably about ten
• Portland State University worked out pretty well for us
• I'll look for contact information

Patrick:

• last week, we passed 1365 tests
• now we're passing 1677, 312 more
• from the last Friday of June to the first Friday of July, we had an increase of 500 tests
• almost 50% more than we were

Jesse:

• how many are newly ported tests and how many used to fail?

Patrick:

• probably an equal mix of both
• a big part of that is getting implicit lexicals working, $_, $!, and $/
• implicit method calls too are working now
• lots of refactoring, especially for builtins
• they now seem to work better in the Any class
• removed a lot of inline PIR code and stuff like that
• spent an hour on the phone with the Houston Perl Mongers last night
• they want to work on the test suite as part of their meetings for a while
• I walked them through building Rakudo, checking out the Pugs repo and test suite, explaining how we do testing
• they plan to have meetings where someone gives a topic, presents how they think it should work, and then they review or create tests for that feature
• they'll either move tests from Pugs into spectests, or add tests to spectests
• I'll try to write that into an article for use Perl or other places
• a step by step guide for contributing tests
• haven't started writing my "This Week in Perl 6 Articles" yet
• should have one by this time next week

Jerry:

• haven't been able to produce much code
• participating in code reviews and design discussions
• this is the mid-term evaluation period for Google Summer of Code
• all of the mentors and students have submitted their mid-term evaluations
• it's all gone smoothly
• all three are going ahead
• the Parrot Foundation is in process of taking over the NLNet grant from TPF
• working with the OSU open source labs to host the website
• expect more on that soon

Allison:

• because we need SSL certificates, they were going to set us up with our own virtual machine
• we'll need to purchase the certificate

Jerry:

• and finalize the purchase of parrot.org

c:

• applied some patches, fixed a couple of bugs
• closed some tickets, but a lot more came in
• worked with Andrew some on fixing bugs in his GC
• getting closer to the point of merge
• approved his milestone, setting some priorities for the second half of the work
• probably won't have much time to work in the next week
• thinking about Closures, not sure Parrot's approach is entirely right

Patrick:

• did you see my note about the PGE bugs in the branch?
• I ran PGE in the concurrency branch yesterday, and get an odd result
• if you run it by using prove, it gives errors
• if you run the PIR directly, it works just fine

c:

• I don't think Parrot::Test adds any flags when it invokes Parrot
• but t/harness does

Patrick:

• it's in the operator precedence parser
• you can specify a particular stop token
• nothing uses that anywhere anymore, but the test tests it
• I don't think anything that uses it

Allison:

• does it throw an exception?

Patrick:

• it just stops parsing at that point
• the caller decides what to do
• it's not detecting that token when it's parsing
• I pass a string with a stop token in the middle
• it's supposed to parse only the first part
• but it doesn't stop at the stop token
• it's just a simple comparison of some sort
• seems kinda weird

Allison:

• maybe it is detecting it, but isn't working right
• but if you're not using exceptions, there's no old exception handler lying around
• so it's not that

Patrick:

• I gave instructions on how to reproduce in my message

Allison:

• my current patch probably won't fix that
• it sounds unrelated

Patrick:

• I might put some tracing in and run it through the harness
• figure out why it's failing to detect that stop token
• also a question for Larry
• do we have an official leaning on method fallback?
• are they in or out?

Larry:

• assume they're out for now

Patrick:

• I'm happy
• I don't have to rewrite my dispatcher
• can I start telling people to organize the test suite that way?

Larry:

• sure

Patrick:

• for the eval built-in, can someone take String.eval and have it do what you expect?

Larry:

• yes

Patrick:

• a method that's exported
• great!

Jerry:

• STD.pm parses itself
• that's fantastic
• is the LTM implementable now in Rakudo or elsewhere?

Larry:

• essentially

Jerry:

• is anything blocking that?

Patrick:

• just time
• but I plan to develop that under the grant
• I think it'll be a significant chunk of code and research
• don't want to do a bunch of PGE refactoring until the concurrency branch is back in trunk though

Jerry:

• I want to get that merged as soon as possible
• it won't make a lot of progress until we do
• hope we can get it before OSCON, even though Allison will be busy

Allison:

• there are only three failing tests

Jerry:

• but HLLs don't work

Patrick:

• I don't want to go into OSCON without languages working on trunk

Larry:

• maybe a reverse merge?

Allison:

• we do that regularly

c:

• I just don't want to block everyone from doing anything until the code gets fixed

Patrick:

• just about everyone who can fix it is on this call

Allison:

• we're almost to the point where it's time for HLL implementors to work on it

c:

• seems like we can pick the top three HLLs that need to work (Rakudo, Pheme, Punie)
• make them pass
• give the other HLL implementors a week to fix their stuff
• then do the merge

Patrick:

• just don't want to show off all of this nice stuff at OSCON, then say "Don't download trunk, it doesn't work"
• but show off the new stuff in Rakudo that's not in the new release
• a week makes a big difference, the way things are moving

c:

• that could be 500 tests

Patrick:

• thanks to Larry for jumping in on the design discussions
• hope you're not frustrated

Larry:

• it's all part of the job
• I'd rather see progress than vice versa