Some unsorted notes while reading through it:
*) definition: "current namespace"
...
(Pasm also has its own separate concept of current namespace ...
Why and how? And what doest that mean? I don't see any difference WRT
PASM code.
*) namespace separator: "::"
In this document, "::" indicates namespace nesting.
This looks too much misleading to me. Folks are already creating
'foo::bar' namespaces in parrot all over the place, which just aren't
doing, what perl5 does. These are *not* nested namespaces at all, and
will be unaccessible by e.g. Python. While the document states, that
this is just an annotation, it's too much perlish and doesn't really
help non-perl users. A notation ['perl5';'CGI'] or [perl5;CGI] is much
better IMHO and reflects Parrot's usage of nested namespaces.
*) ... unicode encoding
I'm not sure if this is a good idea for language interop. Especially
what charsets are allowed?
*) definition: "HLL" *and* Parrot
Parrot isn't a HLL, but the document doesn't spec at all, where Parrot
itself should put it's symbols. Currently each PMC and class occupies
an entry in the top-level aka global namespace.
$ cat ns.pir
.sub main :main
.local pmc ns, m
ns = find_global "\0String"
print_item ns
m = ns['lower']
$S0 = typeof m
print_item $S0
print_newline
.end
$ ./parrot ns.pir
Hash[0x808523c] NCI
Additionally the namespace "__parrot_core" is used for MMD builtins.
*) Raw Interface
The choosen method names are either misleading (e.g. 'add' vs
infix:<+>) and/or not available as 'standard' vtable functions. Why not
just use the Hash interface?
*) Typed Interface
I've already layed out earlier in reply to Matt's proposal that this
will be mostly unusable for e.g. Python.
*) load_library($S0, $S1, ...)
We don't have any va_list syntax like that.
*) export_to($P0, ...)
Besides the va_list syntax the wild card support $P1.export_to($P0,
'w*') seems to belong into the HLL. OTOH there isn't any 'import' hook
that might be necessary to deal with type mismatches, interop issues,
and whatnot. (But I haven't thought much about export/import at all yet
;)
leo
