On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 18:51:03 -0500, David K Storrs wrote: > So, to bring it down to brass tacks: there are 5 big chunks (S15, S16, S18, > S21, S23) that remain to be be written, a 6th (S08) that needs to be written > but will > probably be fairly short, and 5 (S28, S30-33) that need to be compiled out > of the mass of emails flying through the lists. I know that substantial > progress has been > in defining the semantics of all of these topics, and I have the impression > that it's mostly a question of wrapping up the last 5-20% of each one, > compiling all the > data, and writing the Synopsis. > > > I'd say that qualifies as light at the end of the tunnel indeed!
The point I was trying to raise is that the Synopses are a very
high level, top down angle on the language's design.
They have *NOTHING* about any implementation details like:
the design of the compiler
the design of the runtime
the design of the object space
The layers of Perl 6 (what is an optional module? what is a
macro (see also 'use')? what is the core essence of Perl 6?).
Except implying that these things will be implemented in Perl 6, and
will be somehow worked out.
Now, I have no objection to this - the Synopses are sort of like
requirement docs.
But we do need something that's between where parrot is today, and a
top down view of all of Perl 6 - and that's a lot of chunks.
What I'm trying to say is that letting the part in the middle grow
completely organically and ad-hoc is not a good thing, and that
the pugs developers really have no authority as to making design
decisions. We need those things to happen and they're getting
overlooked, and in my opinion the first step into this is
refactoring the design into several layers.
Bottom line - there's much more than 5 missing chunks in the design,
as I see it - designing the implementation is nontrivial.
Also, none of the synopses are really 100% complete - S12 does not
detail the meta model's methods and features, for example. The doc
explaining macros does not detail what the AST macros get (the
definition of the AST). Etc etc etc. These things are also important
to implementation, and amount to a huge chunk of code. If we can
layer this code, chunk it up, componentize it and make it clean we
we can implement it more easily.
--
() Yuval Kogman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 0xEBD27418 perl hacker &
/\ kung foo master: /me groks YAML like the grasshopper: neeyah!!!!!!
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