seeing the end of the tunnel

[David Storrs]

So, I was thinking about how $Larry's original plan for doing the
Perl6 design was something along the lines of "write a series of
Apocalypses, one for each chapter of the Camel book". I know that
the latest version of the Apocalypses are in SVN, but I checked
dev.perl.org just to see what the current list was. I see the
following:

* Apocalypse 1 - "The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good"
* Apocalypse 2 - "Bits and Pieces"
* Apocalypse 3 - "Operators"
* Apocalypse 4 - "Syntax"
* Apocalypse 5 - "Pattern Matching"
* Apocalypse 6 - "Subroutines"
* Apocalypse 7 - "Formats" (see Exegesis 7)
* Apocalypse 12 - "Objects"

Hmm, interesting; that actually sounds like a pretty complete
design. So, I pulled down my Camel v3 and started checking to see
what was left to do. I was surprised how few of the remaining
chapters pertain directly to broad issues of language design; most of
them are things like "The Command Line Interface", "The Debugger",
etc...important, but not fundamentally critical to the language
design. Many of the others are things like "Packages"--they probably
won't change much, and the differences have already been hammered
out, just not consolidated into an Apocalyptic form. Other chapters--
such as Chapter 33, "Diagnostic Messages"--will be better served by
being left unwritten until the implementation is released.

All in all, I think that might just be the end of the tunnel up
ahead. Go us for getting here, and loud applause to @Larry for
guiding us so well!

--Dks

Here are the chapters which haven't been covered yet:

The Gory Details
* 8. References
* 9. Data Structures
* 10. Packages
* 11. Modules
* 13. Overloading
* 14. Tied Variables

Perl as Technology
* 15. Unicode
* 16. Interprocess Communication
* 17. Threads
* 18. Compiling
* 19. The CLI
* 20. The Perl Debugger
* 21. Internals and Externals

Perl as Culture
* 22. CPAN
* 23. Security
* 24. Common Practices
* 25. Portable Perl
* 26. Plain Old Documentation
* 27. Perl Culture

Reference Material
* 28. Special Names
* 29. Functions
* 30. The Standard Perl Library
* 31. Pragmatic Modules
* 32. Standard Modules
* 33. Diagnostic Messages

[Luke Palmer]

On 10/1/05, David Storrs <dst...@dstorrs.com> wrote:
> All in all, I think that might just be the end of the tunnel up
> ahead. Go us for getting here, and loud applause to @Larry for
> guiding us so well!

Applause for p6l for hashing out the issues that we didn't think of.

I recently wrote a "Perl 6 design TODO", which was surprizingly small,
which enumerated the things to be done before I considered the design
of Perl 6 to be finished. Larry replied with a couple more items. In
particular:

> Here are the chapters which haven't been covered yet:
>

> * 17. Threads

> * 26. Plain Old Documentation

> * 29. Functions

Luke

[TSa]

HaloO,

Luke Palmer wrote:
> On 10/1/05, David Storrs <dst...@dstorrs.com> wrote:
>
>>All in all, I think that might just be the end of the tunnel up
>>ahead. Go us for getting here, and loud applause to @Larry for
>>guiding us so well!
>
>
> Applause for p6l for hashing out the issues that we didn't think of.

I think this is a good opportunity for me to drop out of the list.
Not that I expect anyone to care. Consider this just me talking
to myself in public. But since I'm not *doing* anything on Perl6,
why should I bother you with ranting about it.

I've always taken the 'what type of expression' approach to programming
languages and thus have an affinity to type systems and type theory.
With 'type' in general and 'data type' in particular beeing too misleading
or used in too many different meanings in other programming languages I
propose to coin the notion of 'kind' which has the nice double meaning of
nice and sort. And as such gives the nice pun

Perl 6, the kind language

with the two "meanings"

Perl 6, a kind of language
, the language of kind(ness)

Here are attempts to translate this to German

Perl 6, die artige Sprache
, eine Art Sprache
, eine Art-Sprache
, eine Artsprache
, die Sprache der Art

Well, take it or leave it.

> I recently wrote a "Perl 6 design TODO", which was surprizingly small,
> which enumerated the things to be done before I considered the design
> of Perl 6 to be finished. Larry replied with a couple more items.

The type system is not on this list, right?
--
$TSa.greeting := "HaloO"; # mind the echo!

[Chromatic]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 16:26 +0200, TSa wrote:

> > I recently wrote a "Perl 6 design TODO", which was surprizingly small,
> > which enumerated the things to be done before I considered the design
> > of Perl 6 to be finished. Larry replied with a couple more items.
>
> The type system is not on this list, right?

It actually is, both in syntax and semantics.

-- c