Re: Guidelines for internals proposals and documentation

At 02:45 PM 11/17/00 +0000, David Grove wrote:

>Dan Sugalski <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>  > At 10:19 AM 11/17/00 -0800, Ken Fox wrote:
>  > >However, I don't want to see early (premature) adoption of fundamental
>  > >pieces like the VM or parser. It makes sense to me to explore many
>  > possible
>  > >designs and pick and choose between them. Also, if we can keep
>external
>  > API
>  > >design separate from internal design I think we'll have more wiggle
>room
>  > >to experiment. (That's one of the big problems with perl 5 right now.)
>  >
>  > That's one of the reasons I'd like to work on the APIs first. I realize
>
>  > that doing even that will have an effect on the design of the pieces
>  > behind
>  > the APIs, but we have to startsomewhere.
>
>But.. but... but... we don't even have a design spec. I mean, we don't
>even know for sure what Perl 6 is going to look like for certain, inside
>or outside. Wouldn't we have to know the outside before we try to put the
>insides together?

No, not really. For the actual code we will, of course, but there's a lot 
we can do now. (And a good part of the parser could still be written now, 
since most of the changes will likely be reasonably trivial) The APIs perl 
presents to the world are pretty much independent of the language.

For example, we can take a good stab at the extension API now--regardless 
of how the language looks, extensions will still need to get and set 
scalar, hash, and array values. Perl would have to change a *lot* for that 
to be no longer valid. The API presented to an embedding programs similarly 
can be worked on--the fact that the language might change doesn't alter the 
syntax of the run_perl_code() function. (or whatever we call it)

We also do have, generally speaking, a picture of both perl (since Larry 
has said we're not gutting the language entirely) and the internal 
structure. I've been a bit lax in presenting that internal picture, but 
I'll fix that in a little bit.

					Dan

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Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
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