On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 10:45:53PM -0500, Adam Turoff wrote: > On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 06:29:34PM -0800, Steve Fink wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 04:11:58PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > > > Seriously, there are real answers to a whole lot of design questions. Ask > > > 'em and I'll get FAQable answers to 'em once and for all. > > > > Whee! Ok. Some of these are probably duplicates, and some > > inappropriate for a Parrot FAQ, but: > > I have a section of the Parrot FAQ dedicated to Parrot + Perl, but > I'm realizing that a Perl6 FAQ is necessary (if not long overdue). > > These questions should be shoved into the Perl6 FAQ (er, sometime tomorrow):
Hm. I think I wasn't very good about the wording of some of those. Clarifications: > > Q: Will perl6 support the same regexes as perl5? > > Q: Larry said _what_? What does that mean? I really only mentioned perl6 because that's where the "regexes shalt be regular opcodes" edict comes from. So the first is certainly Perl6, the second straddles the two, and the third you've already classified as Parrot. > > Q: What about incremental matching? I mean this wrt Parrot, since it's been on my mind. Are the RE opcodes hardwired to work only against strings or stringifyable PMCs? If we want incremental (nonbuffered) matching, we'll need something like an interface for REs to use to grab a character at a time, say they don't need anything before char <n> anymore, etc. But the question here is really "do we need to support it?" since a full discussion is probably beyond the scope of this FAQ. > > Q: Any plans for continuations? Coroutines? These are also applicable to Perl6, but I am specifically asking about the Parrot implications. They require more than a simple stack -- you need to be able to save frames off to the side and wacky things like that. It's come up a few times. > > Q: What previous discussions? Are there archive links I can use? That was in reference to the "why not use GCC as the target instead of Parrot" question -- but I noticed you already have it in the FAQ. > > Q: What API will extension writers write to? Namely, at what level do extensions get to plug in? Do extensions create PMCs and call PMC vtable entries directly? Through a layer of CPP cruft? What interface will be immutable between major releases? > > Q: How will garbage collection interact with extensions? > > Q: How will finalization [or whatever the right word is] interact with > > extensions? > > Q: What's the difference between the previous two questions? I think this stuff is relevant to Parrot, since GC happens at the Parrot level, not the Perl level, and finalization (or whatever) will require heavy-duty Parrot support as well. But these questions may have already been answered by a PDD. > > Q: What's the release schedule? Parrot has its own release schedule, no? I was expecting something along the lines of 0.01 had X, 0.02 had Y, 0.03 had Z, 0.04 won't be released until we have W, and anything beyond that is at Simon's whim.