hi, PIR syntax has evolved over the years; new features have been added and old features/syntax has been removed.
As more and more PIR code is being written, it is important to settle the PIR syntax at some point, so that any changes are limited to the current amount of PIR code that is out there. The longer the PIR syntax review is postponed, the more code needs to be changed later on. Every now and then, there's a discussion on the list on PIR syntax, but such discussions seem to die after some time. Mailing lists are no good way of documenting things, so in an attempt to support such discussions and in order to make the review process easier, I started a Wiki page named "PIR syntax clean up proposals". As you might know, I have made attempts to write new implementations of the PIR language. These are languages/PIR and compilers/pirc. Both languages are very close to IMCC's language, but slightly different. For instance, pirc allows multiple heredoc arguments in function/method calls, whereas IMCC does not. (a valid usecase is implementation of the functions "pir_output_is" and friends, which take 2 heredoc args.) I have not been able to implement this in languages/PIR. During implementation of both parser I came along some syntax constructs that could need a review. I documented those in the documents in both language directories, but as I can understand, main focus is on Parrot's core features. Be that as it may, PIR is Parrot's main interface for programmers; in other words, Parrot users (programmers) need to work with it daily (until there are full language implementations). Anyway, if you're interested and have some issues that are on your mind, please add them to the wiki page in the proposed format. This makes it easier to make some decisions. The format allows for multiple solutions, after which some decision should be made (and documented along with a rationale). I added the first entry: method invocation syntax (barenames vs quoted). I have some more in mind, but I'll add those later. hope this helps, kjs
