PSC #030 2021-070-23
Present: Paul, Rik, Neil
We've had a couple of discussions about namespaces, identifying the questions that we think need answering, in particular, what problem might namespaces be the answer to? We're going to invite some relevant members of p5p to join us for a longer discussion on this topic, in a couple of weeks. If you have well-formed opinions you'd like to share, please do that on p5p.
Following on from a discussion on p5p, we had a chat about whether catch should be optional on try. Three quarters of the Try/Catch modules on CPAN support optional catch, but just about all other programming languages require at least one catch, and rethrow the exception if it's not caught. What's the perl'ish approach? We're going to revisit this another time, after we've written up our thoughts. But Paul and Rik are of a mind here, so it's pretty clear how this is going to play out :-)
Paul raised the topic of signature introspection, and whether this is something Perl should support. We had a brief talk, but given "signatures" are on Rik's hit list of experiments to resolve, we decided that should be the driver for working out where signatures should go.
The rest of the time was spent working through some more quirks. One theme was that a number of quirks have been identified because someone was working on JSON encoding/decoding, and other serialisations. Rik suggested it would be useful to have a document that covers "everything you should be aware of if you're writing serialisation code". Paul suggested that a useful precursor doc would be a comprehensive "Perl data model", covering the different sorts of things you might find in scalars, arrays, etc. Some of the quirks would then end up with "ok this is quirky, but read this other document for the gory details".
Present: Paul, Rik, Neil
We've had a couple of discussions about namespaces, identifying the questions that we think need answering, in particular, what problem might namespaces be the answer to? We're going to invite some relevant members of p5p to join us for a longer discussion on this topic, in a couple of weeks. If you have well-formed opinions you'd like to share, please do that on p5p.
Following on from a discussion on p5p, we had a chat about whether catch should be optional on try. Three quarters of the Try/Catch modules on CPAN support optional catch, but just about all other programming languages require at least one catch, and rethrow the exception if it's not caught. What's the perl'ish approach? We're going to revisit this another time, after we've written up our thoughts. But Paul and Rik are of a mind here, so it's pretty clear how this is going to play out :-)
Paul raised the topic of signature introspection, and whether this is something Perl should support. We had a brief talk, but given "signatures" are on Rik's hit list of experiments to resolve, we decided that should be the driver for working out where signatures should go.
The rest of the time was spent working through some more quirks. One theme was that a number of quirks have been identified because someone was working on JSON encoding/decoding, and other serialisations. Rik suggested it would be useful to have a document that covers "everything you should be aware of if you're writing serialisation code". Paul suggested that a useful precursor doc would be a comprehensive "Perl data model", covering the different sorts of things you might find in scalars, arrays, etc. Some of the quirks would then end up with "ok this is quirky, but read this other document for the gory details".