On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 01:42 PM, Joseph F. Ryan wrote:
I think we've been gravitating to a "language reference", geared primarily towards intermediate/advanced users. Something much more rigorous than beginners would be comfortable with (since it defines things in much greater detail than beginners would need) and written to assume *no* prior knowledge of Perl5. It will be useful to the developers -- in that it will describe required P6 behaviors in much greater detail than the Apocalypses and Exegesis -- but it will be written for users.James Mastros wrote:We need to decide if this is a user doc or a developer doc/language specification. If it's the later, we need a regirous defintion of what a pair is.
I'm more inclined towards a user doc; a rigorous definition of pairs in the tests should be good enough for the developers.
The document should be taken to mean "we aren't describing how Perl6 is implemented or what the guts look like, but the language behaviors described herein should always be true."
As of Larry's last writings, there will definitely be an octal (it still has good uses), and it's syntax will definitely be 0o777 -- with an 'o', not a 'c'. The 'o' is a little hard to read, but the best anyone can come up with. It has to be lowercase 'o', not uppercase 'O', which helps *enormously*. :-)Do we want to change shorthand octal literal numbers to 0o123 (I don't like this, it's hard to read), change octal chars to \c123 (can't do this without getting rid of, or changing, \c for control-character), get rid of octal chars entirely, or somthing else? (Baring a good "somthing else", I vote for killing octal chars.)
(But since I assume you can use \d, \b, \h anywhere you use \o, you won't have to use octal at all if you don't want to.)
MikeL
