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Weblog: Specification
in Perl 6
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is the Standard Perl 6 grammar and more or less part of the specs. Its a program, written in a subset of Perl 6 and by Larry Wall, that defines how Perl 6 should be parsed. It uses the parser engine Cursor. Unfortunately no implementation can fully parse STD.pm yet, let alone build a compiler or interpreter based on it. However, by means of the "viv" tool described next, Perl 6 source code can be parsed by a near equivalent running in Perl 5. Anyone can try STD.pm online. Join the #perl6 channel on irc.freenode.net, then address your command to the std: nick. For example: std: say "hello"; The output is either an awesome error message, or the status 'ok' followed by the amount of time and megabytes of memory that 'viv' took to parse the source. The actual work is done by the 'tryfile' script, also in the src/perl6 directory of the pugs repository. The Synopses are the (almost) human readable documents which constantly kept up to date, (unlike other historic docs like apocalypses and exegeses.) mostly after discussions at the p6l mailing list. HistoryThe Perl 6 design process began with a call for RFC (requests for comments) in July 2000 at The Perl Conference 4 (todays OSCON). In the next one and half year 361 RFC came in and Larry Wall sorted them and answered with the Apocalyses. Damian Conway tried to make them easier accessible and enriched them with examples. He got help from Allison Randal and so the Exegeses were born. But people today are not very patient and want a quick diff between Perl 5 and 6. That is why the Synopses were written. The Termcomes from the latin word for compare. Its mostly used today by theologians (like apocalypse and exegesis too) who call the 3 gospels (except John's) synoptical gospels, because the tell almost the same story in the same order, even some parts are in each version different or missing. Links
Perl 6 has a huge test suite (about 40 000 single tests), that is located here, in the svn repo of Pugs. Chief is Moritz Lenz and cares a lot about it. Unless Perl 5, where the interpreter IS the de-facto specification, Perl 6 has the advantage of clear definition, which becomes clearer every day, since the language design team working on the syntax and the implementers finding ambiguous spots. Mainly the spec has 3 parts:
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