Perl Steering Council meeting minutes February 11

The gang was all here: Neil, Paul, Rik.

We discussed a few RFCs.

The “configure option to disable taint” RFC had a couple questions we thought were resolved: how do
we phrase the question in Configure (where the “not” goes!), and whether trying to use taint mode
on a no-taint-mode perl is fatal. These were resolved and the RFC PR was merged.

The “kv” proposal meant to help get index/value pairs of arrays for two-at-a-time iteration was up
next. We closed it. I’m going to write up a new RFC for something like `indexed(@arr)`

Ovid’s “modules” RFC PR was closed.

We talked about signatures.

There was a lot of discussion, here, but the big takeaway was that we all agree that signatures
should be removed from experimental status, except for the use of `@_` inside a signatured sub,
which gets an experimental warning, and which we think will surely change, given the significant
speed-ups we expect can be wrung out of it.

Further, they should be enabled under `use v5.36`, as part of our goal of providing the best
possible perl we can with the least required boilerplate.

We also want to make sure it’s clearly document, not only for general use, but that our
documentation shows Perl being written in an up-to-date way. Once the general code freeze is in
place, we’re hoping to make a pass through our docs to get them all up to date.

source::encoding

Karl has been doing some work on source::encoding — namely, making it work! Apart from making it
work, our big question was whether we could feel good about making `use v5.36` imply `use
source::encoding 'ascii'`, and the general consensus was, “yes, if we feel good about its tests.” I
have begun making a modest pass at some tests, but definitely need to set aside some time for being
a bit more aggressive in my approach.

I’ll also be following up with Dan Kogai to make `use encoding` always fatal on new Perls.

Bidirectional bracketing pairs

We at least agreed that this isn’t going into the v5.36 feature bundle. The big question here is
“can we curate a set of brackets such that they’re not problematically surprising.” So far, I think
Karl is on the right track, but it needs some discussion.

Experiments

I’d like to get through a bunch more experiments, as I think a few more can yet be removed from
experimental status, but we were running out of time. We only covered one: `isa`. On our call as
p5p, there is general agreement that the `isa` operator can be removed from experimental status.


-- 
rjbs