Regarding his RakuAST Grant, Jonathan Worthington reports some awesome progress for May 2021.
Side note: due to a bug in the Markdown rendering in this blog post, the less-than and greater-than characters in code blocks are double-encoded. Please refer to this gist for a correctly rendered version.
Anyway, here is Jonathan's report:
During May I focused on filling out the regex part of RakuAST, with the result that the majority of the constructs found in Raku regexes now have AST nodes and can be compiled by the RakuAST-based compiler frontend. Of note, I did AST nodes for:
:my $foo)and)\e, \f, \h, \r, \t, \v, and \0 escape sequences<:l>), rules <+rulename>, and the
combination of these using + and -<{ ... }&>)$x) and in an assertion syntax
as code (<$code>):i, :m, etc.)<&rulename>), including passing of
argumentsFurthermore, I corrected a mistake in handling of backtracking modifiers, and added a missing action method in the new compiler frontend that blocked regexes passing arguments from compiling.
Away from the regex language itself, I:
CHECK time and report problemsCHECK-time things
in the AST nodes, since they can happen in synthetically
constructed programs too. Those that are purely syntactic are
often not possible to represent in the AST.token/rule declarations, so that
grammars can now be expressed and compiled in RakuAST (without
protoregexes so far, however)All of this work won a rather underwhelming 17 extra fully passing spectest files; as has been previously noted, the test files are quite good at depending on a lot of language features.
For one, I am a great believer in investing in moving the core language to new levels and AST/macros is a very broad area for improvement and further raku awesomeness. I would say "keep up the good work" - and maybe lay a trail as for how the roast tests could/should be disaggregated....