Administrative Issues

[interpinfo name]

how to do this from inside parrot?

migrate all these issues to RT.

TODO tests would also suffice, where possible.

update docs/*

add pod to all .imc

Programming Issues

C-level tasks

List to String (KJ?)

The current list to string logic in dynclasses/tcllist.pmc is missing logic to properly escape string elements.

PMC based parser

Instead of the current PIR level parsing, we should instead use a pmc - not only should this improve speed slightly, but will help us implement the [parser] builtin.

string to list

Should be moved to tcllist's set_string method. (but this requires first moving the parser into a pmc.)

tclword

An object is probably too heavyweight for this. A PMC with a few overloaded methods is probably sufficient.

Use PMCs to handle numifying

not the pir routines we now have. Verify that [expr 2a + 2b] behaves appropriately when doing this. Include proper numification of octal and hex.

PIR-level tasks

globals vs. lexicals

Right now, globals are done with lexicals. get_var/set_var needs to be updated to check the call_level - if we're at 0, then use a global. [global] and [upvar] may need attention once this is done.

interactive tclsh

interactive tclsh mode currently only waits for EOF and then runs all commands entered. should have sane defaults for tcl_prompt1, tcl_prompt2 and respect them, and process intermediate input.

implement default globals, etc.

global variables provided by tcl libary. tclvars.

global variables provided by tcl interpreter. tclsh

source per-user settings. tclsh

misc

hex & unicode escapes are not supported in lib/parser.imc

unimplemented commands/subcommands

[after] [array get]* [array names] [array unset] [array statistics] [array anymore] [array donesearch] [array nextelement] [array startsearch] [bgerror] [binary] [case] [clock] [close] [cd] [dde] [encoding] [eof] [exec] [fblocked] [fconfigure] [fcopy] [file] [fileevent] [flush] [gets] [glob] [http] [info]* [interp] [library] [lindex] [load] [lreplace] [lsearch]* [lset] [lsort] [memory] [msgcat] [namespace] [open] [package] [pid] [pwd] [read] [registry] [regexp] [regsub] [resource] [safe] [scan] [seek] [socket] [subst] [string replace] [string tolower] [string totitle] [string toupper] [string trim] [string trimleft] [string trimright] [string compare] [string equal] [string last] [string bytelength] [string is] [string map] [string wordstart] [string wordend] [switch] [tcltest] [tell] [update] [variable] [vwait]

* - assigned

Tests

standards

Any future tests, write more like t/tcl_var_subst.t. Eventually cleanup tests so they're consistent.

Add tests for...

tclword.imc, PMCs, the macros, expr's precedence and parens, [puts]'s ability to write to other channels, the compreg compiler.

[uplevel] [upvar] [lrange] [inline] [string repeat]

pass tcl test suite

Uncategorized Issues

From leo - cleanup of tcl objects.

tclobject is an abstract object, it doesn't have a vtable. But the bundling code *does* pmc_register this PMC. This leads to an empty vtable slot, dereferencing that NULL is an operation, which many systems don't like.

Remove Perl*

Mostly done. All that seems to be left is PerlUndef. Much was already converted to the internal types. PerlUndef removal will probably result (finally) in the use of null checks where it's being used for that, and TclObject where it's being used for shimmering.

Freeze/Thaw of TclWord would ...

allow us to build a braindead compile option - given a chunk of tcl, generate a chunk of PIR that we can emit to be saved, compiled, and then run again.

tail call optimizations

tail call optimizations - there are several cases where I could use this and save myself a call. Possible to do right now with PASM - wait for PIR support before welding in.

provide a way to access existing library PIR from Tcl.

add benchmarks?

given freeze/thaw for objects...

Once freeze/thaw is working for tclwords (currently waiting on parrot support), rewrite proc to preparse once and cache the result in the generated sub rather than reparsing each time.

(Though this seems evil, too. There must be a better way.)

TclWord

implement is_const to allow for some optimizations in the compiler. (which isn't written yet.) when adding words, default to true, but if at any point we add a variable or a command, invalidate that. (mostly done!)

Move TclWord namespace into _Tcl::Word, less clutter?

multiple level lists

This will be much easier to do when we can call into the parser from the TclList PMC. (is this already doable?)

compiler vs. interpreter

it should be possible to further extend our interpreter this to make an actual compiler, where the _compiler emits PIR. So, the resulting call from, say, [source] would be:

# Note this a change from _parse's current signature 
(parsed_data_structure,tcl_status,error) = _parse(tcl_code)
(pir_code,tcl_status,error) = _compile(parsed_data_structure)

And now that we have the pir_code, we can either emit the necessary PIR (ala parrot's -o option) or we can compile and run it.

Caveat: how to support -o with user defined procs - right now, proc is defining the sub on the fly, where, with a compiler, we may want to defer compilation, and simply be able to extract the generated PIR.

(LOW) speed

Comparing examples/fact.tcl with parrot vs. tclsh (OSX)

??/??/??: 8-12 x slower, single call
05/14/04: 500 calls in a loop slows us down to 60x!
11/22/04: 500 calls in a loop: only 10x slower!

expr

Clean up expr. MUUUUCH room for improvement there.

expr - parse/interpret split - This is working for expr - change any other thing that calls __expression to use the _p, _i variants, delete the original proc. Once we've done that, determine a better structure to use as the inter mediate representation between the two.

clean up expr so that it's not passing around type indicators. - just use PMCs everywhere. (Though we may still need to have CONST vs. VARIABLE types.

The type indicator is also used to disambiguate operators and function calls from operands. We can easily remove it for operands, but how to cleanly remove this for operators?

TBD: strings, floats as operands - (many of the math funcs return floats but you can't specify them, and not everything takes them (try, for example, [expr sin(1) + sin(1)] vs [expr sin(1) * sin(1)].)

TBD: blocks, commands, and strings as operands

TBD: logical binary ops & ternary op (need deferred evaluation) ; unary ops; ops that work on strings only.

TBD: functions that take > 1 arg.

TBD: Argument type requirements - Currently works ONLY on bitand - esp need to get any that require int-only args, as we can now /generate/ floats, even if we cannot specify them. {This probably requires switching to Tcl* PMCs and putting the logic in there hidden under MMD}

misc

complete [error] (need global var support)