... aka "Not This Christmas".

Specification

The POD files of the specification have moved into the Pugs svn repository, which formerly only held the draft specs.

You can now find them all in http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/docs/Perl6/Spec. The main reason was the wish to encourage contributions to the specs.

It worked promptly: Daniel Ruoso and Tim Nelson checked in their first draft of Synopsis 7: Iterators and Laziness. It's based on Ruoso's notes on the lazy map function in SMOP and IRC discussions with Larry and others.

Jerry "particle" Gay recived a grant for working on S19, the specification of the Perl 6 command line interface, and started working on it.

Implementations

Rakudo

After long struggling, Patrick Michaud re-designed and re-implemented lexical variables in Parrot, fixing lots of bugs that were really annoying in real world application. (The test suite didn't contain that many instances that triggered lexical bugs - this shows again how important real-world apps are for testing.

There was other progress as well, much of which was geared towards enabling a prelude written in Perl 6: is also trait on classes (which allows to extend existing classes), inline PIR (not strictly a Perl 6 feature, but hopefully very useful), basic support for protos and countless small fixes that make live easier for Perl 6 developers.

SMOP

SMOP also made progress, which is described here better than I could with my own words.

Elf

Mitchell Charity updated the Elf homepage and continued his work on bootrapping Elf on Common Lisp.

Misc

Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson put notable effort in the Perl 6 syntax hilighting file for vim, the world's best text editor. During his work he discovered that parsing Perl 6 is non-trivial.

This week's positive surprise was that Justin Simoni offered to contribute some art work to the Perl community, and I promptly recruited him for creating a Logo for Rakudo. I'm really excited, and want to thank him, and also chromatic for calling people to action.