Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #31 ("Atlanta")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the July 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #31 "Atlanta". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see http://www.parrot.org). The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads.

Please note: This is not the Rakudo Star release, which is scheduled for July 29, 2010. The Star release will include the compiler, an installer, modules, a book (PDF), and more.

The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named after a Perl Mongers group. The July 2010 release is code named "Atlanta" in recognition of Atlanta.pm and their Perl 5 Phalanx project, which they selected for its benefits to Perl 6.

Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this release include:

Rakudo now properly constructs closures in most instances.

Undefined objects can now autovivify into arrays or hashes when subscripted with .[ ] or .{ } .

Arrays can now handle infinite ranges.

Generic, multi-level Whatever-currying now works, e.g. (1, 1, *+* ... *).

The REPL shell now remembers lexical declarations in susbsequent lines.

The open()` subroutine now returns a Failure instead of throwing a fatal exception.

Rakudo now provides $*ARGFILES for reading from files specified on the command line.

Added $*PERL , moved %*VM to $*VM .

Simple binding operators := and ::= now work.

Simple feed operators <== and ==> now work.

For a more detailed list of changes see docs/ChangeLog .

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification.

The following people contributed to this release: Patrick R. Michaud, Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, Solomon Foster, Carl Masak, Bruce Gray, Martin Berends, chromatic, Will "Coke" Coleda, Matthew (lue), Timothy Totten, maard, Kodi Arfer, TimToady, Stephen Weeks, Patrick Abi Salloum, snarkyboojum, Radu Stoica, Vyacheslav Matjukhin, Andrew Whitworth, cognominal, Tyler Curtis, Alex Kapranoff, Ingy döt Net, Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯, mathw, lue, Вячеслав Матюхин

If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#32) is scheduled for August 19, 2010. A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2010 is available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each Parrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!