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Announce: Rakudo Perl development release #15 ("Oslo")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the March 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #15 "Oslo". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the March 2009 release is available from

    http://www.pmichaud.com/perl6/rakudo-2009-03.tar.gz

However, because of the rapid pace of Rakudo development and addition of new features, we still recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain the latest version directly from the main repository at github -- more on this in a bit.

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code named after a Perl Mongers group. This release is named "Oslo" in honor of the organizers of the 2009 Nordic Perl Workshop [2], April 16-17, 2009. The 2009 Nordic Perl Workshop will have a special focus on Perl 6, Rakudo Perl, and Parrot, including Perl 6 tutorials and hackathons after the conference itself.

A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 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.

Rakudo Perl now uses git [3] for its version control system, hosted at http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo . The README file there is kept up-to-date with the latest instructions for obtaining and building Rakudo Perl.

In this release of Rakudo Perl, we've made the following major changes and improvements:

• Rakudo is now passing 7273 spectests. This is an increase of 197 passing tests since the February 2009 release.
• The eval() construct now understands lexical variables from an outer scope.
• More of the builtin functions ("settings") are being written in Perl 6.
• Rakudo supports the "R" (reverse) metaoperator.
• Parsing of if, unless, while, until, etc. statements after blocks now works correctly.
• The Q quote operator is now implemented, along with several adverbial forms. In particular, the Q:PIR form allows inline PIR to be included in Perl 6 code.
• Multi-method dispatch now works with inheritance also.

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Perl possible. The next release of Rakudo (#16) is scheduled for April 23, 2009.

References:
[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/
[2] Nordic Perl Workshop 2009, http://www.perlworkshop.no/npw2009/
[3] Git version control system, http://git-scm.org/