From c012d8b882480151d8eb7da92c4cca80d1d9b814 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: pmichaud Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:36:53 -0500 Subject: Move skel/ into top-level directory, to try building directly from the repo. --- docs/announce/2012.08 | 104 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 104 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2012.08 (limited to 'docs/announce/2012.08') diff --git a/docs/announce/2012.08 b/docs/announce/2012.08 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f734c36 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2012.08 @@ -0,0 +1,104 @@ +Announce: Rakudo Star - a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 + +On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to +announce the August 2012 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and +usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the August 2012 +release is available from . +A Windows .MSI version of Rakudo star will usually appear in +the downloads area shortly after the tarball release. + +In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language +("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as +"Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2012.08 [0] of the +Rakudo Perl 6 compiler [1], version 4.6 of the Parrot Virtual +Machine [2], and various modules, documentation, and other +resources collected from the Perl 6 community. + +Some of the new features added to this release include: + +This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error +reporting and better failure modes. More exceptions are thrown as typed +exceptions, and more meta-model errors have been fixed to properly +report line numbers. + +Starting with this release, we will also identify changes to the +implementation or specification that can cause breakages in existing +Perl 6 code. The following features have been deprecated or modified +due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are being removed +or changed as follows: + +[TODO: update the below list] + +* IO::File and IO::Dir will go away, and &dir now returns values of type + IO::Path (which is currently the superclass of IO::File and IO::Dir). + The return values of &dir will still stringify to the base name of the + returned file and directory names, and you can call .path on them to + obtain the full path. + +* Leading whitespace in rules and under :sigspace will no longer be + converted to <.ws> . For existing regexes that expect this conversion, + add a in front of leading whitespace to make it meta again. + Scheduled for the 2012.08 release. + +* The ?-quantifier on captures in regexes currently binds the capture + slot to a List containing either zero or one Match objects; i.e., it + is equivalent to "** 0..1". In the future, the ?-quantifier will + bind the slot directly to a captured Match or to Nil. Existing code + can manage the transition by changing existing ?-quantifiers to + use "** 0..1", which will continue to return a List of matches. + Scheduled for the 2012.08 release, but may end up in 2012.09 . + +* The method Str.bytes will be removed. To get the number of codepoints + in a string, use .codes instead. To get the number of bytes in a + given encoding, use $str.encode($encoding).bytes . + Scheduled for the 2012.08 release. + +* The method Str.lcfirst will be removed without replacement. + Scheduled for the 2012.08 release. + +* The method Str.ucfirst will eventually be removed, and replaced by + Str.tc. + No schedule yet, depends on having tc implemented first. + +* 'abs' is currently a prefix operator, and will be changed to a normal + subroutine. + Scheduled for the 2012.08 release. + +* The integer argument to IO::Socket.recv will be interpreted as number of + characters/codepoints. + Scheduled for the 2012.08 release. + +There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not +yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming +releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include: + + * macros + * threads and concurrency + * Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints + * interactive readline that understands Unicode + * non-blocking I/O + * much of Synopsis 9 + +There is a new online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features +that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo Star +2012.08 and other Perl 6 implementations. + +In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the +programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are +many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken +features are welcomed at . + +See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about +Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference +materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. +An updated draft of a Perl 6 book is available as + in the release tarball. + +The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors +for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, +see , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org +mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode. + +[0] https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2012.08 +[1] http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[2] http://parrot.org/ -- cgit v1.1