From e050eea08fe9a1afcf49b74b6d49ae9daac0b918 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: pmichaud Date: Wed, 1 May 2013 01:10:10 -0500 Subject: Add draft 2013.04 announcement. --- docs/announce/2013.04.md | 105 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 105 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/announce/2013.04.md (limited to 'docs') diff --git a/docs/announce/2013.04.md b/docs/announce/2013.04.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e5ba1bf --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/announce/2013.04.md @@ -0,0 +1,105 @@ +# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2013.04 + +## 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 April 2013 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable +distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the April 2013 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 2013.04] of the +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler], version 5.3.0 of the [Parrot Virtual +Machine], plus various modules, documentation, and other resources +collected from the Perl 6 community. + +[release 2013.04]: + https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/docs/announce/2013.04.md +[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo +[Parrot Virtual Machine]: http://parrot.org + +Some of the new features added to this release include: + +* Rakudo warns when pure expressions are used in sink context +* .substr(...) now correctly accepts whatever-star closures +* Implemented shellwords postcircumfix (%h<< $x 'foo bar' >>) +* Defining operators spelled like the empty string is now illegal +* Array interpolations now properly do LTM +* Autothread "none" and "all" junctions before "any" and "one" +* Helpful error if you write "else if"/"elif" instead of "elsif" +* Throw exception if a Range is used as a Range endpoint +* Corrected argument order in IO.seek +* wrap low level VM objects in ForeignCode, allowing perl6 OO calls on them +* for loops are eager again +* add link and symlink to IO +* add Capture.Bool() +* improvements to DUMP() +* various optimizations in the optimizer and the runtime +* smartmatch against list now supports Whatever wildcards + +This release also contains a range of bug fixes, improvements to error +reporting and better failure modes. + +The following features have been deprecated or modified from previous +releases due to changes in the Perl 6 specification, and are planned +to be removed or changed as follows: + + * postcircumfix:`<[ ]>` and postcircumfix:`<{ }>` will become + multi-subs rather than multi-methods. Both at_pos and at_key will + remain methods. + + * Unary hyper ops currently descend into nested arrays and hashes. + This will change to make them equivalent to a one-level map. + + * The Str.ucfirst builtin is deprecated; it will be replaced by + Str.tc. + + * 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. + + * 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. + + * The result of failed matches will be Nil instead of a Match + object returning boolean False. + +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: + + * advanced 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 an online resource at +that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo 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 for links to much more information about +Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference +materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A +draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf 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 +mailing list, or join us on IRC \#perl6 on freenode. -- cgit v1.1