Perl 6 Tidings from October 2009

These tidings posts seem to become rather sparse, but I hope you get some news by reading the Planet Six feed aggregator anyway.

Specification

• Larry lifted up the dual nature of Ranges. They mostly serve as an interval now, for smart iteration the series operator has been pimped up. You can now write for 1, 3 ... *+2, 9 { .say } to print all the odd numbers between 1 and 9. (r28344, r28348, r28351).
• Rational and Complex types now have their own literals (r28173).
• Stubbed classes are now documented (r28196, r28197).
• The new S08 documents Parcels and Captures.
• The numeric types have been cleaned up a lot (r28502 and later commits up to r28597).
• New and improved signature introspection (r28664, r28665).

Compilers

Rakudo

As opposed to two months ago, Rakudo now

• supports the Rat type
• supports overloading of many built-in operators
• has contextual variables
• has a faster and much better signature binder
• supports all kind of trigonometric functions, including on complex numbers
• implements sophisticated signature introspection

Patrick Michaud is also working on a new tool named npq-rx, which combines a self-hosting NQP compiler and a new regex engine, which already supports proto regexes, NQP code assertions and closures, and is generally much faster and better than PGE.

Sprixel

Mathew Wilson aka diakopter started sprixel, a Perl 6 to Javascript compiler.

Mildew

Mildew now has an experimental javascript emitter.

Other matters

perl6.org is redesigned again, this time spanning multiple pages, thus allowing much more stuff to be linked there.

Four Perl 6 and Rakudo hackers announced that they are writing a Perl 6 book, the print release of which shall coincide with the release of Rakudo Star.