perlnews
particle
<p>Aloha!</p>
<p>On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.1
"Bird of Paradise." <a href="http://parrotcode.org/">Parrot</a>
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.</p>
<p>Parrot 0.6.1 can be obtained via <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/parrot">CPAN</a>
(soon), or <a href="http://parrotcode.org/source.html">follow the download instructions</a>.
For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself,
we recommend using <a href="http://subversion.tigris.org/">Subversion</a>
or <a href="http://svk.bestpractical.com/">SVK</a>
on <a href="https://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/">our source code repository</a>
to get the latest and best Parrot code.</p>
<p>Parrot 0.6.1 News:<br/>
<pre>
- Specification
+ drafted pdd29_compiler_tools.pod
+ updated pdd28_character_sets.pod draft
+ updated pdd19_pir.pod draft
- Languages
+ c99: added independent C pre-processor
+ HQ9+: reimplemented with PCT
+ Lua:
. reimplementation with PCT, using PAST and POST
. behavior aligned wih 5.1.3
+ Rakudo:
. implemented basic I/O, including '$*IN', '$*OUT', '$*ERR', 'prefix:='
. implemented simple typing and runtime type checking
. added basic multi-method dispatch
. expanded named argument handling, including Pair and colonpairs
. added 'Whatever' and 'Capture' classes
. implemented 'handles' trait verb
. added 'loop' statement
. implemented 'given', 'when', 'for', 'while', 'until' statement modifiers
. implemented Hash methods '.keys' and '.values'
. fixed bug to get '.WHAT' working correctly
. initial implementation of 'eval'
- Compilers
+ NQP:
. created a bootstrapped build, see 'make boot'
. added 'infix:<', 'infix:<=', 'infix:>', 'infix:>=' relational operators
. added 'postfix:++', 'postfix:--' operators
+ PCT:
. added methods specifying default behaviors in PAST, reducing repeated code
. improved symbol table lookup
+ PGE:
. removed deprecated code including: P6Regex, P6Grammar, PAST-pm
- Miscellaneous
+ notable speedups during compilation and execution of parrot and HLLs
+ pdb (the parrot debugger) can now catch parrot exceptions
+ better detection of glibc and gettext during configuration
+ various bugfixes, code cleanups, deprecations, and coding standard fixes
</pre></p>
<p>Mahalo to all our contributors for making this possible, and our
sponsors for supporting this project.</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-85567">
<p>~Particle *<em>accelerates</em>*</p>
</div></div>