[Pdx-pm] "Final report" for Mozilla Foundation and TPF Perl 6 development grant

[Eric Wilhelm]

Hi all,

A recap of the work that Patrick Michaud has been doing on Perl 6 and 
rakudo/parrot for the past year or so:

  http://www.rakudo.org/2008/09/final-report-for-mozilla-found.html

  http://www.parrot.org/
  http://rakudo.org/
  http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/synopsis.html
  http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/t/spec

So, "how could I get rakudo and run some perl 6 today?", you ask?

Well, you could read this:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?what_can_i_do_with_perl_6_today

But reading is boring, right?

  svn co https://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk parrot
  cd parrot
  perl Configure.pl
  make
  make coretest
  cd languages/perl6
  make
  make coretest

  Perl="../../parrot perl6.pbc"

  $Perl -e 'say "hello"'

  $Perl -e '
    my @a = 1..5;
    say @a.reverse.join(", ");'

  $Perl -e '
    my @a = ([1..5],["a".."k"]);
    say @a.map({$_.join(",")}).join("|");'

  $Perl -e '
    my %h = (foo => 1, bar => 2, baz => 3);
    say %h.keys.map({$_ ~ " => " ~ %h{$_}}).join("\n");'

Also `make spectest_regression`, which will download lots of perl 6 code 
from the pugs project into t/spec/ for your reading pleasure.

There are still a few hubcaps that fall off of rakudo when you kick the 
tires.  The lack of IO, missing %*ENV (it seems), and list slices 
(@list[0,3] silently and unhelpfully takes the scalar(0,3) and gives 
you the thing at index 2 at the moment.)

And there is no infinite list yet?  This error message is unfortunately 
seeming rather typical at this stage.

  $Perl -e 'my @list = 0..*; say @list[42]'

And...

  wget http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/examples/algorithms/hanoi.pl
  $Perl hanoi.pl
  $Perl hanoi.pl 6
  $Perl hanoi.pl 8 Segfault :-(

I was hoping to include a module, but I'm not readily finding an example 
and this is getting long anyway.

--Eric
-- 
Issues of control, repair, improvement, cost, or just plain
understandability all come down strongly in favor of open source
solutions to complex problems of any sort.
--Robert G. Brown
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