From mark at purdue.edu  Wed Feb  3 18:27:22 2016
From: mark at purdue.edu (Mark Senn)
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2016 21:27:22 -0500
Subject: [Purdue-pm] January 2016 Rakudo Star out
Message-ID: <33676.1454552842@pier.ecn.purdue.edu>

The January 2016 release of Rakudo Star is out.
See below for the official announcement.
Perl 6 is a much better language than Perl 5 in my opinion.
Mark Senn, Systems Programmer, Engineering Computer Network, Purdue University


To: perl6-users at perl.org, perl6-language at perl.org, perl6-compiler at perl.org
From: Tobias Leich <email at froggs.de>
Subject: Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2016.01
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2016 22:05:31 +0100

# Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2016.01

## A useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce
the January 2016 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable production
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the January 2016 release is 
available
from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This is the first post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and
implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all 
module
tests pass on supported platforms).

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional 
with the
JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend only.

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 2016.01.1 
<https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rakudo/rakudo/2016.01.1/docs/announce/2016.01.md> 
of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo>, version
2016.01 of MoarVM <http://moarvm.org/>, plus various modules, 
documentation, and other resources
collected from the Perl 6 community.

[release 2016.01]: 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rakudo/rakudo/2016.01.1/docs/announce/2016.01.md
[Rakudo Perl 6 compiler]: http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo
[MoarVM]: http://moarvm.org/

Some of the new compiler features since the last Rakudo Star release 
include:

+ Chained .grep calls on Supply fixed (RT #127297)
+ Fixed interaction with perl6-debug and precompilation that resulted in an
   endless loop
+ re-enabled warning when smart-matching against a True or False literal
+ Fixed internal error when reporting certain type errors (RT #127207)
+ Fixed rare "duplicate definition of symbol" errors (RT #127107)
+ Fixed interpolating of pairs with non-key strings into signatures
+ Fixed error when smart-matching Seq against a Set (RT #127166)
+ Improved error message when smart-matching against an S///-expression
+ Fixed bad interaction between EXPORTHOW and multiple declarations (RT 
#126566)
+ Fixed various issues regarding precompilation
+ Improved accuracy of Complex.sqrt
+ hyper now preserves order of results, as designed
+ Range.sum on an empty, numeric Range is now 0
+ Fixed Promise.allof() with an empty list of promises (RT #127101)
+ Improved message on premature virtual method call (RT #127097)
+ Better error message for module load failures of types that are part of
   the setting
+ Support for Readline in addition to Linenoise
+ Initial shaped array support
+ \r\n (Carriage Return/LineFeed) is now a single (synthetic) grapheme
+ Unicode support adheres to Unicode Annex #29
+ Unicode quotes are now also allowed in regular expressions
+ Improved newline support with "use newline" and updates to IO::Handle
+ Added List.head, List.tail, List.repeated methods
+ Str.encode now allows :replacement parameter for unencodable sequences
+ Str.split now accepts multiple strings to split on
+ New Range.int-bounds returns first/last value for integer ranges
+ Auto-generated meta-ops vivified by referring to them, instead of 
executing
+ Illegal assignment of different Numeric values now caught at compile time
+ &nextcallee implemented, which returns the routine that nextsame would 
invoke
+ Many speedups

Notable changes in modules shipped with Rakudo Star:

* Bailador: The PSGI module by default now sets p6sgi instead of psgi
* DBIish: Many fixes
* Digest::MD5: Updated to conform to new newline handling
* doc: p6doc -l added. p6doc now works for most non-core docs with pod
* LWP::Simple: Replace "as Int" with proper coercion type to fix build
* Linenoise: Many fixes
* MIME::Base64: Adjust to pack being made experimental
* panda: Large number of precomp and other bug fixes.  Now depends on 6.c
* Template::Mojo: use MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL
* Shell::Command: removed "as"

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
   * non-blocking I/O (in progress)
   * some bits of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's
backends 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 rakudobug at perl.org <mailto:rakudobug at perl.org>.

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.
Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory 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
http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler at perl.org 
<mailto:perl6-compiler at perl.org>
mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

From mark at purdue.edu  Thu Feb  4 06:40:23 2016
From: mark at purdue.edu (Mark Senn)
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2016 09:40:23 -0500
Subject: [Purdue-pm] Rakudo Star vs. rakudobrew
Message-ID: <21016.1454596823@pier.ecn.purdue.edu>

SUMMARY

At this point, rakudobrew should probably only be used by people developing
the perl 6 spec, and/or rakudo & components. If you want to *use* Perl 6,
you want Rakudo Star.  I've been using Rakudo Star and have been very happy
with it.


DETAILS

>Subject: Re: Confused about rakudobrew and Rakudo Star
>From: Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
>To: Brock Wilcox <awwaiid at thelackthereof.org>
>Cc: James E Keenan <jkeen at verizon.net>, perl6-users <perl6-users at perl.org>
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=047d7b87465c0c961c052af2848b
>
>On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Brock Wilcox <awwaiid at thelackthereof.org>
>wrote:
>
>> I see Moritz replied to this also saying that the tarball is the way to
>> go. I'd love to know what I'm missing out on by doing it this way.
>
>Probably nothing right now.
>
>The big issue will come later: rakudo HEAD will be working toward a v6.d
>spec in the future, while Star will continue to target v6.c. (I think I've
>already seen a v6.d-targeted proposed spec change.) So Star will get you a
>stable language, whereas rakudobrew will get you a moving target that might
>produce surprises.
>
>At this point, rakudobrew should probably only be used by people developing
>the perl 6 spec, and/or rakudo & components. If you want to *use* Perl 6,
>you want Star.
>
>-- 
>brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
>allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
>unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net


-mark

From mark at purdue.edu  Fri Feb  5 05:38:00 2016
From: mark at purdue.edu (Mark Senn)
Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2016 08:38:00 -0500
Subject: [Purdue-pm] example Perl 6 program
Message-ID: <21012.1454679480@pier.ecn.purdue.edu>

Purdue Perl Mongers, here is an example Perl 6 program that runs on my
Red Hat Linux computer using Rakudo Star 2016.01.  Thought you might be
interested.  You may want to rewrite this in Perl 5 to see if you like
Perl 5 or Perl 6 better (I much prefer Perl 6).  -mark

#!/home/pier/e/mark/bin/perl6

# Give an error message if we aren't using the right version of Perl.
use v6c;

# The data.txt file is
#     10
#     20
#     30
# without the "#     " at the beginning of the lines.
my @x = lines slurp 'data.txt';

# This prints
#     3 numbers, average is 20
say @x.elems, " numbers, average is ", ([+] @x) / @x.elems;

# Print same output using {...} to interpolate expressions in quotes.
say "{@x.elems} numbers, average is {([+] @x) / @x.elems}";

From mark at purdue.edu  Tue Feb  9 10:05:26 2016
From: mark at purdue.edu (Mark Senn)
Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 13:05:26 -0500
Subject: [Purdue-pm] running Perl 6 in the browser
Message-ID: <17721.1455041126@pier.ecn.purdue.edu>

Purdue Perl Mongers,

See
  http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/ian-hague-perl-6-grant-applica.html
for a grant application to run Perl 6 in the browser.

I think that would be very nice.  Thought you might be interested.

Mark Senn, Systems Programmer, Engineering Computer Network, Purdue University