[Wellington-pm] Rakudo test-fest

[Sam Vilain]

Hi all,

Rakudo, the Perl 6 implementation that runs on Parrot, is getting near
alpha.  Already many of the hardest problems have been solved; eg, the
object system, multiple method dispatch, grammars/rules, concurrency,
and more.  Of course there is a *huge* amount in the Perl 6
specification, and so it's very likely that much of it will not make it
into the 1.0 release.  But that shouldn't matter - in a way, it's a good
thing that there is a very comprehensive future plan.

What the parrot team are most interested in now is getting feedback from
people using it to write programs.

So what I thought might be fun would be a short session next week,
perhaps on Perl's 21st birthday (Thursday Dec 18th) where we get
together, have a system with Rakudo installed (for those who don't want
to have to build it themselves), and basically have a go at hacking on
it and seeing what things are missing for the way you code.  Other
sources of example code to translate and see if they work would be
certain books, I'm thinking of the Llama, the first three chapters of
the Camel and then of course there's Higher Order Perl.  The idea being
that if the examples that are in those book work in Perl 6, then it may
as well be considered finished.

The aim would be to produce contributions to the official test suite (in
the pugs repo).

I'm thinking a couple of hours or so, and it would be held either here
at Catalyst House (previously The Building Formerly Known as Eagle
Technology House) or a pub which is likely to actually have seating room
on a Summer evening.  ie not JJ's.

Any takers?
Sam.