DrForr writes " It was the dawning of the second age of parrotkind, ten weeks after the great GC war. The Parrot Project was a dream given form. Its goal: To prevent language wars by creating an interpreter where perl and other languages could reside peacefully... It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace. This is the story of the latest of the Parrot releases. The year is 2002. The name of the tarfile is Parrot 0.0.5.
[Apologies to J. Michael Straczynski]
The Parrot Team is pleased to announce the release of Parrot 0.0.5, soon to be available on your local CPAN mirror as CPAN/authors/id/J/JG/JGOFF/parrot-0.0.5.tar.gz."
"From the NEWS file:
New in 0.0.5
- Full GC
- Perl Scalar support in PMCs
- Array and Hash types almost ready for prime-time
- Internal support for keyed types
- EMACS editing mode
- New PDDs
- New Language - BASIC
- Regular expression compiler
- More tests
- Many, many bug fixes, enhancements, and speedups
I'd personally like to thank everyone on the Parrot development team for contributing to what's turned out to be a great release. Parrot is finally starting to look like a stable platform for development, especially with the attention paid to GC and string issues. The BASIC language gives people more toys to play with, and Perl scalars help prove that we can indeed handle Perl6 when the design process is finished.
Over the next few days, expect an updated roadmap as to where we see Parrot going. Complete support for keyed PMC types will be one of the first items to be checked off, followed shortly by regular expressions and symbol tables.
If you want to join in on the fun, start by downloading a copy of
parrot-0.0.5 at CPAN at one of the following URLs (or a mirror):
http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/J/JG/JGOFF/parrot-0.0.5.tar.gz
http://www.cpan.org/src/parrot-0.0.5.tar.gz
To get the latest CVS version, http://cvs.perl.org/ has the information you need.
Once you've unpacked Parrot, build it as follows:
perl Configure.pl
make
make test
After you've done that, look at docs/parrot.pod to learn more about it.
Discussion of Parrot takes place on the perl6-internals mailing list,
and patches should be sent there as well. If you're not subscribed, look
at:
http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl6-internals
for tips on how to subscribe. CVS commit access is given out to
developers who consistently submit good patches to the mailing list.
Have fun, and hack well."
