Parrot 0.6.1 "Bird of Paradise" Released

davorg on 2008-04-16T10:13:00

particle writes "Aloha!

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.1 "Bird of Paradise." Parrot (http://parrotcode.org/) is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.6.1 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on the source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.6.1 News:
- 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:>=' 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

Mahalo to all our contributors for making this possible, and our
sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!"


Creepy coincidence in latest Parrot release name

laburu on 2008-05-06T01:19:55

It is (to me) an odd coincidence that they chose Bird of Paradise as the name of the latest Parrot release. I used this very term a few months ago (on February 10) in an entry about free software hackers on my Advogato diary and, a few days ago, in a brief note about Perl hackers on my use Perl; user journal. I take this synchronicity as an indication – or would that be a symptom – of assimilation, and wonder what other such moments Perl's onion has in store for me.