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07.27.10
Perl 6 May Finally Be Forthcoming
 By
Bryan Young
Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, has an ongoing joke that he likes to tell during his annual "State of the Onion" speech. He says that Perl 6 will be ready for release by Christmas. The joke lies in that he doesn't say Christmas of which year.
This year is apparently different. Wall dropped several hints in his address that a working Perl 6 "pretty nearly does exist." This is not to say that it's ready for release. It is apparently still very slow and buggy, but still shows much promise. One exciting bit of news is that later this week we should be seeing the release of Rakudo Star, the first official developer release of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. This release is hoped to bring in much feedback from developers as well as to show what Perl 6 will be able to do.
Rakudo Star (officially called Rakudo *), makes note of the new "whatever" operator that will play such a large role in the new Perl. This operator, the *, has many new functions it will be able to carry out. For instance, it can continue a list intuitively. Typing
(1,3,5,7....*)
will return the first twenty odd numbers, starting at 1. Typing
(1,2,4....*)
will return powers of two. Of course, the * will still be used as a wildcard in regular expressions and as the multiplication operator as well. It will just be expanded to have additional meaning in more places.
It remains to be seen if Perl 6 will be ready by Christmas '10, but whenever it is available it is sure to breathe life back into a language that has been described as the Swiss Army Chainsaw of the programming world.
About
the Author:
Bryan Young is a staff writer for WebProNews.
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