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Perl 6 Progress Discussed

By Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2008-11-04

You may want to pull together some philosophy textbooks and a dictionary; all of them seem like useful resources in a new debate on whether or not Perl 6 is vaporware. Still, regardless of how you define Perl 6's existence, some interesting tidbits concerning its development were mentioned.

Someone with the screen name "chromatic" went to Perl 6's defense when Neil McAllister first used the v-word. He or she wrote, "While the software isn't finished ... it does exist and has existed for years. We do all of our development in public; we even have a graph of passing specification tests updated daily."

Furthermore, "Through Pugs and Rakudo (and other projects -- Perl 6 is a specification which we expect to have multiple compatible implementations), people have been able to and have in fact run real Perl 6 code for over three years. In fact, the Parrot project has released a new stable version of Parrot on the third Tuesday of every month for the past two years. This includes a new stable version of Rakudo, the Perl 6 implementation running on Parrot."

There's not a lot of new information, then (and certainly not a release date), but chromatic's given plenty of signs that Perl 6 hasn't been abandoned. To people who haven't followed the situation too closely, that may come as news and/or bring relief.

The update info and rising graphs also signal that, no matter what sort of official status Perl 6 currently enjoys, it's liable to enter the real world at some point.

About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.




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