New Parrot Version "Alex" Released

dogma01 writes "Parrot the virtual machine for Perl6 and other dynamic languages has released version 0.3.0. If interested you can also help support Parrot development by donating to The Perl Foundation or by getting involved with development."

Re:obligatory grammar nazism

[Bastian]

This is perl-land. Punctuation is always optional in perl-land.

Re:obligatory grammar nazism

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Punctuation is always optional in perl-land.''

No, it's not. In Perl, you have to write semicolons to separate statements, braces for loop constructs (which includes if and unless) (unless the loop construct goes after a statement), commas to separate arguments, and sometimes parentheses.

Donations?

[HRbnjR]

Maybe we should take donations to buy the Perl camel a bigger hump, so it doesn't run out of water waiting for a stable Parrot release! ;)

Re:Donations?

[jd]

The problem is, it's a Dromedary [no-pest.com]. (Only has one hump.) For development cycles, you really need a Bactrian camel. The prehistoric Camel of North America was about the size of a rabbit, which would make it perfect for embedded systems.

Re:Does anyone care?

[vcv]

perl is still heavily used by nix and is great for sysadmins. It's amazing for writing quick dirty scripts.

As far as using it on larger projects, well, some people just like perl.

Re:Does anyone care?

[the morgawr]

Perl is like C: It works fine for large project if you use it correctly, but if you don't know what you are doing, you get crap. For example, the OpenBSD pkg_* tools are written in perl.

Re:Does anyone care?

[tacocat]

So is

• Slashdot
• debian packages
• Amazon

For starters. Perl is better than most people give it credit for. It just lacks a S&M (Sales and Marketing) team.

Re:Does anyone care?

[ajs]

"Perl is better than most people give it credit for. It just lacks a S&M (Sales and Marketing) team."

Perl lacks far more than that:

• Formal parameter lists
• Types
• A stable interpreter-free code generation capability
• Any kind of formal object declaration

Thankfully, these are all features which Perl 6 provides in spades. If you wish to get involved in Perl 6 development, download and compile pugs today!

Speed issues?

[Anonymous Cumshot]

Have they fixed the speed issues? Earlier versions worked but were uber-slow. The devs said that this would be fixed in a future release.