The Perl Journal March, 2005
After only two months of development, Autrijus Tang's Pugs—an implementation of the Perl 6 language written in Haskell—has hit its 6.0.12 release, representing "full support for source code written in UTF-8, and Perl 5-compatible regular expression matching as rx:perl5//." Several bug fixes have also been made, and tests and documentation added.
Pugs' unique naming scheme requires that the major and minor version numbers converge to 2pi; the initial release was 6.0, and the next milestone will be reached in the 6.2 release. Currently, the planned milestones are:
Pugs developer Stevan Little commented on perlmonks.org: "Much of 6.2 is already in 6.0.12 actually...We have basic IO and most of the standard control flow statements (for, if, else, elsif, unless, while & until are all there and tested). Mutable variables is getting there (I just did some tests for those today). Assignment is mostly in place as well. I believe that the plan is for 6.2 to hopefully be released shortly after the YAPC::Taiwan Pugs Hack-a-thon."
The Pugs homepage is http://pugscode.org/.
Meanwhile, the Parrot virtual machine (http://www.parrotcode.org/) has also been updated, to Version 0.1.12. Parrot is the target for the Perl 6 compiler; it's also designed to execute bytecode for other dynamic languages. Parrot 0.1.2 includes Patrick Michaud's Parrot Grammar Engine. According to the release notes, it also features new string-handling code, including charset and encoding for strings; parts of a generational garbage collector; improved support for Python, separated into dynclasses; and better test coverage and documentation.
In the wake of the new release, Dan Sugalski announced that he's yielding the role of Parrot design lead to Chip Salzenburg, a former Perl pumpking. Leo Totsch will continue as Parrot pumpking. As Dan wrote in his blog (http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/ blog/archives/000391.html): "Chip's a sharp guy, and I have no worries that between Chip and Leo that Parrot's in good hands. I expect the news'll not take too many people by surprise, as it was past due. I've been essentially missing the past few months, with Real Life (pesky thing that—I think I disapprove) getting in the way...From now on? Mostly I'm dealing with the other things taking up my time. I'm just a regular user of parrot, albeit one with more knowledge of how it works than is good for my sanity."
The Perl Foundation has awarded Ivan Tubert-Brohman, author of dozens of CPAN modules, a $1000 development grant to create a web interface for users to comment on CPAN modules. As Ivan elaborated in his grant proposal (http://www.perlfoundation .org/gc/grants/2005_q1.html):
"There are many modules on CPAN that don't have mailing lists or other discussion venues. Scattered discussions may happen in various places, or some users may post general comments on cpanratings.perl.org. However, there is no central place where users can help each other by commenting on specific features, uses, gotchas, tips, and tricks for all Perl modules. A limitation of sites such as CPANRatings (and to a certain degree other sites that host reviews) is that the comments appear out of the context of the module's documentation, so they are necessarily general unless the comment's author decides to write a long review to establish context. AnnoCPAN intends to fill this gap by allowing users to add public annotations on the margin of the documentation of every module on CPAN."
The grant period is for one or two months, so AnnoCPAN should debut soon.
The second Italian Perl Workshop has been announced for June 23-24 at the University of Pisa's Polo Fibonacci. The registration fee of 50 Euros (35 Euros for students) covers attendance at the workshop; printed proceedings from every talk; two lunches, one dinner, and four coffee breaks; as well as a T-shirt. See http:// www.perl.it/workshop/ for details.
Registration is now open for this year's Yet Another Perl Conference, North America, to be held in Toronto, Canada from June 27-29 at a facility within the University of Toronto. The full registration fee is $85. Hotel discounts for groups will be available until early May. Also, YAPC::NA is still accepting proposals for talks; see http://yapc.org/America/ for more.
Lastly, OSCON Europe is tentatively scheduled for October 17-20 in Amsterdam. Conference planner Nathan Torkington wrote in his blog (http://oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6616): "Everything about it is still in the planning stage, though I'm getting a feel for the focus. It'll be smaller than the Portland OSCON, though we hope it'll grow over time as attendance grows. As with OSCON, we expect most of the attendees to be from companies using or thinking about using open source, and speakers to be the alpha geeks building the open-source projects. More details, obviously, when the CFP comes out."