    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #33 ("Milan")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
August 2010 release of Rakudo Perl #33 "Milan".  Rakudo is an 
implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see 
<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for the September 2010 release
is available from <http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads>.

Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star distribution --
it's announcing a new release of the compiler only.  For the latest
Rakudo Star release, see <http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads>.

The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each release
named after a Perl Mongers group. The September 2010 release is code named
"Milan", because the release manager happens to like the name :-)

Some of the specific changes and improvements occurring with this
release include:

* The specification for temporal objects (DateTime, Date, Instant and
  Duration) is now completely implemented in Rakudo

* Several performance improvements were implemented, most notably in
  slurp() and reverse() functions

* The series operator has been refactored, and updated to the current
  specification

* Enumeration objects now conform much closer to the current specification

* 'now' and 'time' are now terms (and not functions anymore). This means you
  can now write 'time - 1' and do what you mean, but 'time()' does not work
  anymore

For a more detailed list of changes see "docs/ChangeLog".


Deprecation notice:

* Currently True and False evaluate as '1' and '0' in string context.
  The specification has changed, and in the next release they will
  evaluate to 'Bool::True' and 'Bool::False' in string context.
  To get the old behaviour, use ~+True or ~+False.


The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
making Rakudo Perl possible, as well as those people who worked on 
Parrot, the Perl 6 test suite and the specification.

The following people contributed to this release:

Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, Carl Masak, Patrick Abi Salloum,
Solomon Foster, Kodi Arfer, chromatic, Kyle Hasselbacher, Bruce Gray,
Martin Berends, Stephane Payrard, Tyler Curtis, Shlomi Fish, Nick Wellnhofer,
Nuno  Carvalho, Tadeusz Sośnierz, TiMBuS, NotFound, mathw

If you would like to contribute, see <http://rakudo.org/how-to-help>, ask on
the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#34) is scheduled for October 21, 2010.
A list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2010 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file.  In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
Parrot monthly release.  Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!
