Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #27 ("Copenhagen")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
March 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #27 "Copenhagen".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org).  The tarball for the March 2010 release
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release named
after a Perl Mongers group.  The March 2010 release is code named
"Copenhagen" for Copenhagen.pm, hosts of the Perl 6 Copenhagen 
Hackathon [1], which took place in connection with the Open Source Days
Conference. The main goal of the hackathon was to raise some awareness
around Perl 6, and to give everyone a chance to get their hands-on with
Perl 6.

The Copenhagen hackathon helped nail down a number of issues regarding
module loading. During these days we also saw a heightened activity on
the channel, in the Perl 6 and Rakudo repositories, and in the number of
passing tests. All this was contributed by people both on location and
elsewhere. The RT queue peaked at 725 new/open tickets, and then started
on a downward trend. Apart from the great steps forward in productivity,
it was the first time some of the core Perl 6 contributors had a chance
to meet.

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

*  Numerous updates to trigonometric functions and the Rat class

*  Basic s/// and s[...] = '...' implemented

*  use improved and need/import implemented, with some basic support
   for versioned modules and lexical importation

*  Grammars work again and now include support for regexes taking
   parameters and proto-regexes

*  Series operator now has basic support for the current Spec.

*  User defined operators working again

*  Support, though with caveats, for !, R, X and Z meta-operators

*  Performance improvements for invocation and hash creation

*  Various parsing bugs fixed

*  Variables initialized to Any by default now, not Mu

*  ROADMAP updates

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

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
making Rakudo Perl possible.  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 (#28) is scheduled for April 22, 2010.
A list of the other planned release dates and codenames 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!

[1] http://conferences.yapceurope.org/hack2010dk/
