    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release 2012.09.1

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm announcing an
out-of-schedule release of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. Rakudo is an
implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see
<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for this 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>.

This release is a point release in addition to the regular, monthly
releases.  Rakudo 2012.09 (no .1) required Parrot 4.8.0, which was recently
discovered to have some unfortunate regressions in standard input/output
buffering for many environments.  This interim release restores the 
compiler back to using Parrot 4.4.0 to allow more time to resolve 
I/O issues.  This also means we revert to 2012.08's version of socket
encoding (where sockets all assume utf8 encoding of data), but this
reversion is considered of lesser harm than the regressions in
standard I/O.

Other changes since the 2012.09 release are also included in this
point release:

- add 'is-prime' and 'expmod' operations
- enable smart matching against Signature literals
- enable binding to signatures in declarators
- add the 'is hidden' and base traits
- temporarily remove the ability to change socket encodings (reverts
  to 2012.08's behavior)

Both 2012.09 and 2012.09.1 contain a possibly breaking change from 2012.08:

- class Iterable does not inherit from class Cool anymore

This is only a small peek at the changes in this release. For a more
detailed list, see "docs/ChangeLog".

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:
Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, Patrick R. Michaud, 
Jonathan Scott Duff, Solomon Foster

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 (#57) is scheduled for October 18, 2012. A
list of the other planned release dates and code names for 2012 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur soon after each Parrot
monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

[*] What's the difference between the Rakudo compiler and the Rakudo
    Star distribution?

    The Rakudo compiler is a compiler for the Perl 6 language.
    Nothing else.

    The Rakudo Star distribution is the Rakudo compiler plus a selection
    of useful Perl 6 modules, the most recent incarnation of the "Using
    Perl 6" book, and other software that can be used with the Rakudo
    compiler to enhance its utility.  Rakudo Star is meant for early
    adopters who wish to explore what's possible with Rakudo Perl 6 and
    provide feedback on what works, what doesn't, and what else they
    would like to see included in the distribution.
