    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #32 ("Pisa")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
August 2010 release of Rakudo Perl #32 "Pisa".  Rakudo is an 
implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine (see 
<http://www.parrot.org>). The tarball for the August 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 August 2010 release is code named
"Pisa" in recognition of its excellent work in organizing
YAPC::EU 2010, "The Renaissance of Perl" [1,2].  Many Rakudo
developers presented at the conference, and it was an excellent
location for a hackathon and planning the next phases of Rakudo
development.

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

* Due to a specification change, Nil is now undefined, and no longer
  simply an empty Parcel.

* Many modifiers are now recognized on the outside of regexes and
  substitutions, for example s:g:samecase/abc/defg/

* Improvements to the performance of integer operations

* Initial implementations of .pack and .unpack methods for the Buf class

* Smartmatching against True or False is now an error. Most people who did
  this really wanted to look at the return value of .so instead.

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, 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, Solomon Foster, Will "Coke" Coleda, 
Carl Mäsak, Jonathan Worthington, Bruce Gray, Patrick Abi Salloum, 
tylercurtis, Kyle Hasselbacher, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Jonathan Scott Duff, 
Christopher J. Madsen, Kodi Arfer, Reini Urban, TimToady, felliott, 
Matt Kraai, Jan Ingvoldstad, szabgab, madsen, Andy Lester, cosimo, 
Fitz Elliott

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 (#33) is scheduled for September 23, 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!

[1] http://www.perl.it/
[2] http://conferences.yapceurope.org/ye2010/
