    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #28 ("Moscow")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
March 2010 development release of Rakudo Perl #28 "Moscow".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org).  The tarball for the April 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 April 2010 release is code named
"Moscow" in recognition of Москва.пм and their invitation of Jonathan
Worthington, one of our core develepors, to speak at the Russian Internet
Technologies 2010 [1] conference.

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

*  Expressions that begin with a variable and end with a circumfix now properly
   interpolate into double-quoted strings, like "@array.sort()" or
   "%hash<key>".

*  Item assignment now has tighter precdence than list assignment, so both
   'my @a = 1, 2, 3' and '$a = 1, $b = 2' magically work.

*  Most of the DateTime built-in type has been backported from the "alpha"
   branch, and is now accompanied by a Date type for date-only calculations.
   
*  Many obsolete uses of Perl 5 constructs are now caught and give helpful
   error messages.

*  As always, many additional small features and bug fixes make working with
   Rakudo more pleasant.

*  Rakudo now passes 30,931 spectests. We estimate that there are about
   39,000 tests in the test suite, so Rakudo passes about 79% of all tests.

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 (#29) is scheduled for May 20, 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://ritconf.ru/
