    Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler development release #51 ("Brazos Valley")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm happy to announce the
April 2012 release of Rakudo Perl #51 "Brazos Valley". 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>.

The Rakudo Perl compiler follows a monthly release cycle, with each
release named after a Perl Mongers group. The April 2012 release is
code named after Brazos Valley, because they sponsored a Perl 6
Hackathon. Thanks!

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

* Support for pseudo packages like MY, OUR, DYNAMIC
* Support for indexing into packages like hashes, e.g. Foo::{'$x'}
* Warnings now include line numbers
* Assorted minor optimizations to compilation, Str methods and iteration
* Now passing over 21,400 spec tests.

We are still regressed on a few features compared to the 2011.07 release of
Rakudo, the most notable of which is autovivification. 
These regressions will be rectified in coming releases.

Two incompatible changes in this release are notable:
* $?POD has been renamed to $?pod
* 'defined' used to be a prefix operator, it is now an ordinary
  subroutine. Code like 'defined $a ?? $b !! $c' should be rewritten
  to use 'defined($a)' or '$a.defined' 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, Jonathan Worthington, Patrick R. Michaud, Carl Mäsak,
Timo Paulssen, Tadeusz Sośnierz, Felix Herrmann, spider-mario, benabik,
timotimo, TimToady and  Will "Coke" Coleda.

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 (#52) is scheduled for May 17, 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.

On behalf of the development team, I encourage you to try the new release.
have fun, and let us know about your experience.

[*] 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.
