Perl 6 in 2009

“Specification

“The year started with lots of improvements to S19. In January
we also learned that *-1 constructs a closure, which means that
Perl 6 has semi-automatic currying features built into most
operators. Lists, Captures and Parcels

“We’ve seen a lot of talk about slices, lists, captures and
parcels. The heart of the discussions is always how interpolation
and non-interpolation of lists can be made both flexible and
intuitive. For example: should 1, 2, 3 Z ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ return a
single, flat list? or instead a list of lists? How can a function
which receives the result decide for itself what it want to
receive? How does that mix with multi-dimensional arrays?

“I haven’t followed these discussions very closely, and so I’m
hard pressed to give a good summary; however it seems that in the
end an agreement was reached: each parenthesis constructs a Parcel,
short for Parenthesis cell. A Parcel can behave context
sensitively: A single-item Parcel degrades to its contents; as a
signature list it is converted to a Capture object; code object
also return parcels.

“It remains to be seen how multi-dimensional slices (with the @@
sigil) evolve, and if we can’t find anything suitable to replace
them. Built-in Routines

“S29, the list of built-in functions and methods, finally got
some long awaited attention in 2009, starting with Carl
Mäsak’s S29 Laundry List, and later carried on by Timothy
Nelson, who split S29 into a set of documents summarized as
S32.”

Complete
Story