Perl 6 coming soon

After nine years of intense development, the Perl community has something to be happy about. Patrick Michaud, lead developer for the Perl 6 implementation on Rakudo, announced in journal entry for use Perl the release of intermediate version of Perl 6 in the Spring of 2010.

Rakudo implements many new features and lifts old limitations:

• Many built-In routines are now written in Perl 6
• Eval () and classes now have access to outer lexical variables
• Much Improved Unicode Support, both in IO and regular expressions
• punning of roles when new is called
• Typed arrays and hashes, parametric roles
• Routine return types are now enforced
• Error messages now contain backtraces with filenames and line numbers
• Multi dispatch is now implemented with a custom dispatcher and signature binder, bringing much improvements over the dispatch and binding semantics that parrot supports.
• User-defined operators now possible, and automatically generate some of their associated meta-operators.
• Contextual variables
• User-defined traits are now possible; some of the built-in traits are now written in pure Perl 6.
• Rational numbers are now implemented, and support for Complex numbers has been much improved.
• routine signatures can now be introspected properly.

Perl 6 has been listed to be available for $29.00 in markets in earlier spring 2010.