address@hidden: Parrot 0.0.3 is released]

[Norbert Bollow]

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Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 00:14:17 +0000
From: Simon Cozens <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Parrot 0.0.3 is released
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address@hidden still works, but simon-cozens.org or netthink.co.uk are 
preferred.

I'll send this out more widely on Tuesday, but here it is...
- --------------

    A great crowd of people were standing all round the Stone Table and
    though the moon was shining many of them carried torches which burned
    with evil-looking red flames and black smoke. But such people! Ogres
    with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil
    trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won't describe
    because if I did the grownups would probably not let you read this
    book---Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets,
    Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins.

                                 - "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe",
                                                                  CS Lewis

What have we unleashed? As promised, the latest release of Parrot, 0.0.3,
contains support for complex, language-specific data types to be created.
PMCs, or Parrot Magic Cookies, are abstract object data types, with class
libraries written in C specifying their behaviour. 

To start you off, we have implemented nice, happy, polymorphic Perl undef,
Perl Integer, Perl String and Perl Number classes. There's also a default
class you can inherit from if you're rolling your own data types. See
docs/vtables.pod for all the juicy details.

That's not all, however... We've more documentation, examples, a
minature Scheme implementation, support for pushing and popping onto
register and global user stacks, subroutine support for Jako, better
platform support, and a whole lot more. See the NEWS and ChangeLog files
for the rest.

You can get the source tarball in (currently) two different ways:
    From CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SI/SIMON/parrot-0.0.3.tar.gz
               http://www.cpan.org/src/parrot-0.0.3.tar.gz
               (once the mirrors have updated)

    From CVS:  See the Parrot CVS home page at http://cvs.perl.org/

Once you've unpacked parrot, you should be able to run "Configure.pl" and
"make test_prog", and then run some tests:

    perl Configure.pl
    make test_prog
    make test

Take a look at docs/parrot.pod for where to go from there.

The special kudos for this release goes to Jeff Goff, who produced most of
the vtable methods for the Perl Number and Perl String classes.

There are two major goals for Parrot 0.0.4; first, I'd like to see the
string handling stuff all sorted out, by bringing the support for UTF8,
UTF16 and UTF32 up to the current standards of support for plain old ASCII.
Secondly, we want array and hash support. Amazingly, Jeff has apparently
already done most of this.

Patches should be sent to the perl6-internals mailing list, where I'll take
a look at them and apply them to the CVS tree. As time goes by, people who
regularly submit good patches will be given committer access to the tree,
and can help me out applying other patches from the list.

Have fun,
Simon

- -- 
new      P1, PerlString
set      P1, "Just Another Parrot Hacker, "
print    P1
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