Rakudo Perl: February 2008 Archives

Recently I've been doing more work on implementing Perl 6 OO support in Rakudo. You can read the full write-up, but as an overview:

• Attributes are now more in line with S12, storing them at $!foo under the hood no matter what twigil they are declared with, generating an accessor/mutator of the twigil is '.' and creating a lexical alias to the attribute if there is no twigil (so has $x means you can use $x and $!x to refer to the attribute).
• The initial work to support inheritance is in place. And it really is implemented through a generic trait application mechanism, not special-case code.
• The "self" keyword can be used now.
• The very initial bits of work on roles are in, but the composition semantics are not correct yet. That will change soon.

Enjoy, and I hope to have more stuff to report on soon.

I strongly believe Rakudo Perl will have faster adoption if it feels like Perl. I've recently added a simple perl6doc utility to Rakudo Perl to move us one small step in that direction. Check out my journal post for more details, and stay tuned for updates to perl6doc and more.