use Perl

Yay for a hugely productive weekend. Our newest committer and golfer extraordinaire, Andrew Savige, rekindled the Original Santa Claus golf course in Pugs, launching a very long thread on Perl Monks and a flurry of commits from #perl6.

With rg0now, Juerd and nothingmuch's help, we have implemented the following features for this golf course:

• reverse for both strings and lists.
• The .= operator, so @list.=reverse works.
• Nested ?? :: now parses correctly, even inside brackets.
• Postfix ... now works again.
• my $a == $b no longer parses are my $a = =$b.
• my ($a, $b, $c) = (1..10) now works the same as Perl5.

I am absolutely delighted about this golf-driven development. After all, Pugs stands for Perl6 User's Golfing system, and it is my sincere wish that golfers can help pushing Pugs forward.

Actually, I think golfing in Perl 6 will be much more fun than Perl 5 (where it is already very much fun). Instead of being constrained to regex and $_-defaulting primitives, the other schools will now be much more competitive, with concise syntax for objects, closures, and nondeterminisms with junctions.

In other news, theorbtwo implemented pugs --help and added me to the AUTHORS file. Also before this golfing frenzy, I made all unit tests pass, by implementing ||=, //= etc, and fixed [...] so it is again evaluated in list context.

That is it for today. Tomorrow should see the release of 6.0.11. Happy golfing!