Looks like my Perl browser isn’t working anymore. Pity.

Anyways, I finally took a closer look at Pugs.

Raku has been a long time coming. A very long time indeed. For a few years, Perl developers heard about how great Perl 6 was going to be, but didn’t see any sign of code. Sure, Perl 6 was going to be huge, but when were we going to be able to play with it on our own? A beta build is supposedly due sometime in 2007 or so, but for now we have the magical toy that is Pugs. Pugs is the brainchild of Audrey Tang, who deserves heaps of praise for such an ambitious undertaking. We can use Pugs to get a feel for the newness of Perl 6 without waiting for the mythical beta build.

There are a few ways you can get a copy of Pugs:

• You can download the latest release and build it yourself, which I haven’t quite managed to do yet. It must be emphasized once again that if the moon and stars are not perfectly aligned, I am a very impatient guy.
• You can grab a binary copy and install it that way. That’s what I ended up doing, choosing JonathonWorthington’s builds from the SVN repository. It’s up to date and seems to work for me.

Okay, so there aren’t a lot of ways to get Pugs, but there are a couple for you. Pugs is not for the complete programming novice. You are messing with a language that doesn’t exist yet, after all!

So until Raku is in beta, any time I’m talking about Raku I’m probably talking about Pugs. Or maybe Parrot. But probably Pugs.