It's been 15 years in the making. Unveiled in October, Perl 6 has been officially released:
On behalf of the Rakudo[1] development team, I'm proud to announce the Christmas release (December 2015) of Rakudo Perl 6 #94 "коледа"[2]. Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Moar Virtual Machine.
[...] Together, we've built a language that:
- Retains the core values of Perl: expressiveness, getting the job done, taking influences from natural language, and pushing the boundaries of language design
- Has clean, modern syntax, rooted in familiar constructs but revisiting and revising the things that needed it
[...] While we are extremely happy to ship an official Perl 6 release, this is not the end of Rakudo's development. We will continue to ship monthly releases, which will continue to improve performance and our users experience. We'll also continue our work on the specification, with feedback from the community.
Related: Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar
[1] According to Wikipedia:
The name "Rakudo" for the Perl 6 compiler was first suggested by Damian Conway.[7] "Rakudo" is short for "Rakuda-dō" (with a long 'o'; 駱駝道), which is Japanese for "Way of the Camel". "Rakudo" (with a short 'o'; 楽土) also means "paradise" in Japanese.
[2] According to Wikipedia:
Koliada or koleda (Cyrillic: коляда, коледа, колада, коледе) is an ancient pre-Christian winter ritual/festival. It was later incorporated into Christmas.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Monday December 28 2015, @02:17AM
They pressed the « » unicode characters into service because they wanted more kinds of brackets than exist in ASCII. Until I do it enough times, I'm having to keep notes on how to type those in. (In Linux, can do ctrl-shift-u then the hex code. For those brackets, the guillemets, the hex codes are ab and bb.)
It's no wonder you're having trouble, trying to memorise hex codes; it might be the only option in some OSes, but you can do much better than that in Linux (or anything else that uses X11, actually). Allow me to introduce the Compose key [wikipedia.org]. You won't have one by default, but you can tweak your keyboard layout to replace some other unused key with it. With the Compose key, you can input those extended characters with sequences of Compose, key, key. For example, ¥ is Compose, Y, =; and the guillemets are Compose, <, < and Compose, >, > for « and ». It also helps with doing accented characters on keyboard layouts that lack them, such as á being Compose, a, '.
Enabling compose keys
The command-line way is to use setxkbmap with the correct -option, such as my preference of using setxkbmap -option compose:rwin to replace the right-side windows key with Compose. Another useful one is compose:menu, which replaces that silly popup menu key. To help with setup, X provides a file that lists all the valid -option entries. On Debian, it's in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst, not sure about other distros. (You can also use setxkbmap -option with no additional arguments to reset to default, in case you don't like your changes)
Once you're set, you can run it at X startup however you like, maybe as part of xinitrc.
Another way to set it up is to check for a GUI configuration provided by whatever desktop environment you prefer. KDE keeps it in System Settings, under the "Regional & Language" section. (Specifically, in that section under Keyboard Layout's advanced tab.) It lists all the -option possibilities and has checkboxes to toggle them for easy testing. GNOME should have something similar, if you use that. No idea about Unity, Xfce, etc.; if in doubt, just go with setxkbmap.
Adding new compose sequences
By default there's a huge assortment of Compose sequences available. You can either search online for a list or look at /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose (replace en_US.UTF-8 with whatever your locale is) on your system; any entry that starts with <Multi_key> is a compose key combination. However, not all extended characters have compose keys. If that's the case, you just have to add your own. X11 checks for ~/.XCompose and uses it instead, so you can create that file and define your own entries. Note that it uses it instead of the system-wide one, so you have to add an include statement to refer back to the original. As an example, this is mine:
include "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose"
<Multi_key> <8> <8> : "∞" # Infinity
<Multi_key> <KP_8> <KP_8> : "∞" # Infinity
<Multi_key> <v> </> : "✓" # check
<Multi_key> <p> <o> : " " # PILE OF POO
This should be all that's needed, at least with most applications; now Compose,p,o outputs 💩, Compose,8,8 prints ∞, and Compose, v, / gives a check (√). However, Gtk apps may ignore custom entries until you set the environment variable GTK_IM_MODULE=xim. This was a problem with Gtk2 apps, not sure about Gtk3.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 29 2015, @03:08AM
Or you can use Emacs and insert Unicode characters by fuzzy matching their name. For example, type "rig dou ang bra", press Enter to select RIGHT DOUBLE ANGLE BRACKET. If you need it a lot, you can always bind it to a key.
Since Emacs supports both server-clients and remote editing, you can use it everywhere. My favorite is running Vim through SSH in an Emacs terminal emulator, then running an Emacs client from within Vim to edit my Neovim configuration on that same remote server.
Yes, that's a joke.
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