The first draft of the synopsis for the (as yet unwritten) Apocalypse 9 has been released by Larry to the perl6-language list. (Viewable here.) It focuses on the types of things a Perl6 implementation will have to be able to do wrt data structures and data manipulation.

Uhh ... wow. The highlights I saw were:

• The semi-colon now has different meanings, depending on where it's used. It's still the statement delimiter, but it will also attempt to create a list of lists (LoL?) when used as part of a subscript.
• There's a new semi operator, to distribute a semicolon across its parameters.
• You actually can declare multi-dimensional arrays as such.
• Every single list is lazy, until flattened.
• my @x = 1 .. 10:by(2); I think that says it all.
• The default hash iterator is a property called C<.iterator> that can be user replaced. This makes Tie::Hash::Sorted really easy to rewrite. :-)

An item caught my eye and I think it has some serious voodoo potential.

In any scalar context not expecting a junction of values, a junction produces automatic parallelization of the algorithm. In particular, if a junction is used as an argument to any routine (operator, closure, method, etc.), and the scalar parameter you are attempting to bind the argument to is inconsistent with the Junction type, that routine is "autothreaded", meaning the routine will be called automatically as many times as necessary to process the individual scalar elements of the junction in parallel.

Basically, what that means is that you might be able to do something like (Bad Perl6 code ahead!):

if ( some_func( $x | $y | $z ) == $foo ) { ... }
[download]

And, some_func() will return back a junction, if you write it (in?)correctly. That is uber-cool!

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