The Sleep scripting project has released version 2.1-b10. They write in, "Getting closer to the 2.1-stable (another 2 releases or so). Relevant changes include: unicode friendly I/O print and read operations. Added \x and \u escapes for specifying character literals. Added assignment operations (i.e. +=, *=, |=, etc.). A bug that prevented reporting out of context bareword tokens as errors was fixed."