use Perl

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.4 "St. Vincent Amazon." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.6.4 is available via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.6.4 News:

- Documentation
  + removed a lot of old information from the FAQ
  + improved function level documentation
- Configuration
  + removed the configuration item 'has_gnu_m4'
  + refactored ICU-detection
- Languages
  + ChitChat
    - improved the Smalltalk implementation
  + Pipp
    - renamed Plumhead to Pipp
    - support for a lot of builtin functions.
    - Pipp now uses PHP specific data types.
    - converted from PCT with TGE to PCT with NQP actions
    - improvements in the PCT variant by using optok parsing
    - start of object support
  + pir
    - simple assignments work
  + json
    - added a PCT-based implementation of JSON parsing
  + lolcode
    - improved handling of symbols
    - added support for block handling
    - added support for globals
  + Lua
    - more tests
  + Rakudo
    - updated Range implementation
    - added enums
    - added generic type declarations (::T)
    - added runtime mixing of roles with 'does' and 'but'
    - added generic type declarations
    - fixed handling of implicit lexicals ($_, $!, and $/)
    - fixed implicit method calls on $_
    - improved complex math builtins, added Complex
    - moved many builtins to class Any
    - declaration of lists of variables now work
    - improved test infrastructure
    - 910 additional passing spec tests since last release
    - more convergence with STD.pm grammar
    - added named 0-ary parsing and ops
- Compilers
  + PCT:
    - allowed subroutine and method names to be a PAST tree that produces the name
    - Improved lexical handling
- Tools
  + pbc_disassemble renamed from disassemble
- Implementation
  + allowed .macro_const in PIR
  + added the flag :lexid(...) for subroutines
  + made multiple dispatch work for sub types
  + fixed garbage collection bug related to the metadata attached to a PMC_EXT structure
  + added a warning when using deprecated opcodes
  + simplified the stacks implementation
  + fixed C++ build
  + improved closure and lexical support
  + improved IMCC register allocator
  + added cache for all runtime-constant strings, reducing memory usage
- Miscellaneous
  + improved OpenGL/GLU/GLUT bindings
  + added a standard profile for Perl::Critic coding standard testing
  + added support for smoke testing with Smolder
  + enabled use of Test::Harness 3.0 if available, but don't require it for 'make test'
  + added the executable 'parrot_config' to query Parrot configuration

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next release is 19 Aug 2008.

Enjoy!

Bernhard writes "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.0 "P&P." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running dynamic languages. This release is a milestone release featuring the revamping of Parrot Magic Cookies.

Parrot 0.6.0 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.6.0 News:

- Specification
  + launched pdd18_security.pod
  + updated pdd17_pmc.pod
  + launching draft of pdd28_character_sets.pod
- Documentation
  + cleanup of IMCC documentation
- Configuration
  + add step auto::gettext
  + add step auto::crypto
- Compilers
  + PCT:
    . Fix '-e' option
    . Phase out P6Regex in favor of Perl6Regex
  + IMCC:
    '.local Array my_arr' is illegal now
- Languages
  + C99: reimplementation with PCT
  + lolcode:
    . various updates
    . add support for functions with params
    . add math functions
  + Rakudo:
    . support for 'say'
    . first cut at smart matching
    . indirect method calls
    . support for Pairs
    . added methods 'grep' and 'first'
    . implement auto{increment,decrement}
    . initial implementation of 'perl6doc'
  + Lua:
    . various updates
    . add base64 library
  + Cardinal: basic support for functions with parameters
  + Pheme: various updates
  + Ecmascript: various updates
  + Tcl: now targeting tcl 8.5.1, no more expected failures in test suite.
    (No, this doesn't mean everything's implemented. =-)
  + Eclectus: various updates
  + WMLScript: various updates
- Implementation
  + PDD17 (PMCs)
  + Add library YAML::Dumper
  + Add the MD2, MD4, MD5, RIPEMD160, SHA & SHA1 PMC, as a wrapper
     around libcrypto
- Miscellaneous
  + various bugfixes, code cleanups and coding standard fixes
  + consting
  + remove external Perl 5 modules from the Parrot distribution

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!

"