Parrot 0.4.6 Released! {p2-only announcement}

[Chip Salzenberg]

{{ This announcement is going to p2 only. Once CPAN has propagated the
tarball far and wide, the announcement will go out for everyone else. }}

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.6, the most
recent close-to-monthly release of Parrot. I'm particularly pleased to
report that Parrot 0.4.6 includes the beginnings of a Ruby implementation
(named "Cardinal"), thanks to the work of Kevin Tew.

What is Parrot? Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic
languages. The Parrot project home page is <http://www.parrotcode.org/>.

You may now (or very soon) grab Parrot 0.4.6 from this URL:

<http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/CHIPS/parrot-0.4.6.tar.gz>

New in Parrot 0.4.6:

- New languages: Ruby ("Cardinal"), Javascript ("ecmascript")
- Updated languages: Tcl, dotnet, bc, Pheme, Punie, WMLScript
- Updated compilers: PGE, TGE
- IMCC updates:
+ ".loadlib" directive expresses dependencies
+ ".namespace" with no parameter goes to HLL root
+ lexer is reentrant (reentrant grammar in progress)
- Namespace improvements:
+ new suite of opcodes to access namespaces and globals
("find_global" and "store_global" will be phased out)
+ namespace '' no longer means HLL root
- Design document updates:
namespaces (pdd23), basic types (pdd17), embedding
- Updated tool requirements for developers:
flex 2.5.33, bison 2.1, perl 5.6.1
- New to-do list for people new to Parrot:
cage/todo.pod
- The usual plethora of bugfixes and enhancements

If you decide to help develop on Parrot (or help develop Parrot itself), we
strongly recommend that you keep up with the latest and best Parrot code by
accessing our source code repository. Instructions for doing this are at
<http://www.parrotcode.org/source.html>.

I'd like to thank all our contributors for making this possible, and our
sponsors for supporting this project.

Share & Enjoy!

Chip Salzenberg <ch...@pobox.com>