Parrot 0.4.6 Released!

August 9, 2006

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.

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 <chip@pobox.com>