4.5.0 Parrot "Buff-faced Pygmy Parrot" Released!

In honor of M0: "The tiny bird, which is not much bigger than an adult
person's thumb, is smaller than some of the insects with which it shares the
forest. On average, buff-faced pygmy parrots (Micropsitta pusio) stand less than 9cm tall and weigh 11.5g (0.41oz)" --BBC Earth News.

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 4.5.0,
also known as "Buff-faced Pygmy Parrot". Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 4.5.0 is available on Parrot's FTP
site
, or by following the download
instructions
. For those who want to hack on Parrot or languages that run on top of Parrot,
we recommend our organization page on GitHub,
or you can go directly to the official Parrot Git repo on Github

To clone the Parrot Git repo into a directory called 'parrot', use the following:

    git clone git://github.com/parrot/parrot.git

If you want it to be in a directory other than 'parrot', then just give that as a second
argument to clone:

    git clone git://github.com/parrot/parrot.git parrot_foo

Parrot 4.5.0 News:

    - Core
        + Added .write_bytes and .read_bytes methods to FileHandle and Socket
          PMCs.
        + Added Parrot_api_set_stdhandle, Parrot_api_new_call_object and
          Parrot_api_setup_signature functions to the embedding API
        + Removed the "can" VTABLE
    - Languages
      + Winxed snapshot updated to 1.9.1
        - New syntax for parameters in multi
        - New syntax for initalization with new
        - Cast to var improved
    - IMCC
        + Removed .line, .file, setline and setfile directives from IMCC
    - Documentation
        + Fixed up Pod in 240 files to pass 't/codingstd/pod_description.t'.
    - Tests
        + Added 'docs/pdds' and 'docs/pdds/draft' as files for
          'Parrot::Test::Pod.pm' to exclude.
    - Build
        + Reduced number of packages under 'lib/Parrot/Pmc2c/'.
        + Added method-level documentation to several of the remaining packages.
        + Added 'docs/pdds' and 'docs/pdds/draft' as files for
          'Parrot::Test::Pod.pm' to exclude.
    - Community
        + M1, a C-like language that targets M0 had a burst of development
          and now has many working examples such as recursive Fibonacci and
          recursive factorial : https://github.com/parrot/m1
        + Parrot bindings to LAPACK are being worked on as part of Google
          Summer of Code: https://github.com/leto/parrot-lapack

The SHA256 message digests for the downloadable tarballs are:

e675ce8ba85b6172c8364f33946a1cf5c600b0b21666451b755e30073f8e2e8a
parrot-4.5.0.tar.gz
74996076eb9dbe0f2442e0ae9c0cb5c3e9d5f49a266368eee01f4ab30c6d2808
parrot-4.5.0.tar.bz2

Reini Urban (or a delegate) will release Parrot 4.6.0, the next scheduled
monthly release, on July 17th 2012.

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

Enjoy!

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