Parrot 2.7.0 "Australian King" Released!

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. 
    —Robert A. Heinlein 

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.7.0 "Australian King"

Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 2.7.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, 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.

SHA digests for this release are:

51f206172b8b6699cc71e366feb111dc32bdd8ed5e3ecfd59ed898c1ee2de2a1  parrot-2.7.0.tar.gz
46296ad1a60c5933fc229ec64f638f2abb66de23bb9b01b3e7c7b248c2b32df0  parrot-2.7.0.tar.bz2

Parrot 2.7.0 News:

New in 2.7.0
- Core
  + cleanups in packfile and freeze/thaw handling
  + Hash optimizations that improve HLL startup and run time
  + As always, many bug fixes and other optimizations
- Runtime
  + some runtime library cleanups
- Testing
  + added more tests to improve coverage
  + new codingstd test for documentation in .pmc files
- Documentation
  + added documentation to .pmc files (some still missing but headers in place)
  + general documentation improvements and bringing up-to-date
- NQP-rx
  + Updated version included from http://github.com/perl6/nqp-rx includes
    speed improvements

and just for fun:

The Australian King Parrot (Alisterus scapularis) is endemic to eastern Australia. It is found in
humid and heavily forested upland regions of the eastern portion of the continent, including
eucalyptus wooded areas in and directly adjacent to subtropical and temperate rainforest. They feed
on fruits, seeds or small insects.

Adults of both sexes are about 43 cm (17 in) in length, including the long broad tail.  The adult
male has a red head, breast, and lower undersides, with a blue band on the back of the neck between
the red above and green on the back, the wings are green and each has a pale green shoulder band,
the tail is green, and the rump is blue. The male has a reddish-orange upper mandible with a black
tip, a black lower mandible with an orange base, and yellow irises.

The plumage of the female is much different to the male having a green head and breast, a grey
beak, and the pale shoulder band is small or absent. Juveniles of both sexes have brown irises and
a yellowish beak, and otherwise resemble the female.

In their native Australia, King Parrots are occasionally bred in aviaries and kept as calm and
relatively quiet household pets if hand-raised. They are relatively unknown outside Australia.
As pets, they have limited "talking" ability and normally prefer not to be handled, but they do
bond readily to people and can be very devoted. Life expectancy in the wild is unknown, but some
pets have been known to live for up to 25 years.

extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_King_Parrot (more plus pictures etc., there)
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