Submitted by cotto on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 08:58

"Look at the skies," whispered the Dog kindly. "Look at the trees where God made beauty. But it is only a sorrow to look on me where God planted ugliness." sighed the Dog, "such a fine small beak you have."

Not his most piercing, his most murderous crow could move this remarkable rag. Not the words of his anger could send this Dog away. Chauntecleer shuddered with rage. His wattles trembled. His feathers stood out and shivered. And seeing that there was nothing else to do, he bit the dog savagely on the nose. ...

With every peck the Dog said, "Thanks." With every other peck he wept, "But it won't work." And with ever third peck he wailed, "Yet thou art more than a friend to me."

There came the time, finally, when Chauntecleer the Rooster himself broke down. After the Dog had begun to croon, "My friend is a surgeon, a doctor sent from heaven with healing in his beak," it happened that Chauntecleer himself began to cry. He slid down to the ground and lay on his back with his two claws pointing to heaven and gurgled a broken crow. He wept. ...

"It is," said the Dog in commiseration, "a convincing argument, this body. Mountains last forever, though it was a worthy effort, good friend. But mountains last forever, and many a worthy spirit breaks upon them." He sighed, and then wept quietly and almost peacefully.

Suddenly the Rooster said, "Headache. Headache!" he snapped. And then he didn't strut. He stumbled into the Coop.

The Dog rolled his eyes without rolling his body from its back. "A doctor sent from heaven," he said.

— Walter Wagnerin Jr, The Book of the Dun Cow





On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.4.0 "Mundo Cani." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 1.4.0 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.

Parrot 1.4.0 News:



- Core + Key and Iterator refactor + Major pbc_to_exe generated code speed improvement + New "Infinite Memory" GC core for demonstration purposes + gc_debug runcore and GC-related heisenbug fixes + Elimination of variable expansion in parrot_config + CLI arguments are processed as Unicode by default + Substantial optimizations in NCI + Parrot builds on Win64 + Hashes can use native types as keys and values + Fixed installed pbc_to_exe + Simplification of PMC generation code + Improved GC encapsulation and API documentation - Documentation + List of candidates for embedding API (docs/embed.pod) + PIR book sent to publisher - Testing + Several conversions of Perl test to pure PIR. + C indentation coding standards test improvement + Improved test coverage of example code - Deprecations + Removal of PGE rules: <null> <fail> <sp> <lt> <gt> <dot> + Removal of PGE methods: .text .item .result_object + Deprecation of most dynops + Miscellaneous + Beginnings of OpenGL::Math library; OpenGL bindings and library marked experimental + Localizing and consting fixes + Many memory and thread-related leaks plugged

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

for supporting this project. Our next release is 18 August 2009.

Enjoy!