Parrot 1.7.0, "African Grey" Released!

On behalf of the entire Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.7.0
"African Grey." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

• Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
  Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
  Their indices bedecked from one to ''n''
  Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
• I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
  Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
  And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
  And in our bound partition never part.
• Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
  Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
  A root or two, a torus and a node:
  The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

   -- Stanisław Lem, Love and Tensor Algebra 

Parrot 1.7.0 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.

New in 1.7.0

- Functionality
 + Parrot_capture_lex has been added to the PARROT_EXPORT API
 + PARROT_MAX_ARGS has been increased from 8 to 16 to allow for 
   ops that take more than 8 args
- Performance
 + The profiling runcore now caches metadata for improved performance
- Maintenance and cleanup
  + Expanded the Parrot debugger documentation
  + Parrot debugger now uses the new Parrot STRING API
  + Continue to port rest of internals to use the STRING API
- Deprecations
 + The JIT subsystem has been removed and is being written from the 
   ground up. More information can be found at 
   https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/JITRewrite
 + Implicit optional named parameters (eligible in 2.1)
 + Continuation-based ExceptionHandlers (eligible in 2.1)
 + Use of undocumented variables in class_init (eligible in 2.1)
 + Parrot_oo_get_namespace (eligible in 2.1)
- Bugfix
  + Improved line number tracking in IMCC
- Tests
  + Converted many more Perl 5 tests to PIR
  + Expanded test coverage of the CallSignature, Namespace, FixedPMCArray,
    ResizeableIntegerArray and ExceptionHandler PMCs

Happy Hacking!