Parrot 4.4.0 "Banana Fanna Fo Ferret" Released!

    Its existence guarantees nothing in itself, and the catalytic or
    Promethean moment only occurs when one individual is prepared to cease being
    the passive listener to such a voice and to become instead is spokesman, or
    representative.

    But it's important to remember the many dreary years when the prospect of
    victory appeared quite unattainable. On every day of those years,
the "as if"
    pose had to be kept up, until its cumulative effect could be felt.
    -- Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce the 4.4.0 release of
Parrot "Banana Fanna Fo Ferret".  Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual
machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 4.4.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site
(ftp://ftp.parrot.org/pub/parrot/releases/stable/4.4.0/), or by following the
download instructions at http://parrot.org/download.  For those who would like
to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Git to
retrieve the source code to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 4.4.0 News:
    - Core
        + Most internal calls to libc exit(x) have been replaced with
          Parrot_x_* API calls or PARROT_FORCE_EXIT
    - Documentation
        + 'pdd31_hll.pod' made stable in 'docs/pdds/'.
        + Updated main 'README' to 'README.pod'
        + Updated various dependencies, e.g., 'lib/Parrot/Distribution.pm'.
        + Updated all 'README' files to 'README.pod' files.