Garrett Goebel wrote: > John Porter wrote: > > Not to beat on Dan (or anyone else), but for the sake of those > [...] > > Please don't beat on Dan... ;)
I'm not! > Parrot isn't Perl. I.e., your Perl-vision blinders are on a tad > tight. It's the first general purpose vm for dynamic languages. > That would make it a first system not second. That actually doesn't matter much. The two systems are very similar in many fundamental respects; and the one thing that all the designers have in common is perl5. Remember what Larry said: "perl 6 is the community's rewrite". That makes perl 6 a "second system" in many respects. > And with a goal like he'll always have at least one voice > screaming bloat into the one ear, while someone else'll be > asking for support for yet another obscure language feature > in the other. I'm just saying that (IMHO) trying to reproduce the behavior of even two different virtual machines in parrot would be way beyond parrot's purpose. Since, in general, for high-level languages like perl, distributing code as source is the norm, there does not seem to be a compelling need to execute bytecode created by some other compiler. If we can support the languages at the source level, through compiler back-ends that target parrot, then we have achieved all anyone could expect of us. As I said, .NET is taking that route; all that legacy VB and C++ code will have to be recompiled for the CLR. Assuming we do this sensible thing (:-), then the impact on parrot is to add a judicious selection of opcodes that ease the task of the back-end developer for those languages. -- John Douglas Porter __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
