On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:27:42PM -0400, Melvin Smith wrote:
>This is no surprise. Parrot documentation will be lacking until
>things settle down.
Actually it's not so much the documentation. I didn't complain about
0.0.7 and 0.0.8 requiring changes to parrot-gen.py, because that's
simply to be expected at this point. More documentation would be
nice, of course, but it's not the major stumbling block.
>Faster execution times would be on the top of my list.
>I'm speaking for Perl, not Python, but last time I checked, neither
>language was spectacular in this category.
<shrug> I can't remember the last time I found a Python program too
slow for my purposes; Moore's Law is doing a fine job there. Better
performance is not that exciting to me.
>Eek, Scheme would do little for Parrot's acceptance in the
>commercial world, and we all know its the commercial world
>that provides most of the fuel to the fire. Seeing a "real" Perl, Python,
>Java or C# running on Parrot would be my preference.
Getting something -- anything -- running is what I'm suggesting;
commercial acceptance is irrelevant for that purpose.
I suggested Scheme because the syntax is easy to parse, the language
is already specified in detail, and getting continuations working
would exercise a complex part of Parrot's design. Perl6 can be ruled
out because its design isn't finished yet; I assume Perl5 is
difficult, and it will require extra work in implementing regexes,
which aren't needed for most other languages. Like Perl5,
implementing Ruby would also entail implementing regexes. Python
might not be too difficult if imcc is used and the necessary PMCs get
written, but I'm not moving very quickly on that. I hadn't thought of
C#/Java, but they're not really Parrot's target languages, being
static as opposed to dynamic.
With one full language implementation, you can take real programs off
the net and benchmark them, or take real libraries (a rule engine in
Scheme, say) and try calling them from proto-Perl code to see how well
cross-language works in practice. It provides an actual target to
poke at.
--amk (www.amk.ca)
Destiny? Isn't that just a fancy name for blind chance?
-- Peri, in "Mindwarp"
