G'day, I'm doing a bit of research and having a bit of fun reimplementing the PHP parser, I've been using Python and dParser.sf.net (http://dparser.sf.net A scannerless GLR parser).
I'm almost to the point where I can start taking an AST and doing code generation, and I'd really like to be able to use Parrot as my target machine. I'm aware Parrot is a little bit of a moving target, and I'm wondering where I can find the most up to date reference on it, for the purposes of writing a code generator. I'm interested in a full set of instructions, and possibly an existing compiler I can look at. I see this page parrot website : http://www.parrotcode.org/docs/parrot.pod.html Is reading those documents my best bet? Some of them haven't been altered since '01 (and in fact one of them seems a verbatim copy of an article on perl.com). Does anyone have any other recommendatations? Should I just read the source? I'm not sure how I'm going to go about bootstrapping this (the bootstrapping must be done for 100% php compatibility because its 'include' operator is equivilient to reading a file and running eval($file_contents);). If Parrot is eventually able to compile Python and that Python is capable of using C extensions, then it should be possible to simply use the compiler I've already written - Is that going to be even possible? Using C extensions from Parrot-compiled bytecode? It seems thats in a bit of doubt (based on the comments about the Python compiler using C code and having to use a drop-in replacement code generator to solve the bootstrap issue). Regards, Stephen Thorne.
