(1) LANGUAGES.STATUS is out of date.
I found (on linux x86 [1]):
These languages failed to build:
BASIC/interpreter
jako
miniperl
tcl
And these languages were quite broken (bad make test failures):
BASIC/compiler [2]
m4
ruby
scheme
LANGUAGES.STATUS says they all work.
If my result is typical, adding a
S: Not working as of 0.0.14 release.
line to each of these entries seems appropriate.
(2) Also, these languages' directories could really use README's:
python
plot
README's saying just what their LANGUAGES.STATUS entries say
("elsewhere" and "broken and abandoned", respectively).
(3) Finally, this suggests a serious need for expectation management.
The version documentation should perhaps say, early and often,
something very vaguely like
Several of the languages targeting parrot were not working at release time.
They were waiting for objects. Waiting for this release.
While they waited, enough things changed to break them.
The purpose of this release is to help them get unstuck and resynced.
In the meantime, you might look at languages/perl6, forth, cola, and urm,
which already work. [3]
Mitchell
[1] redhat 7.1 linux-x86-gcc2.96, perl 5.6.0, parrot_2004-02-26_080000.
[2] Actually, BASIC/compiler wasn't a "make test" failure (no Makefile).
BASIC_README points to the wumpus2.bas example, which failed with
error:imcc:parse error, unexpected LOCAL, expecting $end
suggesting obsolete code is being generated.
[3] I list these languages because they demonstrate "parrot is _real_"
and being used "professionally". And cola draws a mandelbrot. :)
