I have a newbie question. If the answer exists in a doc, just point the way (I browsed the docs directory). What is the design rationale for so many opcodes in parrot?
Let me try as another newbie... ;-)
Since the opcodes of parrot are not directly supported by any existing hardware, at least not now ;-), they have to be mapped to native code during execution. This costs something per parrot-operation. So if there are many different opcodes in parrot with powerful functionality behind them, this overhead does not hurt so much, because a parrot instruction gets a lot of stuff done. At least I heard this kind of explanation for Perl5, which uses something slightly like parrot internally as well.
Maybe this reduces the answer by the real experts to a yes/no? ;-)
Best regards,
Karl
