MrJoltCola wrote:
> This should actually be titled "Where are all the compilers?"
The compilers will come! Loads of people, myself included, are quietly
working away on compilers that target IMC.
It takes time for people to discover and adopt new platforms -
especially when you are so modest about Parrot. The FAQ says:
"Parrot is in the early phases of its implementation. The primary
way to use Parrot is to write Parrot assembly code"
when it could say something like:
"Although parrot is not yet complete, and indeed the design is
still being refined, it already offers an elegant, powerful,
feature-rich, solidly-designed (though poorly documented)
environment that makes it amazingly easy to implement
a wide range of scripting languages. The primary way to use
parrot is to generate code for its intermediate language
compiler (IMC) which handles all of the following things (and
more) for you: numbers, bignums, objects, multiple inheritance,
closures, garbage collection, strings, polymorphic feature
dispatch, regular expressions, exception handling, and more!"
> ... here documents ...
I don't care strongly either way about here-documents, and they're not
going to make-or-break parrot. Lots of folks like to use here-documents,
and lots of folks get by just fine using languages that don't support
anything like here-documents.
(Would I would like, though, is for the ".include" macro to
find .../runtime/parrot/include like it says it does in the
documentation :-)
But these things are mere details, minor bumps along the road.
> Years after I dumped much work into Parrot, I've seen no progress or support
> from other language camps (Python, Scheme) and Perl 6 seems to be such a
> daunting goal to implement, I'm afraid we won't a full, commercial-free
> implementation for years...
It would be ironic indeed if the standard Perl 6 implementation ended up
being written in Haskell! But Melvin's work on IMC is one of the core
things that will ensure Parrot's success. Many people wouldn't want to
manually generate code that satisfies the parrot assembly language
calling conventions, but they can cope with generating $P1."foo"($P2).
> . Or were we so slow with Perl 6 that everyone had time to swallow the .NET
> pill?
Naaah! Parrot is the scripting platform for the next few decades, so it
doesn't matter if it takes a few years for it to catch on.
Sorry that I can't help out more myself - I'm not fluent in either C or
Perl (I'm getting pretty good at IMC though!). But I'll at least help
out bringing the compilers that Melvin craves.
Regards,
Roger
--
Roger Browne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
