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Parrot: For Real

Posted by Hemos on from the and-you-thought-it-was-a-joke dept.

Thanks to Pudge of Slashteam for pointing out that very early version of Parrot has been released. You may recall Parrot from The April Fool's joke - but it's coming to life.

5 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. well... not exactly by __aahlyu4518 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unlike the joke, it is not a combined language !!! It started as an idea as a 'shared bytecode/runtime environment that could be used by both Perl 6 and a future version of Python'
    Right now it is a interpreter that does assembly to bytecode only for now as far as I can tell...

    1. Re:well... not exactly by rubicelli · · Score: 5, Informative
      Please.

      "Parrot" is the development name for the internals of Perl 6, notably the interpreter. See, e.g., this explanation. Any similarity to a certain April Fools joke is probably intentional, but isn't to be taken literally.

  2. More links by PhilHibbs · · Score: 5, Informative

    ESR on encouraging the bytecode merge ( http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-J uly/016406.html )

    use.perl.org links ( http://use.perl.org/search.pl?topic=parrot )

  3. April fools becoming real? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Informative

    I believe there was an April Fool's joke many years ago about a 16-bit version of the ARM processor called THUMB. But then only a relatively short time later ARM Ltd announced they were indeed working on a 16-bit frontend to the ARM (basically a new instruction decoder), and now the 'Thumb instruction decoder' is a standard part of many ARM family CPUs.

    How many other things started out as an April Fool's day joke and then actually got implemented?

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  4. Yes, Parrot. But not that parrot. by smallpaul · · Score: 3, Informative
    It is the intent of the Perl 6 folks that Perl 6's VM be usable as an engine for interpreting multiple languages. This was always their intent. In order to make that wish a little more public they've decided to call their VM "parrot" (after the April fools joke). But at this point nobody has seriously looked at porting Python to parrot because it is not very mature yet. Furthermore, many Python people are skeptical that Perl 6 will live up to its long feature set so nobody is putting eggs in that basket yet.

    There is no sense in which the languages will be merged. If moving to Parrot required a substantial change in Python it just wouldn't happen. If Python on Parrot was less efficient than the current Python interpreter, that would also be a major issue.