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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.

4 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