Perl Features of the Future - Part 2

Kevin writes "This story is a follow up to yesterday's part 1 (hence the name) on the changes in Perl 6. Damian Conway (design team member): "There will be some learning involved, but it isn't like learning an entirely new language," he said. "It's more like adding a few new words to your vocabulary." It seems the perl intrepreter is getting overhauled as well."

Comments

Re:Parrot

[bcrowell]

Look here for information.

I'd like to it compared to other bytecode interpreters like the JVM and .NET's CLR. How similar/different are they?
One big difference is that it's register-oriented rather than stack oriented. It has some fixed number of registers (32 IIRC), each of which can hold a Perl scalar value, i.e. a string, number, or reference. The register design apparently makes it faster than stack-based designs.

The thing I'm really looking forward to is that it promises to be a well designed, well implemented, portable, free-as-in-speech approach to software distribution. This is in contrast to Java, for instance, which has lots of really horrible proprietary implementations and only an incomplete free-as-in-speech implementation (gcj).

Re:Parrot

[chromatic]

Parrot has much better support for dynamic languages -- it supports anonymous subroutines, closures, run-time compilation, and other nice features.