Ponie: Perl On New Internal Engine

caseywest writes "Today at his State of the Onion speech during the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Larry Wall announced the Ponie project (somewhere within his legendary humorous presentation). Ponie involves rewriting central parts of the Perl 5 interpreter to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, including a C API emulation layer to make existing XS code work. Arthur 'sky' Bergman is sponsored by his employer Fotango to develop Ponie. Currently, a press release and a FAQ are available. More details will be available in due time."

Comments

Pony??? I blame London.pm

[babbage]

The proof is in the CPAN:

David Cantrell > Acme-Pony-1.1.2 > Acme::Pony
Module Version: 1.1.2 Source

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
DIAGNOSTICS
AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT

NAME
Acme::Pony - An encoding scheme for Silly People

SYNOPSIS
use Acme::Pony;

print "Hello world";

DESCRIPTION
The first time you run a program under use Acme::Pony, the module removes all that nasty text stuff from your source file, turning it into a lovely ASCII-art rendition of a pony. In the spirit of other london.pm modules, the ASCII-art will consist entirely of the characters matching /[buffy]+/i, thus fulfilling Greg, Leon and Dave's fantasy of seeing Buffy riding a Pony.

DIAGNOSTICS

Can't pony '%s'
Acme::Pony couldn't access the source file for modification.

Can't unpony '%s'
Acme::Pony couldn't access the source file for execution.

AUTHOR
David Cantrell

This is based on Leon Brocard's 'Buffy' module and inspired by Damian Conway's brief talk on his Bleach module.

Leon contributed the code for scaling a vector Pony and filling it, replacing the bitmap Pony from the previous versions.

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2001, David Cantrell. The Artistic Licence applies.

I don't think I need to mention that Leon Brocard works for Fotango, and that Fotango owns up to adding their share of silly libraries to CPAN.

And now they've gotten to Larry Wall himself.... :-)

So, is there a URL for the State of the Onion talk this year then?

Re:$perl %syntax @sucks

[ichimunki]

Um. There are scads of Perl web development books written by people who DO NOT know what they're doing. And thousands more actual web developers working in Perl who don't know what they're doing as a result. I know. I used to be one of them. Language wars are a waste of time. The original post was probably off-topic, since this is not a general "criticize Perl" thread. Indeed, the sigil change issue has been answered for Perl 6. The sigils will no longer change. However, there are many of us who find the character indicates type characteristic of Perl to be distracting. In a truly OO language, this can only lead to pain and suffering. If Perl OO is to be more than a hack, the sigils have got to go.

In any case, the concerns about context are completely baseless. So what? It's not like context is subjective in Perl. It's just a factor to deal with when programming. It makes the code more expressive with less effort. That's one of the stated goals of Perl: laziness. In this case, it's a great idea. Not one that is perfectly implemented in Perl, necessarily, but nonetheless a fantastic notion.