Parrot 0.1.1 'Poicephalus' Released

Pan T. Hose writes "The long awaited release of Parrot 0.1.1 "Poicephalus" has been finally announced on perl.perl6.internals newsgroup and perl6-internals mailing list simultaneously by Leopold Toetsch followed by an announcement on use Perl by Will Coleda and now also on Slashdot." (Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links.) Pan T. Hose continues "The most important changes since the previous version 0.1.0 (code-named 'Leaping Kakapo' and released in February) are:

• Python support: Parrot runs 4/7 of the pie-thon test suite
• Better OS support: more platforms, compilers, OS functions
• Improved PIR syntax for method calls and <op>= assignment
• Dynamic loading reworked including a "make install" target
• MMD - multi method dispatch for binary vtable methods
• Library improvement and cleanup
• BigInt, Complex, *Array, Slice, Enumerate, None PMC classes
• IA64 and hppa JIT support
• Tons of fixes, improvements, new tests, and documentation updates

The amazing project which no one had any idea would go so far from the original April Fool's Joke by Simon Cozens (also posted on Slashdot on April 1, 2001) to really unite Perl and Python one day (not to mention Tcl, Scheme, Forth and Ruby, to name just a few) is now available for download from CPAN and via CVS. Those who are not up-to-date with Perl 6 mailing lists can read This Week in Perl 6 weekly summaries by Piers Cawley to have some idea on how's the project been going in the last two years. It's important to read Apocalypses, Exegeses and Synopses together with RFCs and Parrot Design Documents for better understanding of the underlying rationale, especially the superiority of register-based Virtual Machines (like Parrot VM) over stack-based one (like JVM) for modern (dynamically-typed) OO languages with multiple inheritance, operator overloading, traits, roles and much, much more. Parrot Docs, FAQ and examples are also very helpful. This is a very important step in the direction of Perl 6 which we are all looking forward to."

Comments

Awesome april fools joke

[Anonymous Coward]

For those too lazy to click on the april fools links, the programming examples were some of the funnies things I've seen.

=====
Show us some Parrot code.

GvR: [...]

# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
while left_angle_right_angle:
if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
continue_next;
}
print dollar_underscore;
}

[...]There's more than one way to do it, right, [...]

LW: [...]

while(@line = Sys::Stdin->readline()):
continue_next if $line[0] =eq= "#":
print @line;
}
============
From the minute I saw that I thought I'd love the language. Truely shows the power of open source.

Python support?

[WillWare]

Python support: Parrot runs 4/7 of the pie-thon test suite

Python 2.3.3 (#1, May 7 2004, 10:31:40)
[GCC 3.3.3 20040412 (Red Hat Linux 3.3.3-7)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 4 / 7
0
>>>

Ouch!

Now I'll get my thumb out of my ass and pass along my gratitude to everybody who's worked on Parrot. An open-source VM, particularly one targeted at existing open-source languages, is a mitzvah. It even has the nice side benefit of creating a little commonality between the communities. Thank you.