[Python-Dev] Parrot -- should life imitate satire?

Dan Sugalski dan@sidhe.org
Tue, 31 Jul 2001 23:16:05 -0400


At 06:12 PM 7/31/2001 -0700, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > Things Python would bring to this party: our serious-cool GC, our
> > C extension/embedding system (*much* nicer than XS).  Things Perl would
> > bring: blazingly fast regexps, taint, flexitypes, references.
>
>I don't really understand the motivation.  Do we want any of those things?
>
>Taint might be worth something, and i would see the regexp engine as
>incrementally better perhaps, but that doesn't seem enough to justify
>a massive re-engineering of both languages.

Honestly, neither language should need any reengineering. If it does, then 
that means I've failed as a designer. The point isn't to redesign Python to 
run on the Parrot back-end--it's to design the Parrot back end such that 
Python runs just fine on it. Which doesn't mean you *can't* redesign, just 
that you shouldn't have to.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk