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

[Moshe Zadka]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001 10:58:13 +0200, Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> wrote:

> He's disagreeing. It's not a PERL vs. PYTHON ADD at all; it's a "string
> concatenation add" vs. "numerical add". Perl code using the string
> concatenation operator (apparently, it's not going to be ".", which scares
> me shitless: Perl6 gets a new string concat operator, but it isn't going to
> be "+" ? If it is going to be '+', how does it flexitype ?) would use the
> string-concat add opcode, and Perl code and Python code doing '+' would get
> the normal BINARY_ADD. The string-to-int conversion in Perl's '+' would be
> put into the 'Scalar' type.

I think I've lost you.
But if you're thinking about Perl compiled to something like

PUSH "1"
CONVERT_TO_INT
PUSH "2"
CONVERT_TO_INT
BINARY_ADD

Then it's only a matter of time before the Perl guys find out it's hella
slow and optimize it to:

PUSH "1"
PUSH "2"
CONVERT_TO_INT_TOP_2
BINARY_ADD

And then to

PUSH "1"
PUSH "2"
CONVERT_TO_INT_TOP_2_AND_BINARY_ADD

And then a simple

#define CONVERT_TO_INT_TOP_2_AND_BINARY_ADD PERL_ADD

Would finish the 2*PI circle to land exactly where we started with. ;-)

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