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

[Simon Cozens]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 12:11:56AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Perhaps a less ambitious (than Parrot) but still very useful project
> would be a portable stdio-like library that has the features dynamic
> languages need?  

I hope you do not think that I'm blowing Perl's trumpet again, but I see
one of my roles here as sharing knowledge about things that Python has
that Perl needs and vice versa.

Perl 5.7.x has such a library, and it's my expectation (another sideways
glance at Dan) that if we did Parrot, it would include this library.
PerlIO attempts to be a very portable stdio (it's running on everything
that Perl runs on, AFAIK) and it supports "line disciplines" in the sfio
sense: you can stuff processing modules between the file and the
filehandle. This allows us to do anything between altering buffering
semantics, and decompressing and decrypting files on the fly.

It'll need to be somewhat rewritten for Perl 6, at which point I'm
hoping it'll be done in such a way that it'll make it easier to extract
from the Perl mess around it and be made available to other projects.

-- 
Putting heated bricks close to the news.admin.net-abuse.* groups.
        -- Megahal (trained on asr), 1998-11-06