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

[Skip Montanaro]

    Guido> The PVM doesn't have a lot of knowledge about types built into
    Guido> its instruction set....  The opcodes are mostly very abstract:
    Guido> BINARY_ADD etc.

Yeah, but the runtime behind the virtual machine knows a hell of a lot about
the types.  A stream of opcodes doesn't mean anything without the semantics
of the functions the interpreter loop calls to do its work.  I thought the
aim of Eric's Parrot idea was that Perl and Python might be able to share a
virtual machine.  If both can generate something like today's BINARY_ADD
opcode, the underlying types of both Python and Perl better have the same
semantics.

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