Parrot... is Python dead now?

[Alex Shindich]

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Alex Shindich wrote:
OK, I am an idiot who forgot that today is April 1st... At least you all
will have fun at my expense... ;)))))

I know I had fun... ;)

But I would really love to see a common VM for Python, Perl, and Tcl...

> I read an article on http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm about a
> joint effort between Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum to conceive a new
> animal. According to them camel + python = parrot.
> 
> I personally have very mixed feelings about this project. 
> One the one hand I have always thought that interoperability between P&P
> would be a great thing. I even planned (for some time now) to start a
> project called "Babylon" to create an interoperability framework for
> Python, Perl, and Tcl.
> On the other hand, the new language scares me... The biggest reason of all
> is that I am deeply in love with Python's syntax. After all, Perl and
> Python are roughly equivalent in what they offer to the programming
> community. But I could never bring myself to learn Perl's ugly syntax. I
> love the fact that Python syntax can be easily read by people who know
> nothing but BASIC -- the syntax is simple and natural.
> 
> My question is, why can't Parrot be an open virtual machine just like
> Microsoft's CLR? That way, both Python source code and Perl source code
> would compile down to Parrot byte codes, and Pythonians wouldn't have to
> abandon Python's syntax. I understand that Perl could use some syntactical
> cleaning up... but why abandon Python? In fact If people like Parrot
> syntax, why not have parrot compile to common byte code too?
> 
> 

-- 
Alex Shindich
mailto:alex at shindich.com
Visit http://www.shindich.com/