Parrot... is Python dead now?

[Dustin Boswell]

DON'T SCARE ME LIKE THAT!
After going to
http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/01/parrot.htm
and having my jaw hit my keyboard as read the ghastly code like
# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
                           while left_angle_right_angle:
                               if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
                                   continue_next;
                               }
                               print dollar_underscore;
                           }

and

while(@line = Sys::Stdin->readline()):
                               continue_next if $line[0] =eq= "#":
                               print @line;
                           }

I took my heart medicine pills, realized it was a new month, and breathed a
sigh of relief...

Alex Shindich wrote:

> 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/