Ruby folks focus on Parrot

[Andrew Kuchling]

Ron Stephens <rdsteph at earthlink.net> writes:
> runtime environment for Perl 6. This poster even asserts how important
> it could be to beat Python to the punch in this regards, so to speak.

Hmmm... that's not really possible given that I've already checked
nondist/sandbox/parrot into the Python CVS tree; it compiles a trivial
Python subset to Parrot assembly source, as long as the only type you
use is integer.

Unfortunately Parrot 0.0.3 isn't really complete enough yet to support
a really interesting subset of Python.  The painful absence is that
there's no working support for variables yet, so you can't really
implement scopes properly, and getting code generation right requires
writing register allocation code that would promptly become useless as
soon as variable storage actually gets implemented.  

Another necessary task is to write PythonString and PythonInteger
classes supporting Python's semantics for those types; Parrot already
includes PerlString and PerlInteger implementations.  Work on that
could proceed now, but I have little motivation to work on that given
the lack of variables.  (If someone wants to work on that anyway, feel
free to do so.)

--amk