[Purdue-pm] Perl, Parrot, Python, future web browsers, Purdue Perl Mongers

[Mark Senn]

Thought you might be interested in this.

THE "PARROT" INTERPRETER WILL RUN PERL CODE IN THE FUTURE

A very quick review of the past three years (and one day :-) of Perl
development.
    The Perl 5 code base had became unwieldy.
    A completely rewrite of Perl was decided upon for Perl 6.
       o  Perl 6 will be compiled into Parrot code---Parrot is a new
          interpreter.
       o  Perl syntax and semantics were redesigned from the ground up
          for Perl 6---nothing was off limits as far as what could
          be changed.  Indeed, accessing the third element of array name
          in Perl 5 is "$name[4]", in Perl 6 it will be "@name[4]" (now
          to refer to the entire arrawy one uses "@name").  There are
          major changes planned for regular expressions---the Perl 6
          design team sometimes calls them rules instead of regular
          expressions.  There are many other improvements in the language
          to make it cleaner, add features, and make it more orthogonal.
       o  There will be some way to run Perl 5 code using Perl 6 without
          manually rewriting all the code.
    Perl 5.8 was released
    Perl 5.10 will use Parrot.

PARROT WILL ALSO RUN OTHER LANGUAGES

Parrot can run BASIC now.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/soto2003.html?page=8
has a diagram implying Parrot will run Perl 1, Perl 5, Perl 6, PHP,
Ruby, __Python__ [my emphasis ---MDS], Scheme, COBOL, Java, Befunge,
TECO, and REXX.  I've seen or heard Perl 6, PHP, Python and Java
mentioned in other sources.

I expect the new Perl 6 regular expressions (now called rules)
will be ``picked up'' by most other programming languages and that
the new Perl will greatly influence other language design.
Mathematica doesn't have regular expressions now---last I knew
they planned to develop their own, though.

WEB BROWSERS WILL HAVE PARROT AND RUN MULTIPLE COMPUTER LANGUAGES

I know of no technical reason why a web browser couldn't run Parrot
so a browser could run Perl, Java, etc.---whatever the best
language for an application was.  But why stop there, since different
languages can compile down to Parrot why not write different subroutines
for an application in the most appropriate language.  My guess is this
will happen in the future.

PURDUE PERL MONGERS

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REFERENCES

The information above is condensed from weekly Perl 6 progress
summaries, information presented at the past three Open Software
Conferences, information received at YAPC::NA::2003 (2003 Yet Another
Perl Conference in North America), perl.com, oreilly.com,
_Perl 6 Essentials_, informal discussions at conferences, etc.

Mark