[kw-pm] Hrm.

[Arguile]

On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 04:52, lloyd carr wrote:
> Well apparently it started as an April fools joke, note the date of the
> article I linked you to, that went on to become true!?! How strange is
> that? Perhaps one of the real Perl mavins, hello Daniel, can enlighten us.

[snip]

Yes, it did start as an April fools joke (mainly from the Perl camp). At
the time it was thought of as ludicrous the Perl and Python camps could
agree on anything, so it seemed an amusing idea. They asked O'Reilly if
they could use their name/animal trademark to give the joke weight;
O'Reilly aquised and even provided an artist to do the lithograph cover.
It was then realised that the only way it would be even close to
believable is if they had colusion in the upper echelons of the Python
camp. Hence came about an absudly work intensive joke, and one of the
best working relations between the two camps.

I hope I got that all correct, I remeber being as shocked as the next
person when it was originally announced (the joke one). You can probably
find some funny comments if you search the /. archive.

## Brief synopsis -- not detailed enough to be wholely correct

Anyways, what seemed like a ludicrous idea at the time did in fact start
making more sense as they talked it over. 

Parrot is basically just a virtual machine. Just as Java is compiled
down to bytecode to run on it's JVM, or .Net languages like C# are
compiled into IBL (I think that's the acronym), or even Pascal had
pCode, things like Perl and Python will be compiled down to Parrot. 

As it currently stands, when you run a Perl script the perl interpretter
first compiles it down to an internal bytecode representation, unlike
Java's bytecode however this representation is not portable across
machines. 

Parrot should allow multiple languages all to be compiled down to the
same VM and be cross platform in the way Java bytecode is. You can even
program in Parrot "assembly" if you wish. When the first beta came out I
had a bit of fun with this, if you have a bit of time the hacking is
definitely worth it :)