Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom "languages" and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. Wall and his co-developers are doing with Perl 6 -- starting again. "It will break backward compatibility [but] in order to simplify it we have to get rid of old cruft, particularly the regular expression cruft," Wall said. "A lot of the unreadability of Perl is related to the regular expression syntax â" and we didn't do that, we got it from Unix. It needs to be end-of-lifed."
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Member since:2007-03-07
I don't think I am mistaken. The reason being that there is no obvious benefit to porting Python, Ruby, or PHP to Parrot. Not when there are already production quality versions written on top of the JVM and the .NET VM. And these implementations often run circles around their C counterparts because they can take advantage of JIT compilation and such.
I just can't see any obvious benefit to porting Python, Ruby, or PHP to Parrot. Other than "it might be fun to port it". But there's no real practical benefit.
Member since:2008-12-08
Porting to Parrot virtual machine benefits:
* primary designed for dynamic programming languages
* register based VM, great potential
* interoperability provided at an assembly
level
* open source, platform agnostic
* many features for free PCT, PGE, embeding, mod_parrot, ...
"Parrot is innovative and not just a .NET or
JVM clone.", Jonathan Worthington, 2005
* http://www.jnthn.net/papers/2005-lpw-parrot-slides.pdf
"Perl 5 has two big features that make using the JVM or .NET problematic--closures and polymorphic scalars. Perl 6 adds a third (which Ruby shares) in continuations, and a fourth (which Ruby doesn't) of co-routines." Dan Sugalski, March 25, 2003
* http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000151.html
* http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000152.html
Member since:
2006-02-11
I think you are mistaken here and that you have taken a tunnel view of the programming ecosystem or given the dynamic language greater significance than it is warranted. I don't think you can fairly say that the dynamic languagee community has "commited" to the current VMs than you can say that programming community had committed to java over .NET over C++ a few years back. Also the dynamic language community is young enough to be shaken up by a "new comer" just as perl shook up many of the standard production-quality languages in its day.
I am not necessarily looking forward to Perl 6 to speak candidly. It has been too long and I don't fully understand what it will bring to my toolset. If it does bring increased productivity, reduces my code volume and if it brings the improved clarity it promises then it will find a niche. If it does all this well in a prouction environment even better. This should perhaps be one of the benchmarks of its relevance instead of how well it fits in the particular programming ecosystem and its trends...