I've had an itch to learn some flavor of assembly language for some time and after reading this article I've decided to start with Parrot assembler rather than x86.

The reason is that I presume that it will be very straightforward to use inline Parrot assembly sections in my Perl code for speeding up critical sections (my C is rather rusty).

For me, the speed penalty of using VM assembler instead of a true (hardware-based) assembler is overshadowed by the ability to have my Perl+assembler code be portable across my PC, Sun workstation, and an OS X laptop I have my eye on.

Josh