Re^3: New Book: Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

However .... Perl 6 compiler on top of Perl 5.,......and end up using Perl 5 as an assembly language. Perl 5 is a great high level language, but a rather poor assembly language,

...that jogs the memory.... i do remember the initial promo on Perl6, where an assembly language of sorts, called Parrot, was going to be the base language for all interpreters, like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

...whatever happened to the dream of the Grand Unified Language ? .. :-)

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku

Comment on Re^3: New Book: Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

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Re^4: New Book: Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 30, 2009 at 14:39 UTC
i do remember the initial promo on Perl6, where an assembly language of sorts, called Parrot Parrot is a virtual machine; the assembly language is called PIR (Parrot Intermediate Representation). But it's not essential for language interaction. The important concept is that parrot knows about common concept in dynamic programming languages (like subs, methods, strings, integers, other numbers, conversion between types, namespaces), and thus allows you to call methods on foreign objects. Since Perl 5 was never ported to Perl 6, I don't see how parrot relates to the statement that Perl 5 is a poor assembly language. ...whatever happened to the dream of the Grand Unified Language ? That's still alive, and in Rakudo you can eval() Ruby code, and load Ruby libraries - to the extend that they run on the ruby compiler for parrot, which is quite limited right now.	[reply]

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Re^4: New Book: Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl
by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 30, 2009 at 14:39 UTC

i do remember the initial promo on Perl6, where an assembly language of sorts, called Parrot

Parrot is a virtual machine; the assembly language is called PIR (Parrot Intermediate Representation). But it's not essential for language interaction. The important concept is that parrot knows about common concept in dynamic programming languages (like subs, methods, strings, integers, other numbers, conversion between types, namespaces), and thus allows you to call methods on foreign objects.

Since Perl 5 was never ported to Perl 6, I don't see how parrot relates to the statement that Perl 5 is a poor assembly language.

...whatever happened to the dream of the Grand Unified Language ?

That's still alive, and in Rakudo you can eval() Ruby code, and load Ruby libraries - to the extend that they run on the ruby compiler for parrot, which is quite limited right now.

[reply]