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Postings from July 2002
At 2:30 PM -0700 7/9/02, John Porter wrote:
>Garrett Goebel wrote:
>> John Porter wrote:
>> > Not to beat on Dan (or anyone else), but for the sake of those
>> [...]
>>
>> Please don't beat on Dan... ;)
>
>I'm not!
Nope, he isn't.
Warnings and concerns based on technical merits and past experience
are *always* in order. (Though I'd prefer people hold off on slamming
a design that's been decided to be final, unless they're working on
the implementation--in which case slams based on the realities of the
situation are definitely warranted)
> > Parrot isn't Perl. I.e., your Perl-vision blinders are on a tad
> > tight. It's the first general purpose vm for dynamic languages.
>> That would make it a first system not second.
>
>That actually doesn't matter much. The two systems are very
>similar in many fundamental respects; and the one thing that
>all the designers have in common is perl5. Remember what
>Larry said: "perl 6 is the community's rewrite".
>That makes perl 6 a "second system" in many respects.
Too many respects. Adding "just one more feature" is amazingly seductive.
This is worse in some ways, since it's got features of both a first
and a second system.
> > And with a goal like he'll always have at least one voice
>> screaming bloat into the one ear, while someone else'll be
>> asking for support for yet another obscure language feature
>> in the other.
>
>I'm just saying that (IMHO) trying to reproduce the behavior
>of even two different virtual machines in parrot would be way
>beyond parrot's purpose.
Absolutely. Which is why we're not going to do that.
These 'add-on' bytecode interpreters don't get any special
consideration in the core. That means they *can* have:
*) A custom bytecode loader to translate their bytecode format to
ours, or something we can use
*) As many custom PMC classes as they want
*) Dynamically loaded custom opcode functions
They *don't* get:
*) Changes to fundamental core behaviour (like refcounting garbage collection)
If someone writes one and has a reasonable request, it gets treated
the same as any other reasonable request--if it fits the current
design, or can go in without causing problems elsewhere, it will
probably go in. If not, well, they're out of luck.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
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