[Python-Dev] Parrot -- should life imitate satire?

[Guido van Rossum]

> In the conservative version of this vision, Perl and Python have
> different runtimes dynamically linked to an instance of the same
> opcode interpreter.  Memory allocation/GC and scheduling/threading are
> handled inside the opcode interpreter but the OS and environment
> binding is (mostly) in the libraries.

Hm, the Python bytecode interpreter doesn't do the memory
allocation/GC, and only does the scheduling/threading indirectly (by
releasing and immediately reacquiring the global interpreter lock).

> Things Python would bring to this party: our serious-cool GC, our 
> C extension/embedding system (*much* nicer than XS).  Things Perl would
> bring: blazingly fast regexps, taint, flexitypes, references. 

I'm not sure I want references, and I don't know what flexitypes are.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)