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

[Dan Sugalski]

At 07:12 PM 7/31/2001 -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Guido van Rossum writes:
> > > Yeah, but the runtime could offer a choice of data types -- for Python
> > > code the constants table would contain Python ints and strings etc., for
> > > Perl code it would contain Perl string-number objects.  Maybe.
> >
> > A perl6 value have a vtable, essentially an array of function pointers
> > which comprises the standard operations on that value.  I talked to
> > Dan (the perl6 internals guy, dan@sidhe.org) about an impedence
> > mismatch between Perl and Python data types, and he pointed out that
> > you can have Perl values and Python values, each with their own
> > semantics, simply by having separate vtables (and thus separate
> > functions to implement the behaviour of those types).  Code can work
> > with either type because the type carries around (in its vtable) the
> > knowledge of how it should behave.
>
>The vtable looks a lot like Python's type object.  Is Perl's vtable an
>object in its own right?

Depends on your definition of object, I suppose. There is a mapping from 
the low-level bits the interpreter needs to interpreted-language level 
things--while the vtable won't actually be directly manipulatable at the 
HLL level, manipulating HLL constructs will alter the vtable, so it's 
effectively the same thing.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
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