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

[Guido van Rossum]

>     Guido> The PVM doesn't have a lot of knowledge about types built into
>     Guido> its instruction set....  The opcodes are mostly very abstract:
>     Guido> BINARY_ADD etc.
> 
> Yeah, but the runtime behind the virtual machine knows a hell of a lot about
> the types.  A stream of opcodes doesn't mean anything without the semantics
> of the functions the interpreter loop calls to do its work.  I thought the
> aim of Eric's Parrot idea was that Perl and Python might be able to share a
> virtual machine.  If both can generate something like today's BINARY_ADD
> opcode, the underlying types of both Python and Perl better have the same
> semantics.

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.

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