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

[Michael Hudson]

Guido van Rossum <guido@zope.com> writes:

> >     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.

And the point of this would be?  I don't see much more benefit than
just arranging for the numbers in Include/opcode.h to match perl's
equivalents (i.e. none), but I may be missing something...

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  I've even been known to get Marmite *near* my mouth -- but never
  actually in it yet.  Vegamite is right out.
 UnicodeError: ASCII unpalatable error: vegamite found, ham expected
                                       -- Tim Peters, comp.lang.python