Is Parrot dead?

[Antaeus Feldspar]

"Ing. Roman Fischer" wrote:
> 
> For a long time I do not find informations about Parrot (the programming
> language). O Reilly still estimates July 2001 for the "Programming in Parrot
> in a Nutshell"-book and even Amazon (which is not very shy to offer books
> long before they are available) does not have it in its offer. I also did
> not find any real complete definitions of this language.
> 
> So is this language dead?
> 
> Roman

I think I can clear up this confusion.  ^_^  It stems from a huge,
elaborate April Fool's joke in April of 2001, in which Guido van Rossum
and O'Reilly books and many other open-source leaders participated.  The
full story can be found here:
http://www.oreilly.com/news/parrotstory_0401.html .  

However, that is not the end of the story.  There wasn't ever a real
language named Parrot that combined the features of Perl and Python. 
However...  there is now a virtual machine in development that should be
able to run both Perl and Python code, as well as other interpreted
languages.  Since the lead developer of this project is the very man who
orchestrated the Parrot-the-programming-language hoax, Simon Cozens, the
obvious name for this virtual machine was Parrot.

	-jc