use Perl

Well, we have a challenge. Some of the ximian folks are hanging around in perl6-internals, and once again the decision that parrot's going to be a register machine is being questioned. (Which is a good thing, as big decisions should be challenged until they're not changeable any more) I still think it's the best way to go. It won't necessarily map that well to the x86 chip, but I'm OK with that. The x86 architecture sucks rocks, and I don't see the benefit to tying ourselves to its limitations. (The later members of the family aren't horribly pathetic, but even Intel's finally gotten around to tossing the damn thing) We'll run just fine there, but we won't tie ourselves to the limits of the system, so when we do run on a less-sucky architecture (Alpha, Sparc, PA-RISC, PPC, or even an IA64) we'll be fine.

Anyway, I'm now determined to make Parrot execute streams of low-level ops faster than mono does. I don't know if we will, but damn it we will try. Nyah! :-)

I've also gotten the CygWin tools installed on my laptop, so I can hopefully build parrot on it, rather than on my Linux box. (I can access my laptop everwhere, but editing on my home box when I'm at work means terminal-mode emacs. Blech)

And speaking of Parrot... we're looking good, and on track for a first public release next week. Simon's working on docs and todo lists, and I'm doing more design work, and we're both beating the interpreter source into shape for a basic release. We're pretty much there for the source, but the infrastructure that needs to be wrapped around the repository's still being built. (By Ask, one of the unsung heroes of perl)

First public demo of Parrot should be next week at the Boston.PM meeting. Come and be amazed! :)