use Perl

brian_d_foy writes "You may have read chromatic's latest Perl 6 Design Meeting notes and wondered what NQP was (although Patrick brought it up in the Meeting notes for June 20). Over in the Pugs blog, Mark Strosberg talks a little about this new implementation of "Not Quite Perl 6" on parrot. It's not everything, but it's enough to whet your appetite. It doesn't do fancy DWIMery like leaving the parentheses off and the method call syntax. NQP gives the Parrot developers to work on the compilation phase of the process without dealing with all the complexity of a full Perl 6.

Mark explains building NQP—it's just another language in parrot. Have you looked in the languages directory recently? There's quite a number of languages in there (which you can also see on at parrotcode.org):

APL                     cola                    pheme
BASIC                   dotnet                  plumhead
HQ9plus                 ecmascript              pugs
LANGUAGES.STATUS.pod    forth                   punie
Makefile                jako                    pynie
PIR                     lazy-k                  regex
WMLScript               lisp                    scheme
Zcode                   lua                     t
abc                     m4                      tap
amber                   nqp                     tcl
befunge                 ook                     unlambda
bf                      parrot_compiler         urm
c99                     perl5
cardinal                perl6

That Makefile builds all of the languages, or I can build them separately by using the Makefile in their directories. Once I have the .pbc file, I can tell parrot to use it to parse my script:

./parrot languages/nqp/nqp.pbc hello.nqp

The t/ directory contains examples of what I can do with NQP, and adding to those tests is a good way to get started in the Perl 6 effort."