On Sat, 29 Dec 2001 ptkwt / aracnet.com wrote:

> I tried to post this to the ng, but I keep getting some kind of message 
> about not being able to post because of a server configuration problems...

I've Cc'd to ruby-talk. AFAI it's a bidirectional gateway. (It's where I
sent the original message at least)
 
> I think a lot of us Rubyists want to see Ruby play with Parrot - and there 
> might also be a few of us willing to actually work on it.

That would be great.

> There are 
> already a couple of projects out there to parse Ruby in Ruby.  Or, perhaps 
> JRuby could be modified to be PRuby - instead of spitting out Java bytcode  
> it could spit out Parrot bytecode.

Sure, the JRuby way would probably be the best starting place.

> Is there a Parrot bytecode/VM specification out available?

There's a partial specification in the Parrot kit.  
docs/parrot_assembly.pod has the details, such as they are. Things aren't
fully specified yet, but things are in progress.

The parrot kit's available for CVS checkout--

  CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous / cvs.perl.org:/home/perlcvs
  cvs co parrot

will get it for you. (Perl 5.005 or higher's needed to build, and yes we
are aware of the bootstrapping issues... :)

There are some docs posted off of dev.perl.org and www.parrotcode.org as
well, and I know some stuff's been posted to www.perl.com.

Things are pretty perl-centric at the moment, as would be expected. That
won't last, though, especially if Ruby folks come on. The end result
engine will *not* require perl. (When we're done, the parrot engine won't
require any parser at all--if someone wanted they could go all-assembly,
though that seems like a fair amount of extra work...)

					Dan