From: Dan Sugalski Date: 2001-12-30T12:33:23+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:29691] Re: Python and Ruby: a comparison At 09:57 AM 12/30/2001 +0900, Ron Stephens wrote: >However, for what its worth, the PERL 6 implements, whom I met and conversed >with at the MIT Lightweight Languages conference, are definitely truing, as a >goal, to create a PERL 6 runtime environment that can easily and credibly, >someday later on, run Perl, Ruby, and Python. I suppose that could be >additional >runtime environments for these languages, just like Jython is an additional >runtime environment for Python. Maybe that could work, and give some of the >advantages of "bringing the tow (or , in this case, three) streams if >development back togethers into one mighty river. > >I am a doubter about this, btu who knows? Oh, don't doubt. We've pulled it off already, to an extent, with the perl 5 engine, and that's a mess as these things go. Technically, an engine capable of running all three languages (and more) is pretty trivial as these things go. Inter-language calling conventions are the toughest and that's not really tough at all. The politics involved are by far the biggest hurdle, and they exceed the technical difficulties by many orders of magnitude. Having said that, Parrot will be *capable* of running perl, python, and ruby. (Whether there's a full-blown language parser for python and ruby is up in the air--I'm all for the ruby parser in ruby, as that'd make my life really easy. We'll have full bytecode translators, but those are trivial compared to parsing the languages) Even if it's not fully used, it'll make Parrot a better engine. And anyway, at this point I can wave the "Hey, look, we have a JIT!" flag to entice people into writing a ruby parser for Parrot... :) Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk