An introduction to Parrot
Birdsong
© Dmitry Pichugin, Fotolia
Parrot is an all-in-one tool for developing and executing new programming languages. Perl 6 runs on Parrot; chances are your language can run on it, too.
Are you exhausted from working on the same old code day after day? Is your programming language a clunker? Do you need a little more oomph to merge onto the information superhighway? Suffer no more. Coder's Kingdom has something for everyone, so come on down! Here's PHP 5: practical and great for the web with spunky bytecode acceleration. Or Ruby 1.9: this looker, fresh from the factory, is a real cloud-pleaser. Do you want to save a little cash? Try certified, pre-owned programming languages. Perl 5.8 is priced to move. Coder's Kingdom. Where every coder is king.
Coder's Kingdom might not exist, but choosing a programming language is strikingly similar to buying a car. Like a car, each programming language is designed with an intent, be it utility, speed, or size. Like a car, a language can offer exotic, cutting-edge features. Choosing a language is a significant investment, too, with potentially harmful and even disastrous consequences if the selection is ill considered. Additionally, each language includes mandatory parts – literals, variables, subroutines, and flow control instead of four tires, a steering wheel, and a windshield.
Indeed, the bulk of the work developing a new programming language is spent on (pardon the allusion) reinventing the wheel. The source of language must be decomposed by a parser, assembled into tokens, collated into statements, abstracted into syntax trees, and finally, either interpreted or converted into something executable, such as bytecode or binary.
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