Version 11 of parrot

Parrot (http://www.parrotcode.org/ ) is a new runtime interpretor written in support of Perl 6 and other dynamic languages.

Try it out

To try out the Tcl interpreter that is currently available with parrot: (you'll need a C compiler, make, and perl, for now.)

First, get a copy of parrot: (see http://www.parrotcode.org/source.html for instructions. You can use svn or grab a snapshot)

 cd parrot
 perl Configure.pl
 make
 cd languages/tcl
 make

From here, you can cd to examples and make hello.In the tcl directory, there is also a make test target, where you can run the limited test suite.

Current Status:

This is a tcl interpreter. Code is parsed out into words, and then an interpreter finds the appropriate command and invokes it, passing in the arguments. A number of builtins are implemented, mostly in PIR (http://www.parrotcode.org/examples/pir.html ), though they are easily swapped out for code written in C.

Future Goals:

Drop the interpreter - have the parser emit an invokable parrot object. (At this point, we'd still be doing command lookup dynamically at runtime.). Eventually, make the compiler smart enough to know when it can use cached versions of the builtins.

Pass most of tcl's test suite. (Main holdup here is implementing the rest of the builtins)

Provide the ability to call routines defined in other languages from inside Tcl. (There is already a parrot standard library; eventually this would allow us to call anything, say, written in perl, using native Tcl syntax.)

Hacking

Currently, the Tcl on parrot effort is being coordinated by Will Coleda (will at coleda dot com). If you're interested in helping out, there is C, PIR, Tcl and Perl code that needs writing.