Parrot[http://www.parrotcode.org/] is a new runtime interpreter written in support of [Perl] 6 and other dynamic languages.
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'''Try it out'''

To try out the Tcl interpreter (called ParTcl) 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. There is also a "make tcl-test" target which will grab the latest copy of the tcl test suite out of CVS; and run them.

You can also see the PIR that your tcl compiles to with the *--pir* option. Also, you can use *-e* to specify the tcl on the command line, ala perl.

 ../../parrot tcl.pbc --pir -e='puts [expr 2 + 2]'
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'''Current Status:'''

This is a tcl compiler. We use a perl six grammar to parse the code into an AST, which we then translate to PIR (kind of a high level assembly). This is then compiled and executed. (We also use the grammar for the [expr] language.)

Only a few builtins are available inlined: most of the work currently is *always* dispatched at runtime. The primary goal is feature completeness.

A partcl-only option --pir allows you to dump the PIR that would be executed.

Recent work on our testing harness (and new features!) brings up to 15.10% passing rate of cvs-latest's suite; we don't *quite* run tcltest yet, but we're getting closer.

"New Features"

Since this is a brand new implementation on parrot, it would be nice to take advantage of parrot features like the Parrot Grammar Engine (see [PerlSixGrammars])
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'''Future Goals:'''

Run tcltest.tcl :  With "make tcl-test", we can now run a (very slightly converted) version of the tcl suite using partcl. While at one point we did a lot of conversion to run these tests in a perl-based harness, we are now running them entirely through partcl. This is accomplished by providing a Test::More like API that has a 'test' fronted - this is shim'd into the header of each .test file, which can then be run directly by partcl.

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.)
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'''Hacking'''

Currently, the Tcl on parrot effort is being coordinated by [Matt Diephouse] and [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.

See also [perl] and [python] and Will's blog[http://use.perl.org/~coke/journal.pl]

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[[[Category Language]|[Category Tcl Implementations] (not exclusively, but inclusively)]]