Parrot 0.0.1 is released.

    Because the game of hide-and-seek was still going on, it took Edmund
    and Lucy some time to find the others. But when at last they were all
    together (which happened in the long room, where the suit of armour
    was) Lucy burst out:

    "Peter! Susan! It's all true. Edmund has seen it too. There is a
    country you can get to through the wardrobe. Edmund and I both got in.
    We met one another in there, in the wood. Go on, Edmund; tell them all
    about it."

                                 - "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe",
                                                                  CS Lewis

I suppose (unlike Edmund did) I should tell you all about it. What we're
releasing today is a very, very early alpha of the Parrot interpreter. At
the moment, we have support for some simple operations on integer, floating
point and string registers, and the ability to read in and execute bytecode.
We also have an assembler which can generate bytecode output from Parrot
assembly.

You can get the source tarball in (currently) two different ways:
    From CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SI/SIMON/parrot-0.0.1.tar.gz
               http://www.cpan.org/src/parrot-0.0.1.tar.gz
               (once the mirrors have updated)

    From CVS:  See the Parrot CVS home page at http://cvs.perl.org/

Once you've unpacked parrot, you should be able to "make test_prog", and
use the Parrot assembler to turn assembly into bytecode:

    make test_prog
    perl assemble.pl test.pasm > test.pbc
    ./test_prog test.pbc
    perl assemble.pl test2.pasm > test2.pbc
    ./test_prog test2.pbc

The first test program will add some numbers together, count to 10,000,000,
and tell you how long it took; the second test program will print a familiar
greeting.

In the next email, coming in a couple of minutes, I'll outline two areas
where I really, really need some patches before we go much further; you
should also note that Parrot has a bug/request tracking system at

    http://parrotbugs.develooper.com/

which will be filled with some more things that I'd like people to take a
look at.

Patches should be sent to the perl6-internals mailing list, where I'll take a
look at them and apply them to the CVS tree. As time goes by, people who
regularly submit good patches will be given committer access to the tree, and
can help me out applying other patches from the list.

IMPORTANT! Please note that we haven't decided the final license for Parrot 
yet. You currently receive Parrot under the same terms as Perl 5: your choice 
of either the Artistic or General Public Licenses.

Have fun,
Simon

-- 
set_s_sc S1, "Just Another Parrot Hacker, "
print_s  S1

• Parrot 0.0.1 is released. by Simon Cozens