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Parrot virtual machine

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Parrot is a discontinued register-based process virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It is possible to compile Parrot assembly language and Parrot intermediate representation (PIR, an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it. Parrot is free and open-source software.

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53-453: Parrot was started by the Perl community and developed with help from the open-source and free software communities . As a result, it was focused on license compatibility with Perl ( Artistic License 2.0 ), platform compatibility across a broad array of systems, processor architecture compatibility across most modern processors, speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and

106-409: A parsing expression grammar into Parrot bytecode . It is therefore compiling rules into a program, unlike most virtual machines and runtimes, which store regular expressions in a secondary internal format that is then interpreted at runtime by a regular expression engine. The rules format used by PGE can express any regular expression and most formal grammars , and as such it forms the first link in

159-535: A recursive descent parser as well as an operator-precedence parser , allowing free transition between the two in a single grammar. The PGE feeds into the Tree Grammar Engine (TGE) which further transforms the parse-tree generated by PGE for optimization and ultimately for code generation. The most complete language implementations targeting the Parrot VM were Raku (known at the time as Rakudo Perl 6), Lua and

212-469: A switch statement (called "given"/"when"), regular expressions updates, and the smart match operator (~~). Around this same time, development began in earnest on another implementation of Perl 6 known as Rakudo Perl, developed in tandem with the Parrot virtual machine . As of November 2009, Rakudo Perl has had regular monthly releases and now is the most complete implementation of Perl 6. A major change in

265-479: A base object from which all classes were automatically derived and the ability to require versions of modules. Another significant development was the inclusion of the CGI.pm module, which contributed to Perl's popularity as a CGI scripting language . Perl 5.004 added support for Microsoft Windows , Plan 9 , QNX , and AmigaOS . Perl 5.005 was released on July 22, 1998. This release included several enhancements to

318-500: A case for a major new language initiative. This led to a decision to begin work on a redesign of the language, to be called Perl 6. Proposals for new language features were solicited from the Perl community at large, which submitted more than 300 RFCs . Wall spent the next few years digesting the RFCs and synthesizing them into a coherent framework for Perl 6. He presented his design for Perl 6 in

371-404: A general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl originally was not capitalized and the name was changed to being capitalized by the time Perl 4 was released. The latest release is Perl 5, first released in 1994. From 2000 to October 2019 a sixth version of Perl was in development; the sixth version's name

424-589: A given algorithm can be short and highly compressible. Perl gained widespread popularity in the mid-1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its powerful regular expression and string parsing abilities. In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for system administration , network programming , finance, bioinformatics , and other applications, such as for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power. In 1998, it

477-701: A hardware design, allowing the vast literature on compiler optimization to be used in generating bytecode for the Parrot virtual machine that could run at speeds closer to machine code . Other register-based virtual machines inspired parts of Parrot's design, including LLVM , the Lua VM and Inferno's Dis . Parrot has rich support for several features of functional programming including closures and continuations , both of which can be particularly difficult to implement correctly and portably, especially in conjunction with exception handling and threading . The biggest advantage

530-471: A large collection of language primitives . Perl favors language constructs that are concise and natural for humans to write, even where they complicate the Perl interpreter. Parser Grammar Engine The Parser Grammar Engine ( PGE , originally the Parrot Grammar Engine ) is a compiler and runtime system for Raku rules for the Parrot virtual machine . PGE uses these rules to convert

583-483: A mainstream VM for any of its other supported languages. The name Parrot came from an April Fool's joke which announced a hypothetical language, named Parrot , that would unify Python and Perl . The name was later adopted by the Parrot project (initially a part of the Raku development effort) which aimed to support Raku, Python, and other programming languages. The Parrot Foundation was dissolved in 2014. The Foundation

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636-469: A new I/O implementation, added a new thread implementation, improved numeric accuracy, and added several new modules. As of 2013, this version was still the most popular Perl version and was used by Red Hat Linux 5, SUSE Linux 10, Solaris 10, HP-UX 11.31, and AIX 5. In 2004, work began on the "Synopses" – documents that originally summarized the Apocalypses, but which became the specification for

689-401: A new language called "Winxed". Projects to implement many other languages were started, including PHP , Python , and Ruby ; along with esoteric and demonstration languages such as Befunge and the " squaak " tutorial language. None of these projects were successful in becoming the primary implementation of their respective languages. There are three forms of program code for Parrot: Parrot

742-564: A rand() function using a consistent random number generator. Some observers credit the release of Perl 5.10 with the start of the Modern Perl movement. In particular, this phrase describes a style of development that embraces the use of the CPAN, takes advantage of recent developments in the language, and is rigorous about creating high quality code. While the book Modern Perl may be the most visible standard-bearer of this idea, other groups such as

795-568: A series of documents called "apocalypses" – numbered to correspond to chapters in Programming Perl . As of January 2011 , the developing specification of Perl 6 was encapsulated in design documents called Synopses – numbered to correspond to Apocalypses. Thesis work by Bradley M. Kuhn , overseen by Wall, considered the possible use of the Java virtual machine as a runtime for Perl. Kuhn's thesis showed this approach to be problematic. In 2001, it

848-516: Is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible". The design of Perl can be understood as a response to three broad trends in the computer industry: falling hardware costs, rising labor costs, and improvements in compiler technology. Many earlier computer languages, such as Fortran and C, aimed to make efficient use of expensive computer hardware. In contrast, Perl was designed so that computer programmers could write programs more quickly and easily. Perl has many features that ease

901-464: Is Raku rules, so a PGE rule might look like this for an addition-only grammar: The operator precedence parser allows an operator table to be built and used directly in a Perl 6 rule style parser like so: This accomplishes the same goal of defining a simple, addition-only grammar, but does so using a combination of a Raku style regex/rules for term and number and a shift-reduce optable for everything else. Though PGE outputs code which will parse

954-528: Is a visual pun on pearl onion . Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while employed as a programmer at Unisys ; he released version 1.0 on December 18, 1987. Wall based early Perl on some methods existing languages used for text manipulation. Perl 2, released in June 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in October 1989, added support for binary data streams. Originally,

1007-522: Is register-based like most hardware CPUs , and unlike most virtual machines, which are stack-based. Parrot provides four types of registers: Parrot provides an arbitrary number of registers; this number is fixed at compile time per subroutine. In PASM In PIR mod_parrot is an optional module for the Apache web server . It embeds a Parrot virtual machine interpreter into the Apache server and provides access to

1060-476: Is the dynamic extendability of objects with methods, which allows for polymorphic containers (PMCs) and associated opcodes . Implementing solutions to these problems at the virtual machine level obviates the need to solve them in the individual client languages. Parrot provides a suite of compiler-writing tools which includes the Parser Grammar Engine (PGE), a hybrid parser-generator that can express

1113-534: The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules ; as of December 2022 , it carries over 211,850 modules in 43,865 distributions, written by more than 14,324 authors, and is mirrored worldwide at more than 245 locations. Perl 5.004 was released on May 15, 1997, and included, among other things, the UNIVERSAL package, giving Perl

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1166-516: The Java virtual machine and the Common Language Runtime , for the .NET platform, have been designed for statically typed languages, while the languages targeted by Parrot are dynamically typed. Virtual machines such as the Java virtual machine and the current Perl 5 virtual machine are also stack based . Parrot developers chose a register-based design, reasoning that it more closely resembles

1219-594: The Libera Chat #raku IRC channel. Many functional programming influences were absorbed by the Perl 6 design team. In 2012, Perl 6 development was centered primarily on two compilers: In 2013, MoarVM ("Metamodel On A Runtime"), a C language-based virtual machine designed primarily for Rakudo was announced. In October 2019, Perl 6 was renamed to Raku. As of 2017 only the Rakudo implementation and MoarVM are under active development, and other virtual machines, such as

1272-468: The regex engine, new hooks into the backend through the B::* modules, the qr// regex quote operator, a large selection of other new core modules, and added support for several more operating systems, including BeOS . Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000. Major changes included 64-bit support, Unicode string representation, support for files over 2 GiB, and the "our" keyword. When developing Perl 5.6,

1325-560: The yada yada operator (intended to mark placeholder code that is not yet implemented), implicit strictures, full Y2038 compliance, regex conversion overloading, DTrace support, and Unicode 5.2. On May 14, 2011, Perl 5.14 was released with JSON support built-in. On May 20, 2012, Perl 5.16 was released. Notable new features include the ability to specify a given version of Perl that one wishes to emulate, allowing users to upgrade their version of Perl, but still run old scripts that would normally be incompatible. Perl 5.16 also updates

1378-454: The "Apocalypses" for Perl 6, a series of documents meant to summarize the change requests and present the design of the next generation of Perl. They were presented as a digest of the RFCs, rather than a formal document. At this time, Perl 6 existed only as a description of a language. Perl 5.8 was first released on July 18, 2002, and further 5.X versions have been released approximately yearly since then. Perl 5.8 improved Unicode support, added

1431-436: The "a" from the name. The name is occasionally expanded as a backronym : Practical Extraction and Report Language and Wall's own Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister , which is in the manual page for perl. Programming Perl , published by O'Reilly Media , features a picture of a dromedary camel on the cover and is commonly called the "Camel Book". This image has become an unofficial symbol of Perl. O'Reilly owns

1484-478: The Apache API to allow handlers to be written in Parrot assembly language , or any high-level language targeted to Parrot. Perl Perl is a high-level , general-purpose , interpreted , dynamic programming language . Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as

1537-664: The Enlightened Perl Organization have taken up the cause. In late 2012 and 2013, several projects for alternative implementations for Perl 5 started: Perl5 in Perl6 by the Rakudo Perl team, moe by Stevan Little and friends, p2 by the Perl11 team under Reini Urban, gperl by goccy, and rperl, a Kickstarter project led by Will Braswell and affiliated with the Perl11 project. At the 2000 Perl Conference , Jon Orwant made

1590-662: The Java Virtual Machine and JavaScript , are supported. In June 2020, Perl 7 was announced as the successor to Perl 5. Perl 7 was to initially be based on Perl 5.32 with a release expected in first half of 2021, and release candidates sooner. This plan was revised in May 2021, without any release timeframe or version of Perl 5 for use as a baseline specified. When Perl 7 would be released, Perl 5 would have gone into long term maintenance. Supported Perl 5 versions however would continue to get important security and bug fixes. Perl 7

1643-401: The Parrot virtual machine was to host client languages and allow inter-operation between them. Several hurdles exist in accomplishing this goal, in particular the difficulty of mapping high-level concepts, data, and data structures between languages. The differing properties of statically and dynamically typed languages motivated the design of Parrot. Current popular virtual machines such as

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1696-493: The Perl 6 language. In February 2005, Audrey Tang began work on Pugs , a Perl 6 interpreter written in Haskell . This was the first concerted effort toward making Perl 6 a reality. This effort stalled in 2006. The Perl On New Internal Engine (PONIE) project existed from 2003 until 2006. It was to be a bridge between Perl 5 and 6, and an effort to rewrite the Perl 5 interpreter to run on the Perl 6 Parrot virtual machine . The goal

1749-619: The Perl Steering Committee canceled it to avoid issues with backward compatibility for scripts that were not written to the pragmas and modules that would become the default in Perl 7. Perl 7 will only come out when the developers add enough features to warrant a major release upgrade. According to Wall, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it," commonly known as TMTOWTDI, (pronounced Tim Toady ). As proponents of this motto argue, this philosophy makes it easy to write concise statements. The second slogan

1802-462: The compiler chain for all of Parrot's front-end languages. When executed, the bytecode generated by PGE will parse text as described in the input rules, generating a parse tree. The parse tree can be manipulated directly, or fed into the next stage of the Parrot compiler toolchain to generate an abstract syntax tree (AST) from which code can be generated; if the grammar describes a programming language. Originally named P6GE and written in C, PGE

1855-410: The core to support Unicode 6.1. On May 18, 2013, Perl 5.18 was released. Notable new features include the new dtrace hooks, lexical subs, more CORE:: subs, overhaul of the hash for security reasons, support for Unicode 6.2. On May 27, 2014, Perl 5.20 was released. Notable new features include subroutine signatures, hash slices/new slice syntax, postfix dereferencing (experimental), Unicode 6.3, and

1908-495: The decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects; after 5.005_63, the next version became 5.5.640, with plans for development versions to have odd numbers and stable versions to have even numbers. In 2000, Wall put forth a call for suggestions for a new version of Perl from the community. The process resulted in 361 RFC ( Request for Comments ) documents that were to be used in guiding development of Perl 6. In 2001, work began on

1961-399: The development process of Perl 5 occurred with Perl 5.11; the development community has switched to a monthly release cycle of development releases, with a yearly schedule of stable releases. By that plan, bugfix point releases will follow the stable releases every three months. On April 12, 2010, Perl 5.12.0 was released. Notable core enhancements include new package NAME VERSION syntax,

2014-448: The flexibility to handle the varying demands made by Raku and other modern dynamic languages . Version 1.0, with a stable application programming interface (API) for development, was released on March 17, 2009. The last version is release 8.1.0 "Andean Parakeet". Parrot was officially discontinued in August 2021, after being supplanted by MoarVM in its main use (Raku) and never becoming

2067-453: The grammar described by a rule, and can be used at runtime to handle simple grammars and regular expressions found in code, its main purpose is to parse high-level programming languages . The Parrot compiler toolchain is broken into several parts, of which PGE is the first. PGE converts source code to parse trees . The tree grammar engine (TGE) then converts these into a Parrot abstract syntax trees (PAST). A second TGE pass then converts

2120-505: The image as a trademark but licenses it for non-commercial use, requiring only an acknowledgement and a link to www.perl.com. Licensing for commercial use is decided on a case-by-case basis. O'Reilly also provides "Programming Republic of Perl" logos for non-commercial sites and "Powered by Perl" buttons for any site that uses Perl. The Perl Foundation owns an alternative symbol, an onion, which it licenses to its subsidiaries, Perl Mongers , PerlMonks , Perl.org, and others. The symbol

2173-411: The only documentation for Perl was a single lengthy man page . In 1991, Programming Perl , known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language but to identify the version that was well documented by the book. Perl 4

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2226-647: The task of the programmer at the expense of greater CPU and memory requirements. These include automatic memory management; dynamic typing ; strings, lists, and hashes; regular expressions; introspection ; and an eval() function. Perl follows the theory of "no built-in limits", an idea similar to the Zero One Infinity rule. Wall was trained as a linguist, and the design of Perl is very much informed by linguistic principles. Examples include Huffman coding (common constructions should be short), good end-weighting (the important information should come first), and

2279-667: Was also referred to as the " duct tape that holds the Internet together", in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance. Perl was originally named "Pearl". Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations. It is also a Christian reference to the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew. However, Wall discovered the existing PEARL language before Perl's official release and dropped

2332-462: Was announced on 24 June 2020 at "The Perl Conference in the Cloud" as the successor to Perl 5. Based on Perl 5.32, Perl 7 was planned to be backward compatible with modern Perl 5 code; Perl 5 code, without boilerplate (pragma) header needs adding use compat::perl5; to stay compatible, but modern code can drop some of the boilerplate. The plan to go to Perl 7 brought up more discussion, however, and

2385-449: Was changed to Raku . Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams which liberally borrow ideas from each other. Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C , sh , AWK , and sed . It provides text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools . Perl is a highly expressive programming language: source code for

2438-415: Was created in 2008 to hold the copyright and trademarks of the Parrot project, to help drive development of language implementations and the core codebase, to provide a base for growing the Parrot community, and to reach out to other language communities. Historical design decisions are documented in the form of Parrot Design Documents, or PDDs, in the Parrot repository. Until late 2005, Dan Sugalski

2491-504: Was decided that Perl 6 would run on a cross-language virtual machine called Parrot . In 2005, Audrey Tang created the Pugs project, an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell . This acted as, and continues to act as, a test platform for the Perl 6 language (separate from the development of the actual implementation), allowing the language designers to explore. The Pugs project spawned an active Perl/Haskell cross-language community centered around

2544-492: Was released in March 1991. Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases , culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993, whereupon Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5. Perl 5.000

2597-418: Was released on March 13, 1995. Perl 5.002 was released on February 29, 1996 with the new prototypes feature. This allowed module authors to make subroutines that behaved like Perl builtins . Perl 5.003 was released June 25, 1996, as a security release. One of the most important events in Perl 5 history took place outside of the language proper and was a consequence of its module support. On October 26, 1995,

2650-503: Was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter , and it added many new features to the language, including objects , references , lexical (my) variables , and modules . Importantly, modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter. This allowed the core interpreter to stabilize, even as it enabled ordinary Perl programmers to add new language features. Perl 5 has been in active development since then. Perl 5.001

2703-412: Was the lead designer and chief architect of Parrot. Chip Salzenberg , a longtime Perl, Linux kernel, and C++ hacker, took over until mid-2006, when he became the lead developer. Allison Randal , the lead developer of Punie and chief architect of Parrot's compiler tools, was the chief architect until mid-October 2010 when she stepped down and chose Christoph Otto as the new chief architect. The goal of

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2756-466: Was to ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code at thousands of companies around the world. The PONIE project ended in 2006 and is no longer being actively developed. Some of the improvements made to the Perl 5 interpreter as part of PONIE were folded into that project. On December 18, 2007, the 20th anniversary of Perl 1.0, Perl 5.10.0 was released. Perl 5.10.0 included notable new features, which brought it closer to Perl 6. These included

2809-505: Was translated to native Parrot and renamed not long after its initial release in November 2004. Its author is Patrick R. Michaud. PGE was written to reduce the amount of work needed to implement a compiler on Parrot. It was also written to allow Perl 6 to easily self-host, though current Pugs development no longer uses PGE as its main rules back-end in favor of a native engine named PCR. PGE combines three styles of parsing: The primary form

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