brian_d_foy writes "You may have read chromatic's latest Perl 6 Design Meeting notes and wondered what NQP was (although Patrick brought it up in the Meeting notes for June 20). Over in the Pugs blog, Mark Strosberg talks a little about this new implementation of "Not Quite Perl 6" on parrot. It's not everything, but it's enough to whet your appetite. It doesn't do fancy DWIMery like leaving the parentheses off and the method call syntax. NQP gives the Parrot developers to work on the compilation phase of the process without dealing with all the complexity of a full Perl 6.
Mark explains building NQP—it's just another language in parrot. Have you looked in the languages directory recently? There's quite a number of languages in there (which you can also see on at parrotcode.org):
That Makefile builds all of the languages, or I can build them separately by using the Makefile in their directories. Once I have the .pbc file, I can tell parrot to use it to parse my script:APL cola pheme
BASIC dotnet plumhead
HQ9plus ecmascript pugs
LANGUAGES.STATUS.pod forth punie
Makefile jako pynie
PIR lazy-k regex
WMLScript lisp scheme
Zcode lua t
abc m4 tap
amber nqp tcl
befunge ook unlambda
bf parrot_compiler urm
c99 perl5
cardinal perl6
The t/ directory contains examples of what I can do with NQP, and adding to those tests is a good way to get started in the Perl 6 effort."./parrot languages/nqp/nqp.pbc hello.nqp
