Quick butchers at perl6/parrot

lilstevey on 2006-09-04T22:22:03

I've been lurking on the perl 6 users mailing list ( perl6-users-subscribe@perl.org ) for a while and thought it was time to have a quick look at perl 6 / parrot given that I found myself with a few minutes to kill.

  1. Searched google for "feather perl 6" I had heard feather on the mailing list and in a few blogs, and figured that it would make a good spam filter came across
  2. Had a quick read of synopsis one
  3. Followed the FAQ down till it got to some usefull links including http://jnthn.net/perl6
  4. Downloaded win32 binaries of pugs and perl 6
  5. Now I'm looking for hello world
    • looking for sommat in parrot I check in japh in the examples dir "a lot of the JAPHs are currently broken due to recent core changes" This may not bode well...
    • Just been reading around and there is a docs folder - maybe a better place to start ( DOH! )
    • right - parrot.pod, contains the following:
      intro.pod
      An introductory article on what Parrot is and how to do some interesting things with it. (Note that this was originally written around the time of Parrot v0.0.2, and is in need of some updating).
      I suppose at this stage there are going to be a few broken bits.. Not to worry... There must be a win32 pod viewer out there without too much overhead - maybe that would be a good starting point...

      Right hello world in pir -
      Hello world!
      Create a file called F that contains the following code. .sub _main print "Hello world!\n" end .end Then run it by typing:

        parrot hello.pir


      Cool - that seems to work... ( still not perl 6, but getting executable parrot code is a good first step )

  6. Right, onto pugs...

    Thats suprising - the pugs directory contains parrot.exe - i wonder if it'll run the same pir file?

    Looking back at Jonathan Worthingtons page he says "Pugs can currently compile to Parrot, though at the time of writing that isn't as stable as the Pugs evaluator"

    I need to read up a little more on this...

  7. Attempting to run the compiled code on the parrot in the pugs directory gives an alert:

    parrot.exe - unable to find component
    This application has failed to start because libparrot.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.


I get the feeling I've annotated more than I've played. oh well.


Thanks for feedback

JonathanWorthington on 2006-09-05T12:07:16

Pleased my Win32 builds were some help in getting started. :-) I should have (7) fixed later today - good to know about that bug. And the intro.pod is actually *not* that old - I re-wrote it from scratch within the last year. Didn't know about the reference in parrot.pod, I'll go ci a fix for that. :-)

Thanks for the binaries!

lilstevey on 2006-09-06T12:23:14

Binary distributions, especially on windows really help us newbies dip our toe - often you find that in trying certain packages, you get locked in a build cycle so complex that interest is lost, so speaking for myself at least they are very much appreciatted.