I finally decided to contact the Perl6 internals
team to find out why I couldn't install Parrot.
Brent Dax promptly replied with the news that
Configure.pl is expecting a C compiler that's
similar to the one that Perl was compiled with.
Unfortunately cl and gcc are not sufficiently
similar.
Thinking about this, I believe I've seen the phrase 'binary incompatibility' bandied about, and I think this may have something to do with it (did I mention that I don't really understand C compilers?)
So I've just downloaded the ActiveState sources
which I'm going to attempt to build.
This is all turning out to be much harder than
my normal method of installing software onto a
Windows PC (double-click on setup.exe, then watch the pretty display flash
by...) Wish me luck.
