Before we start, let”s download one latest copy of Parrot and install it on our machine.

Parrot download link is available in Parrot CVS Snapshot. Download the latest version of Parrot and to install it follow the following steps:

• Unzip and untar the downloaded file.

• Make sure you already have Perl 5 installed on your machine.

• Now do the following:

% cd parrot
% perl Configure.pl
Parrot Configure
Copyright (C) 2001 Yet Another Society
Since you''re running this script, you obviously have
Perl 5 -- I''ll be pulling some defaults from its configuration.
...

• You”ll then be asked a series of questions about your local configuration; you can almost always hit return/enter for each one.

• Finally, you”ll be told to type – make test_prog, and Parrot will successfully build the test interpreter.

• Now you should run some tests; so type ”make test” and you should see a readout like the following:

perl t/harness
t/op/basic.....ok,1/2 skipped:label constants unimplemented in
assembler
t/op/string....ok, 1/4 skipped:  I''m unable to write it!
All tests successful, 2 subtests skipped.
Files=2, Tests=6,......

By the time you read this, there could be more tests, and some of those which skipped might not skip, but make sure that none of them should fail!

Once you have a parrot executable installed, you can check out the various types of examples given in Parrot ”Examples” section. Also you can check out the examples directory in the parrot repository.