Parrot – Overview
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When we feed our program into conventional Perl, it is first compiled into an internal representation, or bytecode; this bytecode is then fed into almost separate subsystem inside Perl to be interpreted. So there are two distinct phases of Perl”s operation:
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Compilation to bytecode and
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Interpretation of bytecode.
This is not unique to Perl. Other languages following this design include Python, Ruby, Tcl and even Java.
We also know that there is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which is a platform independent execution environment that converts Java bytecode into machine language and executes it. If you understand this concept then you will understand Parrot.
Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot is the target for the final Perl 6 compiler, and is used as a backend for Pugs, as well as variety of other languages like Tcl, Ruby, Python etc.
Parrot has been written using most popular language “C”.
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