Zellyn Hunter writes: > On Tuesday 02 September 2003 13:09, Amir Karger wrote: > > A couple more questions on the coding front: > > > > (1) Even though it's supposed to be "native" Parrot support, I'm still > > allowed to write in PIR, right? Because that'll be translated to pasm > > and thereby be native. > > > > (2) WinFrotz, one of the popular C Z-machine runtimes, is GPL. If I > > steal code or ideas from there, does Parrot or this piece of it have to > > be GPL only instead of GPL/Artistic? I am happily ignorant about > > licensing issues. > > So I take it the goal is to to teach parrot to understand z-machine opcodes, > rather than simply writing a z-machine interpreter that runs on parrot, or > rewriting inform to compile to parrot?
I doubt it. I think a z-machine to parrot converter, making some of the more complex ops sub calls or something, would be best. We need to work with the z-machine bytecode directly, though, because many games are distributed without source. And perhaps, once dynamic opcode loading is ready, those sub calls can turn into real ops for speed. But that's not important at the moment: the important thing (well, as important as z-machine can be :-) is to get the translator working. Luke > I'm sure it's much harder that way (especially since I'm sure someone's going > to follow the dotGnu lead and implement C for parrot before we're all said > and done and you could just recompile one of the more portable z-machine > emulators!), but you'd certainly get mad geek respect. And since there's > already a scheme implementation for z-code, you'd kill two birds with one - > er, parrot. > > Zellyn >
