Plum-headed Parakeet

Mark Overmeer passed on one of the take home messages from YAPC::Europe in Birmingham. In a lightening talk about XML::Compile, http://search.cpan.org/~markov/XML-Compile/, he said something like: Never mind the XML, it's just syntax. The day before, Allison Randall had talked about the Parrot compiler tools and mentioned how XSLT had influenced the design of TGE. So I wondered whether Never mind the XSLT, it's just syntax. applies as well.

The XSLT project I came up with, is to take the XML output of phc, http://phpcompiler.org/ and transform it to something Parrot can understand. phc parses PHP, so this should become an implementation of PHP on Parrot.

As a projectname, http://svn.perl.org/viewcvs/parrot/trunk/languages/plumhead/, I chose ‘Plumhead’, which is short for Plum-headed Parakeet, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum-headed_parakeet. The description on Wikipedia is neat too: Plum-headed Parakeet is a gregarious and noisy species with range of raucous calls.