The Perl Foundation announces project Ponie to bridge Perl 5 and Perl 6

Links

• HOME
• Cheap calling cards
• International calling cards

Press Release

Two year investment from Fotango to lead the development of Perl 5 running on top of Parrot.

OSCON 2003, Portland, OR (July 8, 2003) -- The Perl Foundation (TPF) is pleased to announce the formation of the Ponie Project, a bridge between Perl 5 and Perl 6. The Perl 5 interpreter will be rewritten to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine. This will ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code at thousands of companies around the world.

Fotango's two-year commitment will allow Arthur Bergman, a Senior Developer at the company and the main contributor to the Perl 5.8 threading effort, to help TPF coordinate and steer the Ponie project externally with the Perl community and internally within Fotango.

"Ponie changes all the rules. Parrot will be the heart of Perl 6. Bringing Parrot to the heart of Perl 5 is very exciting," said Simon Wardley, Fotango's COO. "Ponie will offer a clear road forward for companies contemplating the Perl 5 to Perl 6 transition."

"Fotango has been working with the Perl community for some time now." said Allison Randal, President of The Perl Foundation. "Ponie is not only important for Perl 5, but for Perl 6 as well. With Fotango's involvement and sponsorship we are confident in the route the Ponie project is taking."

Perl 6 is the next version of the Perl programming language. Perl 6 is currently in the design stage and is coordinated by Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl language, Damian Conway, the author of 'Object Oriented Programming in Perl' and Allison Randal, the president of the Perl Foundation. Parrot, being coordinated by Dan Sugalski, is the virtual machine designed for dynamic languages that will run the next version of Perl.

The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Perl Foundation is a unit of the Yet Another Society (YAS), a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization based in Holland, Michigan.

Fotango is a creative solutions group providing consultancy on software projects. Fotango employs a large number of open source contributors and releases much of its own software as open source. Fotango is based in London, UK.