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Initially, a lot of Parrot's purpose in reality was to be a VM for Perl 6, but Parrot also had a goal of being a good general VM for dynamic languages.

This was, initially, for two reasons:

* allow Perl 5 code to run in process with Perl 6 code (without linking in libperl) * provide a unified VM on which Perl 5.12 could become Perl 6

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Sure. I just remember a lot of (possibly a bit pie-in-the-sky) talk about how it could be a VM for Perl and Python both. That the more concrete initial plans and to some degree work was to allow good interop between major versions of Perl doesn't surprise me.

I'll defer to your memories if they contradict that though, I know you were involved to varying degrees for the first decade or so, and all I did was lurk.

I think no one was more surprised than Simon himself that his April Fools joke turned out to be the plan.

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