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.