Hello All, I hope this is the correct place for my post. I have not seen many (or any) newbie parrot questions on this group. Please direct me to the correct group and forgive my intrusion if this message is misposted.
I would like to start helping in the development of parrot. I have read the documentation, the design docs, and went over the source, but I am still a little lost. I would eventually like to help with the coding, but it appears that there may be a pressing need for a document helping newbie developers figure out how to get started. I would be willing to take on this task (Well at least until I learn enough so that I can code.) 1)If you would like me to do it, who would I send the document and its updates to? 2)I am a diagram oriented person. If I include diagrams (gifs, png ...) in the document, how would you want me to do this (html, ref the image file ...)? Any prefs in the image format? 3)Do I have to use pod? No offense, but I can't stand pod. The pdd design document states that pod is the "...documentation language for All Things Perl", but this is Parrot not Perl. And this document would not be a design doc. If Parrot is supposed to be a cross language VM, why do people need to know pod to read (or write) the docs? I know that it is easy to convert pod to an easy to read format, but would a developer with little perl experience know that? Parrot is trying to encourage developers from areas other than perl, so why discourage them by introducing them to parrot with pod documents. Could there possibly be a parrot comment style? It could be used instead of other comment styles internal to parrot. Use it in the c-code, the perl code, the parrot assembly code, and to write the documentation. Then a (perl) preprocessor could strip it out before it is compiled or run. Normally I would not suggest such a thing, but there is a lot of code generation and manipulation going on anyway. It could allow for document generation of all the parrot source, assembly, tests, and documents into a javadoc-like html reference. Or maybe I'm just dreaming. Please go easy on me for not liking pod. Thanks, Erik Lechak
