This is Parrotlog, a Prolog compiler for the Parrot virtual machine.
For building Parrotlog you need at least a C compiler, a make utility, and Perl 5.8 or newer. To automatically obtain and build Parrot you may also need a subversion (svn) client.
We generally recommend downloading Parrotlog directly from http://github.com/arnsholt/parrotlog
Once you have a copy of Parrotlog, build it as follows:
$ cd parrotlog
$ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
$ makeThis will create a "parrotlog" or "parrotlog.exe" executable in the current directory. Programs can then be run from the build directory using a command like:
$ ./parrotlog <source>The --gen-parrot option above tells Configure.pl to automatically download and build the most appropriate version of Parrot into a local "parrot/" subdirectory, install that Parrot into the "parrot_install/" subdirectory, and use that for building Parrotlog. It's okay to use the --gen-parrot option on later invocations of Configure.pl; the configure system will re-build Parrot only if a newer version is needed for whatever version of Parrotlog you're working with.
You can use --parrot-config=/path/to/parrot_config instead of --gen-parrot to use an already installed Parrot for building Parrotlog. This installed Parrot must include its development environment; typically this is done via Parrot's make install target or by installing prebuilt parrot-devel and/or libparrot-dev packages. The version of the already installed Parrot must satisfy a minimum specified by Parrotlog -- Configure.pl will verify this for you.
Once built, Parrotlog's make install target will install Parrotlog and its libraries into the Parrot installation that was used to create it. Until this step is performed, the "parrotlog" executable created by make above can only be reliably run from the root of Parrotlog's build directory. After make install is performed, the installed executable can be run from any directory (as long as the Parrot installation that was used to create it remains intact).
If the Parrotlog compiler is invoked without an explicit script to run, it enters a small interactive mode that allows statements to be executed from the command line. Each line entered is treated as a separate compilation unit, however (which means that subroutines are preserved after they are defined, but variables are not).
Entering make test will run a test suite that comes bundled with Parrotlog. This is a simple suite of tests, designed to make sure that the compiler is basically working and that it's capable of running a simple test harness.
If you want to run the tests in parallel, you need to install a fairly recent version of the Perl 5 module Test::Harness (3.16 works for sure).
There is no documentation yet, but there is a development diary at http://blogs.perl.org/users/arne_skjaerholt/.
Arne Skjærholt (arnsholt@gmail.com). I can also be found in #perl6 on Freenode and #parrot on irc.parrot.org, I'm usually available roughly between noon and midnight, central european time.