The Perl/Python merger, Parrot, was announced on April 1, 2001. The book Programming Parrot in a Nutshell, by Guido von Rossum and Larry Wall, was also announced on the same day by O'Reilly (ISBN 0-596-00010-X). The name was horribly unfair to us Perl users: Monty Python have a dead parrot sketch (and a Parrot, like a Python, is an animal!). And we're bigger than they are!
There isn't any Parrot code (yet?), but here's the example from the announcement. Note the elegant way in which Parrot syntax manages to merge Perl's marked blocks and Python's indentation controls! Also, Perl's cryptic symbolisms are kept, but in a typically verbose Pythonish manner.
# copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #
while left_angle_right_angle:
if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#":
continue_next;
}
print dollar_underscore;
}
Addendum:
The furor has abated since, but there is at least one important result: In Perl 6, the bytecode engine is codenamed "Parrot".