Anyways, I am , by far, no expert on the matter, but from what I can gather from my reading,it is that Parrot will be a "virtual assembler", which will make "assembly-style" programming cross platform. To me this is a "quantuum leap forward" in the way programmers will be able to think about data and program. No matter what architecture you are on, you will be able to visualize the cpu registers and memory to have the same structure, and write real cross platform code. It is in my opinion, the first real attempt to make a coding "standard". You will be presented with a set of cpu-registers, and some standard variable types, like interger,numeric,string, and binary. Programming just becomes pushing the data thru the virtual registers. I would thing you would get alot of the basics from parrot examples

I'm very excited about Parrot, eagerly await it's release. To me the only question is, "how fast can they make the virtual assembler run"?