Major change proposal

At OSCON last week, IronPython was announced. This is an implementation of
Python running on the .net interpreter (CLI) from Microsoft.  The most
surprising thing about the announcement was that it ran as fast as the
normal Python interpreter.  Past attempts were dissapointing.

Paul Prescod repeated some of this IronPython presentation at the Vancouver
Python workshop that he held (Prothon was a big hit there by the way
<grin>).  Paul brought to my attention something that caused me to lose a
lot of sleep last night.

If I were to put my current Prothon interpreter work aside for a while and
switch to working on "IronProthon" (a Prothon to run on .Net), then I would
have a fast reliable Prothon just as soon if not sooner, but more
importantly, it would have the entire Microsoft .net library available to
it.

It would also have the Unix/Linux world available through the open source
Mono project from Novell.  This open source version of .net project is at
the 1.0 stage and was developed by the author of Gnome, so it is to be
taken seriously.

I looked seriously at using Parrot for an interpreter and almost everything
wrong with Parrot is right with .net and mono.  It is stable and working.
It has the library ready to use.

The thing that caused me to lose a lot of sleep is that while this would be
a great thing for the promotion and adoption of Prothon, it would mean
shelving code that I have been working on 7 days a week for 7 months.
Prothon comes first though.  Getting users of the language is more
important than anything else.

The nature of Prothon will change a bit.  It won't have the
industrial-strength (scalable performance) advantage due to the unique
engine.  IronPython will be identical in that regard.  

It will become Python3000.  In other words it will just become more of a
direct competitior with Python (or to be more exact IronPython).  Our
language features of Prototypes, Python fixes, enhancements, etc. will be
our marketing points.

I welcome feedback and thoughts on this major change.