performance and parrot

[falcon]

I recently started looking at the parrot project and it looks very
interesting. For a while now, I've been wondering if it is possible to
keep the expressivity (and frankly familiarity) of languages such as
Java/C#, Perl/Python/Ruby...even Haskel yet get performance like that
of APL, J, K, IDL, etc. As far as I can tell, APL/etc. get their
performance mainly from vectorization (please correct me if I am
wrong). Now, the only good write-up of vectorization I've found is
here
(http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?AD=1&ArticleID=1313). So
I don't know exactly how to do it with actual code. Could someone
please comment if such a thing could be done with parrot assembly or
PIR/IMC?

Further, are there any plans to include the ability to automatically
take advantage of specialized hardware such as vector processing units
(altivec, GPU) etc.? My understanding is that such abilities are being
incorporated into GCC 4.0.

By the way, as someone else already mentioned, it seems the parrot
developers are being a little too modest about the capabilities of
their project :) I for one would love to have small tutorials doing a
quick walk-through of how to implement a mini-language (a descriptive
write-up rather than pointers to (not so insignificant) code in CVS).
I think parrot will allow many corporate coders (web development,
script writing!) to get back in touch with actual computer science.

Thanks!

Falcon