Dropping two atomic weapons on Japan brought the war to an abrupt end and probably saved countless lives.

That the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was the factor that brought the war to its end is debatable.

Stalin had an agreement with the US that the USSR would engage with Japan 3 months after the defeat of the Germans. V-E day to the Soviets was May 9, 1945. 3 months after that was August 9, and on that day the Soviets began their invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria. (It also happened to be the day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.) Japan was fighting a losing war against the US, and while I'm sure they didn't want any more atomic bombs dropped on them, they _certainly_ didn't want to fight both the US and the USSR. The USSR was as uncaring about casualties as the Japanese were, and they were holding a grudge from the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905 in the war in the Russian Far East. The Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945.

Cheers,
  - Richard

I resemble that comment!

Seriously, the reason why there is no "IronPerl" is that no one with the capability to do the port of Perl 5 to .NET has had the motivation to do so. As was previously commented upon, the bar to do this kind of work is, unfortunately, higher with Perl than with other languages in its class (e.g. Ruby, Python) due to the evolutionary creation & implementation of the Perl 5 language. Python has a language spec off of which implementations can be built in a clean-room fashion. Perl has a language implementation which is its own spec. This leads to significant gnarly-ness when it comes to doing subsequent implementation, be they on .NET, the JVM or on a Lisp Machine. Still, it's not impossible. If someone made a reasonable effort at it then it could happen. (And Microsoft could well pick up the tab to someone who showed sufficient talent and initiative too. The IronRuby implementation is the product of one guy who started it as a personal project. And then Microsoft noticed and hired him to keep doing what he was doing.)

Perl 6 addresses this problem in that Perl 6 is a spec. (Well, it's getting really damn close to being a completed spec.) There are no completed implementations of it but several are in the works. Pugs is a Haskell implementation effort. Rakudo is one built on the Parrot VM. There's the SMOP implementation effort too. Larry Wall is working on one that will use the Perl 5 VM to implement Perl 6. I'm sure we'll have implementation teams working on JVM and .NET implementations soon enough too.

If all you want to do is Perl 5 on Windows there are a few ports -- see ActivePerl and IndigoPerl.

Cheers,
  - Richard