For those with long memories there was a (in)famous Topaz project in the Perl world. This was an attempt to implement perl5 in c++. It was abandoned however it did help kick-start Perl6 & Parrot.

refs:

- http://topaz.sourceforge.net

- Topaz: Perl for the 22nd Century http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/09/topaz.html

- Historical Implementations/Perl6 http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?historical_imp...