Yes. I've read the old Parrot book, including looking through the intermediate language opcodes, which were pretty fun to read about.

I think the solution is related to that, to some degree. The language has to handle structures that Perl uses -- maybe PMCs, maybe not -- and it ought to be able to register subs or packages or classes, because it will also have to do what XS does today.

So it's not Lua's opcode set, that's for sure. But it might borrow some ideas from there.

Heck, it might end up being some Frankensteinian, functional subset of C library functions, plus Perl's functions, plus a way to register new functions with the core. Or something. I don't know. Still mulling it over.