Parrot

Parrot was a hoax introduced in an article from the Perl journal in April 2001. The authors of Perl and Python were supposedly going to merge their languages. O'Reilly even went so far as to create a web page for their Programming Parrot in a Nutshell book! (O'Reilly went on to explain the work that went into the hoax.)

Ironically, this engendered the name for a register-based virtual machine intended for dynamic scripting languages such as Perl.

Example
while left_angle_right_angle: if dollar_underscore[0] =eq= "#": continue_next; }       print dollar_underscore; }
 * 1) copy stdin to stdout, except for lines starting with #