comp.lang.perl.* FAQ 1/5 - Availability

[s...@psa.pencom.com]

Archive-name: perl-faq/part1
Version: $Id: part1,v 2.9 1995/05/15 15:44:17 spp Exp spp $
Posting-Frequency: bi-weekly
Last Edited: Thu Jan 11 00:53:46 1996 by spp (Stephen P Potter) on syrinx.psa.com

This posting contains answers to general information and availability
questions. The following questions are answered in this posting:

1.1) What is Perl?

Perl is a compiled scripting language written by Larry Wall*.

Here's the beginning of the description from the perl(1) man page:

Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. Unlike
most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the
size of your data--if you've got the memory, perl can slurp
in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of
unlimited depth. And the hash tables used by associative
arrays grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance.
Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan
large amounts of data very quickly. Although optimized for
scanning text, perl can also deal with binary data, and can
make dbm files look like associative arrays (where dbm is
available). Setuid perl scripts are safer than C programs
through a dataflow tracing mechanism which prevents many
stupid security holes. If you have a problem that would
ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capa-
bilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to
write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There
are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into
perl scripts. OK, enough hype.

1.2) What are perl4 and perl5, are there any differences?

Perl4 and perl5 are different versions of the language. Perl4 was the
previous release, and perl5 is "Perl: The Next Generation."
Perl5 is, essentially, a complete rewrite of the perl source code
from the ground up. It has been modularized, object oriented,
tweaked, trimmed, and optimized until it almost doesn't look like
the old code. However, the interface is mostly the same, and
compatibility with previous releases is very high.

1.3) What features does perl5 provide over perl4?

If you get the newest source (from any of the main FTP sites), you will
find a directory full of man pages (possibly to be installed as section
1p and 3pm) that discuss the differences, new features, old
incompatibilies and much more. Here, however, are some highlights as
to the new features and old incompatibilities.

* Enhanced Usability: Perl code can now be written in a much more
legible style. Regular expressions have been enhanced to allow
minimal matches, conditionals, and much more. Cryptic variable
names (although still supported) have been aliased to new
nmemonics, using the "English" module, allowing old scripts to run
and new scripts to be readable. Error messages and optional
warnings are more informative and will catch many common mistakes.
See the perldiag(1) man page, which contains pithy prose from Larry
Wall* on each and every possible muttering perl might spout at you.
* Simplified Grammar: The new yacc grammar is one half the size of
the old one. Many of the arbitrary grammar rules have been
regularized. The number of reserved words has been cut by 2/3.
* Lexical Scoping: Perl variables may now be declared within a
lexical scope, similar to C's "auto" variables. This is a
great improvement on efficiency and contributes to better
privacy. See the my() entry in perlfunc(1).
* Arbitrarily nested data structures: Full fledged multidimensional
arrays. Any scalar value, including an array element, may now
contain a reference to any other variable or subroutine.
Easily created anonymous variables and subroutines. See
perlref(1).
* Modularity and Reusability: The Perl library is now defined in
terms of modules which can be easily shared among various
packages. Packages can import any or all of a module's
published interface. See perlmod(1), perlsub(1), and
Exporter(3pm).
* Object-oriented programming: A package can function as a class.
Dynamic multiple inheritance and virtual methods are supported
in a straight-forward manner with little new syntax. Filehandles
are now treated as objects. See perlobj(1), perlmod(1), and
FileHandle(3pm).
* Embeddable and Extensible: Perl can be easily embedded in C/C++
applications, and can either call or be called by your routines
through a documented interface. The XS preprocessor is provided to
make it easy to glue your C/C++ routines into Perl. Dynamic
loading of modules is supported. See perlapi(1), perlcall(1), and
DynaLoader(3pm).
* POSIX compliant: A major new module is the POSIX module, which
provides access to all available POSIX routines and definitions.
Seee POSIX(3pm).
* Package constructors and destructors: The new BEGIN and END blocks
provide means to capture control as a package is being compiled and
after the program exits. As a degenerate case, they work just like
awk's BEGIN and END when you use the -p or -n switches. See
perlmod(1).
* Multiple simultaneous DBM implementations: A perl program now has
access to DBM, NDBM, SDBM, GDBM and Berkeley DB files in the same
script. The dbmopen interface has been generalized to allow any
variable to be tied to an object class which defines its access
methods. tie/untie now preferable to dbmopen/dbmclose. See the
tie() entry in perlfunc(1) and the DB_File(3pm) man pages.
* Subroutine definitions may now be autoloaded: The AUTOLOAD mechanism
allows any arbitrary semantics to undefined subroutine calls. See
the section on Autoloading in the perlsub(1) manpage.
* Regular Expression Enhancements: Qualifiers may be followed by a "?"
to signify that they should be non-greedy. A "?" directly after
an opening paren indicates non backreference grouping and the next
character determines the purpose of the match (?:a|b|c) will match
any of a b or c without producing a backreference, (?=stuff) does
a non-eating look ahead to assure that the next thing is stuff,
(?!nonsense) looks ahead to assure that the next thing must not
be "nonsense". Embedded whitespace and comments for readability.
A consistent extensibility mechanism has been added that is
upwardly compatible with all old regexps. Variables may now be
interpolated literally into a pattern with \Q or the quotemeta
function, which works like \U but backwhacks non-alphanumerics.
New m and s "flags" for pattern matching force multi- or
single-line matching. The "s" makes "." match "\n". \A and
\Z anchor matches to the beginning and end of a string and ignore
multiline semantics. \G matches where the previous m//g or s///g
left off.
* The -w (warnings) switch is much more informative.
* References and Objects (see t/op/ref.t) for examples.
* => is a synonym for comma and helps group paired arguments, such
as initializers for associative arrays and named arguments to
subroutines.
* All functions, even predeclared subroutines, are treated as list
operators or unary operators. Parens are optional.
* Flattened interpreter: Compare perl4's eval.c with perl5's pp.c.
Compare perl4's 900 line interpreter look with perl5's one line.
* eval is now treated like a subroutine call, meaning (among other
things) you can return from it.
* format value lists may be spread over multiple lines with a do {}
block.
* flags on the #! line are interpreted even if the script wasn't
invoked directly.
* ?: is now an lvalue.
* list context now propogates to the right side of && and ||, and
as the 2nd and 3rd arguments of ?:
* preferred package delimiter now :: rather than '.
* new "and" and "or" operators, like && and || but with a lower
precedence than comma, so they work better with list operators.
* New functions abs(), chr(), uc(), ucfirst(), lc(), and lcfirst()
* require(number) checks to see that the version is at least that
version
* qw//, which is equivalent to split(' ', q//)
* assignment of a reference to a glob replaces the single element
of the glob corresponding to the reference type:
*foo = \$bar, * foo = \&bletch;
* filehandle methods are supported:
output_autoflush STDOUT 1;
* Autoload stubs can now call the replacement subroutine with
goto &realsub.
* Subroutines can be defined lazily in any package by declaring
an AUTOLOAD routine, which will be called if a non-existent
subroutine is called in that package.
* "use" and "no" subsume many features. "use Module LIST" is
short for "BEGIN { require Module; import Module LIST }"
"no" is identical, except that it calls "unimport" instead.
"use integer" and variations of "use strict [vars,refs,subs]"
were implemented through new modules.

(Thanks to Tom Christiansen* for this section)

1.4) Where can I get docs on perl5?

The complete perl documentation is available with the Perl
distribution, or can be accessed from the following sites.
Note that the PerlDoc ps file is 240 pages long!!

Marked Up (HTML) format:
http://www.metronet.com/0/perlinfo/perl5/manual/perl.html
http://web.nexor.co.uk/perl/perl.html (Europe)

PostScript:
ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/doc/PerlDoc.ps.gz
ftp://ftp.uu.net/languages/perl/PerlDoc.ps.gz
ftp://www.metronet.com/pub/perl/perl5/manual/PerlDoc.ps.gz
ftp://ftp.zrz.tu-berlin.de/pub/unix/perl/PerlDoc.ps.gz (Europe)
ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/doc/PerlDoc.ps.gz (Europe)
ftp://sungear.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/doc/PerlDoc.ps.gz (Oz)
unable to access as of 7/15/95

TeXinfo (Emacs) Format:
ftp://www.metronet.com/pub/perl/perl5/manual/perl5-info.tar.gz

1.5) Will perl5 break my perl4 scripts?

In general, no. However, certain bad old practices have become highly
frowned upon. The following are the most important of the known
incompatibilities between perl4 and perl5. See perltrap(1) for more
details.

* "@" ***ALWAYS*** interpolates in double quoted strings. Non-array
"@"s must be escaped:
Mail("f...@bar.com") needs to be
Mail("foo\@bar.com");
The compiler catches this.
* "open FILE || die" needs to be "open(FILE) || die". The compiler
forgives you for this, but won't stop complaining until you fix it.
* Barewords are no longer (necessarily) strings: they will actually
call the function (if it existed when that code was compiled)
instead of returning a string of that value. Check your
signal handlers. The 'use strict subs' pragma (see strict(3pm))
will help you with this.
* "shift @x + 20" needs to be "shift(@x) + 20" because of precedence,
and likewise "$y = scalar keys %foo + 30" needs to be instead
"$y = scalar keys(%foo) + 30".
* The internal symbol table is called %{PACKAGE::} for any given
package. It used to be %{_PACKAGE}.
* You may no longer (attempt to) write to read-only variables, like $1,
or assign to a substr() past the end of a string.
* Various deprecated practices elicit warning messages.
* The package delimiter has been changed from ' to ::. Use of ' is
deprecated, but still works. Use of :: may break scripts if you
aren't careful (especially if you are working with colon delimited
data files, like /etc/passwd)

1.6) When will Perl stabilize?

When asked at what point the Perl code would be frozen, Larry answered:

Part of the redesign of Perl is to *allow* us to more or less freeze
the language itself. It won't totally freeze, of course, but I think
the rate of change of the core of the language is asymptotically
approaching 0. In fact, as time goes on, now that we have an official
extension mechanism, some of the things that are currently in the core
of the language may move out (transparently) as extensions. This has
already happened to dbmopen().

I've also been continuously reminding myself of what Henry Spencer
calls "second system syndrome", in which everything under the sun gets
added, resulting in a colossal kludge, like OS 360. You'll find that
the new features in Perl 5 are all pretty minimalistic. The
object-oriented features in particular added only one new piece of
syntax, a C++-style method call.

: The whole idea behind
: Perl is to be a fast text-processing, system-maintenance, zero-startup
: time language. If it gets to be so large and complicated that it isn't
: fast-running and easy to use, it won't be to anyone's benefit.

My motto from the start has been, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I've been trying very hard not to remove those features from Perl that
make it what it is. At the same time, a lot of streamlining has gone
into the syntax. The new yacc file is about half the size of the old
one, and the number of official reserved words has been cut by 2/3.
All built-in functions have been unified (dualified?) as either list
operators or unary operators.

: I really like a lot of the features in Perl, but in order for Perl to
: be useful on a long term basis, those features have to stay put. I
: bought the Camel book less than a year ago and it sounds like within
: another year it will be obsolete.

The parts of Perl that the Camel book covers have not changed all that
much. Most old scripts still run. Many scripts from Perl version 1.0
still run. We'll certainly be revising the Camel, but the new man
pages are split up such that it's pretty easy to ferret out the new
info when you want it.

We did break a few misfeatures in going to Perl 5. It seemed like the
first and last chance to do so. There's a list of the
incompatibilities in the documentation.

: Not only is it a lot of work to recompile Perl
: on 20+ machines periodically, but it's hard to write scripts that are
: useful in the long term if the guts of the language keep changing.
: (And if I keep having to buy new books. I keep hearing about new
: features of Perl 5 that aren't documented in any of the perl 5
: documentation that *I* can find.)

I think you'll find a lot of folks who think that 4.036 has been a
pretty stable platform.

Perl 5 is a special case. I've been working on it for years. (This is
part of the reason 4.036 has been so stable!) There are many changes,
most of them for the better, I hope. I don't expect the transition to
be without pain. But that's why I stuck numbered versions out in your
bin directory, so that you can upgrade piecemeal if you like. And
that's why I made the -w switch warn about many of the incompatibilities.

And overriding all that, I've tried to keep it so that you don't have
to know much about the new stuff to use the old stuff. You can upgrade
your *knowledge* piecemeal too.

The extension mechanism is designed to take over most of the
evolutionary role from now on. And it's set up so that, if you don't
have a particular extension, you know it right up at the front.

: Are there any plans to write a Perl compiler? While interpreted Perl
: is great for many applications, it would also be cool to be able to
: precompile many scripts. (Yes, I know you can undump things, but
: undump isn't provided with Perl and I haven't found a copy.) The
: creation of a perl library and dynamically-loadable modules seems
: like a step in that direction.

Yes, part of the design of Perl 5 was to make it *possible* to write a
compiler for it. It could even be done as an extension module, I
suppose. Anyone looking for a master's thesis topic?

In summary, almost every concern that you might think of has already
been (at least) thought about. In a perfect world, every concern
could be addressed perfectly. But in this world we just have to slog
through.

1.7) What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

32! [ ord('p') - ord('P') ] (Shouldn't that be 42, the Answer to the
Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? ;)

Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the
implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's
quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl."

On the other hand, the aesthetic value of casewise parallelism in
"awk", "sed", and "perl" as much require the lower-case version as "C",
"Pascal", and "Perl" require the upper-case version. It's also easier
to type "Perl" in typeset print than to be constantly switching in
Courier. :-)

In other words, it doesn't matter much, especially if all you're doing
is hearing someone talk about the language; case is hard to distinguish
aurally.

1.8) Is it a perl program or a perl script?

It depends on whether you are talking about the perl binary or
something that you wrote using perl. And, actually, even this isn't
necessarily true.

"Standard" UNIX terminology is (roughly) this: programs are compiled
into machine code once and run multiple times, scripts are translated
(by a program) each time they are used. However, some say that a
program is anything written which is executed on a computer system.
Larry considers it a program if it is set in stone and you can't change
it, whereas if you can go in and hack at it, it's a script. Of course,
if you have the source code, that makes just about anything a
script. ;)

In general, it probably doesn't really matter. The terms are used
interchangeably. If you particularly like one or the other, use it. If
you want to call yourself a perl programmer, call them programs. If
you want to call yourself a perl scripter, call them scripts. Randal*
and I (at least) will call them hacks. (See question 2.10 ;)

Larry says that a script is what you give an actor, but a program is
what you give an audience.

1.9) Is perl difficult to learn?

Not at all. Many people find Perl extremely easy to learn. There are
at least three main reasons for this.

The first reason is that most of Perl has been derived from standard
utilities, tools, and languages that you are (probably) already
familiar with. If you have any knowledge of the C programming language
and standard C library, the Unix Shell, sed and awk, Perl should be
simple and fun for you to learn.

The second reason that Perl is easy to learn is that you only have to
know a very small subset of Perl to be able to get useful results. In
fact, once you can master

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Hello, world\n";

you can start writing Perl scripts. In fact, you will probably never
have to (or be able to) know everything about Perl. As you feel the
need or desire to use more sophisticated features (such as C structures
or networking), you can learn these as you go. The learning curve for
Perl is not a steep one, especially if you have the headstart of having
a background in UNIX. Rather, its learning curve is gentle and
gradual, but it *is* admittedly rather long.

The third reason is that you can get immediate results from your
scripts. Unlike a normal compiled language (like C or Pascal, for
example), you don't have to continually recompile your program every
time you change one little thing. Perl allows you to experiment and
test/debug quickly and easily. This ease of experimentation flattens
the learning curve even more.

If you don't know C or UNIX at all, it'll be a steeper learning curve,
but what you then learn from Perl will carry over into other areas,
like using the C library, UNIX system calls, regular expressions, and
associative arrays, just to name a few. To know Perl is to know UNIX,
and vice versa.

1.10) Should I program everything in Perl?

Most definitely. In fact, you should delete the binaries for sed, awk,
cc, gcc, grep, rm, ls, cat... well, just delete your /bin directory.

But seriously, of course you shouldn't. As with any job, you should
use the appropriate tool for the task at hand. Just because a hammer
will put screws into a piece of board, you probably don't want to do
that.

While it's true that the answer to the question "Can I do (some
arbitrary task) in Perl?" is almost always "yes", that doesn't mean
this is necessarily a good thing to do. For many people, Perl serves
as a great replacement for shell programming. For a few people, it
also serves as a replacement for most of what they'd do in C. But for
some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice.

1.11) How does Perl compare with other scripting languages, like Tcl, Python
or REXX?

REXX is an interpreted programming language first seen on IBM systems.
Python is an interpreted programming language by Guido van Rossum*.
TCL is John Ousterhout*'s embeddable command language, designed just
for embedded command extensions, but lately used for larger
applications. TCL's most intriguing feature for many people is the
tcl/tk toolset that allows for interpreted X-based tools. Others use
it for its "expect" extension.

To avoid any flamage, if you really want to know the answer to this
question, probably the best thing to do is try to write equivalent
code to do a set of tasks. All three have their own newsgroups in
which you can learn about (but hopefully not argue about) these
languages.

To find out more about these or other languages, you might also check
out David Muir Sharnoff*'s posting "Catalog of Compilers, Interpreters,
and Other Language Tools" which he posts to comp.lang.misc,
comp.sources.d, comp.archives.admin, and news.answers newsgroups. It's
a comprehensive treatment of many different languages. (Caveat lector:
he considers Perl's syntax "unappealing".)

1.12) How can I get Perl over the Internet?

Perl is available from any comp.sources.misc archive. You can use an
archie server (see the alt.sources FAQ in news.answers) to find these
if you want.

Version 4:
Volume Issues Patchlevel and Notes
------ ------ ------------------------------------------------
18 19-54 Patchlevel 3, Initial posting.
20 56-62 Patches 4-10

Version 5:
Volume Issues Patchlevel and Notes
------ ------ -----------------------------------------------
45 64-128 Initial Posting, patchlevel 0.

Since 1993, a number of archives have sprung up specifically for Perl
and Perl related items. Larry maintains the official distribution
site (for both perl4.036 and perl5) at netlabs. Probably the largest
archive is at the University of Florida. In order of probability these
sites will have the sources.

Site Directory and notes IP
--------------------------------------------- -------
North America:
ftp://ftp.netlabs.com/pub/outgoing/perl5.0/ 192.94.48.152
ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/src/5.0/ 128.227.100.198
ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/ 18.71.0.38
not current as of 7/15/95
ftp://ftp.uu.net/languages/perl/ 192.48.96.9
not current as of 7/15/95
ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/ 198.59.155.28
not current as of 7/15/95
ftp://ftp.cbi.tamucc.edu/pub/duff/Perl/ 165.95.1.3
ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perl/sources/ 192.245.137.1
ftp://genetics.upenn.edu/perl5/ 128.91.200.37

Europe:
ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/src/ 131.211.80.17
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/ports/perl5/ 128.214.248.6
ftp://ftp.zrz.tu-berlin.de/pub/unix/perl/ 130.149.4.40
ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl5/ 146.169.17.5

Australia:
ftp://sungear.mame.mu.oz.au/pub/perl/src/5.0/ 128.250.209.2

South America (mirror of ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu):
ftp://ftp.inf.utfsm.cl/pub/gnu/ 146.83.198.3

If there is a site in Asia or Japan, please tell us about it. Thanks!

You can also retrieve perl via non-ftp methods:

http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl5/ 146.169.17.5
gopher://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/0/packages/perl5/ 146.169.17.5

1.13) How can I get Perl via Email?

The following is a list of known ftpmail sites. Please attempt to use
the site closest to you with the ftp archive closest to it. Many of
these sites already have perl on them. For information on how to use
one of these sites, send email containing the word "help" to the
address.

United States:
Massachusetts: ftp...@decwrl.dec.com
New Jersey: bit...@pucc.princeton.edu
North Carolina: ftp...@sunsite.unc.edu

Europe/UK:
Germany: ftp...@ftp.uni-stuttgart.de
bit...@vx.gmd.de
UK: ftp...@doc.ic.ac.uk

Australia: ftp...@cs.uow.edu.au

Henk P Penning* suggests that if you are in Europe you should try the
following (if you are in Germany or the UK, you should probably use one
of the servers listed above):

Email: Send a message to 'mail-...@cs.ruu.nl' containing:
begin
path your_email_address
send help
send PERL/perl5.0/INDEX
end
The path-line may be omitted if your message contains a normal
From:-line. You will receive a help-file and an index of the
directory that contains the Perl stuff.

If all else fails, mail to Larry usually suffices.

1.14) How can I get Perl via UUCP?

There currently is no way of getting Perl via UUCP. If anyone knows of
a way, please contact me. The OSU site has discontinued the service.

1.15) Are there other ways of getting perl?

Another possibility is to use UUNET, although they charge you for it.
You have been duly warned. Here's the advertisement:

Anonymous Access to UUNET's Source Archives

1-900-GOT-SRCS

UUNET now provides access to its extensive collection of UNIX
related sources to non- subscribers. By calling 1-900-468-7727
and using the login "uucp" with no password, anyone may uucp any
of UUNET's on line source collection. Callers will be charged 40
cents per minute. The charges will appear on their next tele-
phone bill.

The file uunet!/info/help contains instructions. The file
uunet!/index//ls-lR.Z contains a complete list of the files
available and is updated daily. Files ending in Z need to be
uncompressed before being used. The file uunet!~/compress.tar is
a tar archive containing the C sources for the uncompress program.

This service provides a cost effective way of obtaining
current releases of sources without having to maintain accounts
with UUNET or some other service. All modems connected to the
900 number are Telebit T2500 modems. These modems support all
standard modem speeds including PEP, V.32 (9600), V.22bis (2400),
Bell 212a (1200), and Bell 103 (300). Using PEP or V.32, a 1.5
megabyte file such as the GNU C compiler would cost $10 in con-
nect charges. The entire 55 megabyte X Window system V11 R4
would cost only $370 in connect time. These costs are less than
the official tape distribution fees and they are available now
via modem.

UUNET Communications Services
3110 Fairview Park Drive, Suite 570
Falls Church, VA 22042
+1 703 876 5050 (voice)
+1 703 876 5059 (fax)
in...@uunet.uu.net

1.16) Has perl been ported to machine FOO?

Perl runs on virtually all Unix machines simply by following the hints
file and instructions in the Configure script. This auto-configuration
script allows Perl to compile on a wide variety of platforms by
modifying the machine specific parts of the code. For most Unix
systems, or VMS systems for v5 perl, no porting is required. Try to
compile Perl on your machine. If you have problems, examine the README
file carefully. If all else fails, send a message to comp.lang.perl
and crosspost to comp.sys.[whatever], there's probably someone out
there that has already solved your problem and will be able to help you
out.

Perl4.036 has been ported to many non-Unix systems, although currently
there are only a few (beta) v5 ports. All of the following are
mirrored at ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu:/pub/perl/src/. The following are
the (known) official distribution points. Please contact the porters
directly (when possible) in case of questions on these ports.

* MS-DOS binaries and source are available at [130.179.8.47]
ftp://ftp.ee.umanitoba.ca/pub/msdos/perl/perl4
There are currently half a dozen different ports for MS-DOS.
BigPerl4 (v4) is perl4.036 compiled with the Watcom C/C++^32
compiler (32-bit, flat-memory model C compiler) with the
following features:
* Up to 32MB of memory can be used.
* Supports virtual memory.
* Works under Windows 3.1
* The perl debugger can be used.
* Contains Berkeley DB support. GDBM is no longer supported.

Note that the latest version of BigPerl4 can also be found at
any SimTel mirror site (ftp.ee.umanitoba.ca does not
necessarily have the latest version), such as:

ftp://oak.oakland.edu/SimTel/msdos/perl/

A beta-test version of bigperl based on Perl 5.000 can be
obtained from the following sites:

ftp://ftp.einet.net/pub/perl5
ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/msdos
ftp://ftp.ee.umanitoba.ca/pub/msdos/perl/perl5

This beta bigperl also contains ported versions of a2p and s2p.

* Windows/NT binaries are available from
ftp://ftp.intergraph.com/pub/win32/perl, or at any of the major
NT archives. They are compiled for NT 3.5, but appears to work
under Win95 also. It is visible to the NT Registry. Dean
Troyer* is working on extending the visibility to SAM and the
Event Log. His current work-in-progress is available from
ftp://pmip.dist.maricopa.edu/pub/nt.

* Macintosh binaries and source are available from [130.59.1.40]
ftp://nic.switch.ch/software/mac/perl.
Version 4.1.3 is perl4.036 compiled with the MPW C compiler
* Mac_Perl_413_src.sit.bin Sources
* Mac_Perl_413_tool.sit.bin MPW Tool
* Mac_Perl_413_appl.sit.bin Standalone Application
There is a mailing list for discussing Macintosh Perl. Contact
"mpw-perl...@iis.ee.ethz.ch".

Timothy Murphy* also ported a version of perl to the Macintosh
using Think C. It has probably been abandoned in favour of the
MPW port, but is still available at [134.266.81.10]
ftp://ftp.maths.tcd.ie/pub/Mac/perl-4.035/.

Matthias Ulrich Neeracher* is working on a perl5 port to the
Macintosh. A PowerPC version is available at
ftp://err.ethz.ch/pub/neeri/MacPerlBeta.

* OS/2 sources are also available at
ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/src/4.0/os2. This appears to have
been abandoned and added to the official distribution. See the
directory os2 in the perl5 sources.

* VMS systems should be able to build directly from the standard
distribution.

* Amiga sources are not available from ftp.cis.ufl.edu, but can
be found at any Aminet archive, notably:
* ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/dev/lang/
* ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/aminet/dev/lang/
* ftp://ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk/pub/aminet/dev/lang/
* ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/ports/perl4/amiga

1.17) How do I get Perl to compile on Solaris?

The following directions are for perl, version 4. Perl, version 5,
should compile more easily. If not, send mail to The Perl Porters
Mailing List (perl5-...@nicoh.com)

John Lees* reports:

I have built perl on Solaris 2.1, 2.2 beta, and 2.2 FCS. Take
/usr/ucb out of your path and do not use any BSD/UCB libraries.
Only -lsocket, -lnsl, and -lm are needed. You can use the hint for
Solaris 2.0, but the one for 2.1 is wrong. Do not use vfork. Do not
use -I/usr/ucbinclude. The result works fine for me, but of couse
does not support a couple of BSDism's.

Casper H.S. Dik* reports

You must remove all the references to /usr/ucblib AND
/usr/ucbinclude. And ignore the Solaris_2.1 hints. They are wrong.
The undefining of vfork() probably has to do with the confusion it
gives to the compilers. If you use cc, you mustn't compile
util.c/tutil.c with -O. I only used the following libs: -lsocket
-lnsl -lm (there is a problem with -lmalloc)

Michael D'Errico* reports:

If you are using Solaris 2.x, the signal handling is broken. If
you set up a signal handler such as 'ripper' it will be forgotten
after the first time the signal is caught. To fix this, you need
to recompile Perl. Just add '#define signal(x,y) sigset((x),(y))'
after the '#include <signal.h>' directive in each file that it
occurs, then make it again.

1.18) How do I get Perl to compile on a Next?

According to Andreas Koenig*, under NeXTstep 3.2, both perl4.036 and
perl5.000 compile with the supplied hints file.

However, Bill Eldridge* provides this message to help get perl4.036 on
NeXTstep 3.0 to work:

To get perl to compile on NeXTs, you need to combine the ANSI
and BSD headers:

cd /usr/include
mkdir ansibsd
cd ansibsd
ln -s ../ansi
ln -s ../bsd

Then, follow the configuration instructions for NeXTs, *replacing*
all mention of -I/usr/include/ansi or -I/usr/include/bsd with
-I/usr/include/ansibsd.

1.19) What extensions are available from Perl and where can I get them?

Some of the more popular extensions include those for windowing,
graphics, or data base work. Most of the major sites contain an
archive of the extensions, usually in the ext directory. Since the
list of available extensions changes so often, I have opted to list
only the sites and directories, not the individual extensions, please
check the closest archive for more information

ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/ext
(also linked at ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/src/5.0/ext)
ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/extensions/
ftp://ftp.metronet.com/pub/perlinfo/perl5/
ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/PERL/perl5.0/ext
ftp://black.ox.ac.uk/src/ALPHA/

1.20) What is dbperl and where can I get it?

Many database-oriented extensions to Perl have been written.
Basically, these use the usub mechanism (see the usub/ subdirectory) in
the source distribution) to link in a database library, allowing
embedded calls to Informix, Ingres, Interbase, Oracle and Sybase.

Here are the authors of the various extensions:

What Target DB Who
-------- ----------- ----------------------------------------
?Infoperl Informix Kurt Andersen (ku...@hpsdid.sdd.hp.com)
Ingperl Ingres Tim Bunce (ti...@ig.co.uk) and Ted Lemon
Interperl Interbase Buzz Moschetti (bu...@bear.com)
Isqlperl Informix William Hails, bi...@tardis.co.uk
Oraperl Oracle Kevin Stock (kst...@Auspex.com)
Pgperl Postgres Igor Metz (me...@iam.unibe.ch)
*Sqlperl Ingres Ted Lemon (mel...@ncd.com)
Sybperl Sybase Michael Peppler (mpep...@itf.ch)
Uniperl Unify 5.0 Rick Wargo (ric...@coe.drexel.edu)

? Does this one still exist?
* Sqlperl appears to have been subsumed by Ingperl

Buzz Moschetti* has organized a project to create a higher level
interface to allow you to write your queries in a database-independent
fashion. If this type of project interests you, send mail to
<perldb-inte...@vix.com> and asked to be placed on the
"perldb-interest" mailing lists.

Here's a bit of advertising from Buzz:

Perl is an interpreted language with powerful string, scalar, and
array processing features developed by Larry Wall that "nicely
bridges the functionality gap between sh(1) and C." Since
relational DB operations are typically textually oriented, perl is
particularly well-suited to manage the data flows. The C source
code, which is available free of charge and runs on many platforms,
contains a user-defined function entry point that permits a
developer to extend the basic function set of the language. The
DBperl Group seeks to exploit this capability by creating a
standardized set of perl function extensions (e.g. db_fetch(),
db_attach()) based on the SQL model for manipulating a relational
DB, thus providing a portable perl interface to a variety of
popular RDMS engines including Sybase, Oracle, Ingres, Informix,
and Interbase. In theory, any DB engine that implements a dynamic
SQL interpreter in its HLI can be bolted onto the perl front end
with predicatable results, although at this time backends exist
only for the aforementioned five DB engines.

The official archive for DBperl extensions is ftp.demon.co.uk:
/pub/perl/db. It's the home of the evolving DBperl API Specification.
Here's an extract from the updated README there:

DBI/ The home of the DBI archive. To join the DBI mailing list
send your request to perldb-inte...@vix.com

DBD/ Database Drivers for the DBI ...

Oracle/ By Tim Bunce (not yet ready!)
Ingres/ By Tim Bunce (not yet started!)

mod/ Other Perl 5 Modules and Extensions ...

Sybperl/ By Michael Peppler, mpep...@itf.ch

perl4/ Perl 4 extensions (using the usub C interface)

oraperl/ ORACLE 6 & 7 By Kevin Stock, kst...@auspex.com
sybperl/ SYBASE 4 By Michael Peppler, mpep...@itf.ch
ingperl/ INGRES By Tim Bunce ti...@ig.co.uk and Ted Lemon
isqlperl/ INFORMIX By William Hails, bi...@tardis.co.uk
interperl/ INTERBASE By Buzz Moschetti, bu...@bear.com
oraperl/ ORACLE 6 & 7 By Kevin Stock (sadly no longer on the net)
sybperl/ SYBASE 4 By Michael Peppler, mpep...@itf.ch
ingperl/ INGRES By Tim Bunce ti...@ig.co.uk and Ted Lemon
isqlperl/ INFORMIX By William Hails, bi...@tardis.co.uk
interperl/ INTERBASE By Buzz Moschetti, bu...@bear.com
uniperl/ UNIFY 5.0 By Rick Wargo, ric...@coe.drexel.edu
pgperl/ POSTGRES By Igor Metz, me...@iam.unibe.ch

btreeperl/ NDBM perl extensions. By John Conover, jo...@johncon.com
ctreeperl/ C-Tree perl extensions. By John Conover, jo...@johncon.com
duaperl/ X.500 Directory User Agent. By Eric Douglas.

scripts/ Perl and shell scripts

rdb/ RDB is a perl RDBMS for ASCII files. By Walt Hobbs,
ho...@rand.org
shql/ SHQL is an interactive SQL database engine. Written as a
shell script, SHQL interprets SQL commands and
manipulates flat files based on those commands. By
Bruce Momjian, ro...@candle.uucp
xbase/ Perl scripts for accessing xBase style files (dBase III)


refinfo/ Reference information

sqlsyntax/ Yacc and lex syntax and C source code for SQL1 and SQL2
from ftp.uu.net:/pub/uunet/published/oreilly/nutshell/yacclex,
and a draft SQL3 syntax from Jeff Fried <jfr...@informix.com>+
formats/ Details of file formats such as Lotus 1-2-3 .WK1

There are also a number of non SQL database interfaces for perl
available from ftp.demon.co.uk. These include:

Directory Target System Authors and notes
--------- ------------- -------------------------------------------
btreeperl NDBM extension John Conover (jo...@johncon.com)
ctreeperl CTree extension John Conover (jo...@johncon.com)
duaperl X.500 DUA Eric Douglas
rdb RDBMS Walt Hobbs (ho...@rand.org)
shql SQL Engine Bruce Momjian (ro...@candle.uucp)

1.21) Which DBM should I use?

As shipped, Perl (version 5) comes with interfaces for several DBM
packages (SDBM, old DBM, NDBM, GDBM, Berkeley DBM) that are not supplied
but either come with your system are readily accessible via FTP. SDBM
is guaranteed to be there. For a comparison, see AnyDBM_File(3pm)
and DB_File(3pm).


1.22) Is there an SNMP aware Perl?

snmperl was written by Guy Streeter (stre...@ingr.com), and was
posted in late February 1993 to comp.protocols.snmp. It can be found
archived at one of two (known) places:

Host liasun3.epfl.ch

Location: /pub/net/snmp
FILE -rw-rw-r-- 3407 Aug 11 1992 snmperl.README
FILE -rw-r--r-- 17678 Aug 11 1992 snmperl.tar.Z

Host ftp.cis.ufl.edu
Location: /pub/perl/scripts/snmp

Here is the gist of the README:

This directory contains the source code to add callable C subroutines
to perl. The subroutines implement the SNMP functions "get",
"getnext", and "set". They use the freely-distributable SNMP package
(version 1.1b) from CMU.

USE:
There are four subroutines defined in the callable interface:
snmp_get, snmp_next, snmp_set, and snmp_error.

snmp_get and snmp_next implement the GET and GETNEXT operations,
respectively. The first two calling arguments are the hostname and
Community string. The IP address of the host, as a dotted-quad ASCII
string, may be used as the hostname. The rest of the calling
arguments are a list of variables. See the CMU package documentation
for how variables may be specified.
snmp_set also takes hostname and Community string as arguments. The
remaining arguments are a list of triples consisting of variable name,
variable type, and value. The variable type is a string, such as
"INTEGER" or "IpAddress".
snmp_get, snmp_next, and snmp_set return a list containing
alternating variables and values. snmp_get and snmp_next will simply
omit non-existent variables on return. snmp_set will fail completely
if one of the specified variables does not exist (or is read-only).
snmp_error will return a text string containing some error
information about the most recent snmp_get|next|set call, if it had an
error.

OTHER NOTES:
I didn't find all the places where the CMU library writes to stderr
or calls exit() directly.
The changes I made to mib.c involve the formatting of variable values
for return to the caller. I took out the descriptive prefix so the
string contains only the value.
Enumerated types are returned as a string containing the symbolic
representation followed in parentheses by the numeric.

DISTRIBUTION and OWNERSHIP
perl and the CMU SNMP package have their own statements. Read them.
The work I've done is free and clear. Just don't say you wrote it if
you didn't, and don't say I wrote it if you change it.

Guy Streeter
stre...@ingr.com
April 1, 1992 (not a joke!)

1.23) Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?

No. Larry thinks it likely that he'll be certified before perl is.

--
Stephen P Potter Pencom Systems Administration Beaching It
s...@psa.pencom.com Pager: 1-800-759-8888, 547-9561 Work: 703-860-2222
Cthulhu for President in '96: When You're Tired of the Lesser of Two Evils
--
Stephen P Potter Pencom Systems Administration Beaching It
s...@psa.pencom.com Pager: 1-800-759-8888, 547-9561 Work: 703-860-2222
"I don't care whether people actually like Perl, just so long as they *think*
they like it... ;-)" -Larry Wall