Re: Perl for Windoze (was Re: Picketing With Packets)

[Alan <alan@ctrl-alt-del.com>]

On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Lou Poppler wrote:

> > Perl is a nice language to write such things in, but you won't
> > get huge quantities of people implementing it, except perhaps Linux users.
> > You need an executable that'll run on Win3.1 or Win95 (sigh);
> 
> Perl is available for Windoze 32bit (for free), including W95 and 3.11
> and NT.  see: http://reference.perl.com/query.cgi?windows

There are two ports of Perl 5.x available for Win32.  (Win 3.11 is *NOT* a
32 bit platform.  (There is a Win32 extension available, but it has some
drawbacks, as well as a long bug/incompatibility list, the last time I
checked.))

The two ports are:

-- The standard Perl distribution. The standard distribution of Perl
5.004_02 (the latest at last check) will build under Win95/NT.  
Gurusamy Sarathy has a set of prebuilt binaries for this.
It can be found at any CPAN site.  (My favorite is
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/perl/CPAN or you can try the main archive site at
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN .)  The path for the prebuilt
binaries is
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/perl/CPAN/ports/win95/Gurusamy_Sarathy/ .  There
are tar files built with Borland C++ and MS Visual C++.  (You will need
something like WinZip 6.2 to expand them.)  The readme files explain the
steps to install.  This version is the recommended port of choice of the
Perl5-Porters list. 

-- The ActiveWare port.  This port is a few versions back (5.002?), but
has prebuilt binaries available.  (Including DLL interfaces for the IIS
server and other things.)  It is not as complete as the standard
distribution.  (It is missing some of the newer 5.004 features, as well as
some of the standard modules.)  I have used it though and it works very
well.  (An older version of this port is included in the Win NT resource
kit, as well as with the IIS server.)

Perl is gaining use amongst the Win32 community as more and more people
find out about it.  (And there are a number of crypto related apps
available for it as well.  Check out the CPAN archives for the latest
list.)

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