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From: cmf@obie.cis.pitt.edu (Carl M. Fongheiser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl under other OSs
Message-ID: <21149@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 89 00:48:03 GMT
References: <1989Dec13.190558.21867@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Sender: news@unix.cis.pitt.edu
Reply-To: cmf@obie.cis.pitt.edu (Carl M. Fongheiser)
Organization: University of Pittsburgh, Computing and Information Services
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In article <1989Dec13.190558.21867@comp.vuw.ac.nz> alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley) writes:
>BUT, does anyone have any comments on the difficulties of adapting Perl to
>run under VMS? I suspect that it isn't a trival task (requiring
>modification to several features/calls of the language), perhaps a subset
>would be possible. 

Indeed, a subset is possible.  I have put together a somewhat crippled
version of Perl on VMS, but it still seems usable.  It's a little more crippled
than it needs to be, but I was looking for expediency before adding
functionality.  Major omissions:  it doesn't know how to deal with
directories, nor anything that looks like a subprocess.  Other very Unix
specific stuff was also omitted.  

>Is there anyone out seriously conasidering porting Perl to VMS (It would
>be nice, Perl blows DCL right out of the water).

I'm going to put a little more work into my version before I send my
changes back to Larry.  Even as crippled as it is, my version can do
some pretty amazing things.  (If you have MultiNet, it can deal with
TCP sockets, though not DECnet yet.)

				Carl Fongheiser
				cmf@unix.cis.pitt.edu