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From: al@ee.pitt.edu (Alan Martello)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl run-time image dumping
Message-ID: <7213@pitt.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 90 20:34:29 GMT
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Reply-To: al@ee.pitt.edu (Alan Martello)
Organization: University of Pittsburgh Electrical Engineering Dept.
Lines: 37

I run into the problem that I need to run perl on a variety of
platforms.  Unfortunately, some don't have perl installed and
I can't twist enough arms to make that happen.  However, I would
love to / almost need to run perl scripts on them. 

A few possibilities:

1) do an undump -- this is system dependent and cannot always
be done easily (I have yet to get it to work for hello_world.c
on my Sun under SunOS 4.0.1);  in addition, I can't do a dump
for a DecStation from my Sun.

2) copy the "minimal perl stuff" -- the problem here is that
the minimum includes stuff in the compiled in system 
libaries (which I don't have on my other platforms).

3) the most desirable approach would be a "run-time" perl
which could NOT compile perl scripts, but could only run
"compiled" perl scripts.  Ideally, this would be PORTABLE
across system types.  I realize this may mean addressing the
question like "what if one system has a certain system call
and another doesn't".  The answer which I'd give is to allow
ALL systems to perform all calls and when the "compiled" perl
is loaded, a check is first made by the "run-time" perl 
to determine if it can perform all necessary functions
utilized by the script.

Would anyone else like to see 3) above?  Anyone have any idea
how hard it would be to implement?  Is there an internal state
after parsing the perl source which can be easily output and
re-read later to re-create the previous perl environment in a
"machine-independent" way?

*******************************************************************
       Alan R. Martello        Electrical Engineering Dept.
        al@ee.pitt.edu           University of Pittsburgh
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